OUR CORRESPONDENT
Itanagar: Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu said that his government has chalked out a blueprint to overhaul the existing planning process, for accelerated growth of the northeastern state. Khandu, who is on a two-day tour of the Upper Siang district, while addressing a public meeting at Tuting, assured to implement the new planning process after the elections. Arunachal Pradesh would go for simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls this year.
“The new planning process will extensively involve stakeholders at the ground level as it is the people in villages and officers on the ground who know what is required. So our state plan will stand on the inputs from the ground. The entire process will be from bottom to top, not like the erstwhile top-to-bottom process,” he said.
The Chief Minister assured that the new model of planning will accelerate the holistic development of all villages in the state and that government resources would be optimally utilised without wastage, an official communiqué informed here on Tuesday. Khandu informed that under the central government’s ambitious flagship programme ‘Vibrant Village’ Tuting area in the district will witness a rapid transformation. Hailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi for remodeling the concept of border villages, the chief minister said that Gelling, which was known as the last village on the Indian side in the Tuting sub-division of the district, today has become the ‘first village’ on the Indian side. He said under the present central and state governments, the connectivity sector in the state has witnessed a sea change. Be it roads, air, rail or digital, Khandu said, all modes of connectivity have significantly improved in the last 7-8 years.
Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP), a centrally sponsored scheme launched in 2023, aims at the comprehensive development of select villages in 46 blocks in 19 districts abutting the northern border in Arunachal Pradesh along with Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand and Ladakh.
The programme envisages focused areas of interventions in the select villages for the creation of opportunities for livelihood generation through the promotion of tourism and cultural heritage, skill development and entrepreneurship and development of cooperative societies.
The interventions also include providing road connectivity to unconnected villages, housing, and village infrastructure, energy including renewable energy, television, and telecom connectivity.
“Recently the union home ministry has sanctioned about 1,022 km of roads under the programme for Arunachal Pradesh. We are thankful to the Modi government that Arunachal Pradesh has the most number of border villages listed under the programme,” Khandu added.
Appreciating state health minister Alo Libang, who is also the local MLA, for the all-round development of the district; the chief minister noted that once the new Yingkiong-Tuting road is complete, the district will witness a surge in tourism activities.
Khandu also appealed to the members of five communities – Memba, Khamba, Adi, Mishmi, and Tangam – in the district to coexist peacefully and become equal stakeholders in the development of the border areas. He said that the communities residing in the northernmost part of the district that shares the international border with Tibet-China have been living peacefully for ages and that there should not be any issue that disturbs this relationship of brotherhood.
“Upper Siang’s Tuting administrative division is one of the most vivid and colourful in terms of the people living here. Each one of them is unique, distinct, and independent. Your peaceful coexistence and cultural amalgamation is the hallmark of the district,” he added.
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