CM opens SmartGram facilities

Gurugram, November 11

Residents of five Haryana villages, which have been adopted by President Pranab Mukherjee, can now have access to doctors at Rashtrapati Bhavan with upgraded facility of Ayush clinic being launched here today under the ‘SmartGram’ initiative.

The villages — Alipur, Rojka Meo, Harchandpur and Taj Nagar, all in Gurugram district, and Dauhla in Nuh district — were adopted by the President in July to develop them into smart villages using the existing resources on the patterns of development works in Rashtrapati Bhawan. Besides the Ayush clinic and wellness centre, these villages will also have ‘Water ATM’ for supplying clean drinking water and a skill training centre for youths to increase their employability.

The wellness centre has an e-doctor service which can be used for consultation with doctors in Rashtrapati Bhawan in times of need.

The inauguration of the upgraded facilities was done by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in the presence of Omita Paul, Secretary to the President. In Alipur, Khattar, along with Paul, inaugurated a training centre, a wellness centre and a common service centre. While the training centre imparts knowledge in various skills like sewing, computer, the wellness centre has people trained at Rashtrapati Bhawan in Ayush practice. “Only distributing money to help people is not the solution to the real problem. Providing them with jobs and skills so that they can sustain themselves is necessary,” Khattar said.

Khattar said after the Modi Government asked all MPs to adopt a village each under the Adarsh Gram Yojna, the Haryana Government exhorted MLAs to do so. “But the number of villages adopted were105 while there are a total 6,700 villages in Haryana,” he said.

Thanking the Haryana Government for its support to the SmartGram initiative, Paul expressed the hope that in the days to come these villages would become the centre-point of the project.

“The journey from Smart Rashtrapati Bhawan to SmartGram began on July 2 when the President and the Chief Minister in a meeting decided to select the five villages for developing these as models. “This is an experiment which shows that when the Centre, the state government, district authorities, panchayat, people from the public and private sectors and committed citizens work together, there is hardly anything that cannot be done,” she said. — PTI