Niti Aayog chief praises Uttar Pradesh IAS officer for his effort to develop model villages

Hyderabad : 31/07/2021

Niti Aayog chief praises Uttar Pradesh IAS officer for his effort to develop model villages

Courtesy : THE TIMES OF INDIA 

Neha Lalchandani | TNN | Twitter 

Heera Lal is additional director National Health Mission

LUCKNOW: 

Niti Aayog

 vicechairperson Rajiv Kumar has complemented UP 

IAS

 officer Heera Lal, additional director, 

National Health Mission

, for his 

work

 to turn backward rural areas into 

model

 villages through public participation 

In a tweet on Wednesday, Kumar said: “IAS officer Heera Lal’s endeavour to convert rural and downtrodden villages of Uttar Pradesh into ‘Model Villages’ through active public participation is a tremendous step. Ground work like this is important for India's holistic development. Great work!”

Lal, who as district magistrate of Banda earlier, had carried out similar projects on water conservation, said that he was thrilled to have the work of NGO ‘Model Gaon’ recognised.

“The project was conceptualised by Munish Gangwar, retired chief general manager of 

NABARD

. We started the project in January this year and already, 1,500 village manifestos, outlining how the locals would like to develop their village and what facilities they would like to have there, have been made. We are approaching newly elected pradhans, farmer producer organisations, Nehru Yuva Kendra members and asking them to join the effort,” said Lal, who is an advisor to Model Gaon.

Lal said that his work in Banda while he was DM inspired Gangwar to take up the project at a macro level. In Banda, he said, his administration followed a bottom up approach in implementing water conservation schemes, increasing crop productivity etc, through direct involvement of residents in these projects.

“We have an example of a village pradhan from Gorakhpur who won the recent panchayat elections on the basis of a model village manifesto. We are now in the process of collaborating with him to help in the implementation of the manifesto which will see villagers come together for water conservation, creation of farmer producer companies to protect interest of farmers etc,” he said.