PM launches portal to make village ops digital

Tribune News Service
New Delhi, April 24

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday launched a unified e-GramSwaraj portal and mobile app and Swamitva Scheme to mark National Panchayati Raj Day and addressed gram panchyats from various parts of the country through video conferencing.

Addressing sarpanches, he exhorted them to help implement the lockdown and the norm of social distancing. Modi said the e-GramSwaraj portal would ring in transparency in the Panchayti Raj governance, facilate conceptualisation and implementation of gram panchayat development plan for individual villages. It would provide a data bank of matters relating to village panchyats on a single platform, he said.

The Swamitva Scheme will be implemented as a pilot project in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Modi said the scheme seeks to digitally map residential properties, identity their owners and provide them with title deeds (ownership papers).

“This will help reduce disputes in villages over ownerships, and empower the legal owners economically by helping them have credit worthiness to procure bank loans,” Modi said. During his more than an hour-long interaction, Modi said the pandemic had taught the crucial lesson of “self-reliance”, and virtues of self-sufficiency and resilience to overcome the crisis. He complimented them for ensuring in simple terms “Do gaaj ke doori” (distance of two yards) during social dealings to fight the pandemic.

“Rural India with its villages are cradle of high-end wisdom and embody civilisational and cultural values which need to be tapped into,” Modi said.