Pre-poll push for PM's schemes

Modi sends 8 top officers to Maharashtra, Goa

Officers to camp at 8 districts

Harish Gupta

New Delhi, Oct 27

Eight senior officers of the rank of additional secretaries and joint secretaries are being deputed shortly by the Prime Minister to Maharashtra & Goa to camp in eight clusters to over-see welfare work 8 clusters.

These officers have been identified and will be sent to these eight districts after under-going training program. These officers will be deputed Pune, Nashik, Dhule, Sangli, Nagpur, Aurangabad, Thane and North Goa. These senior IAS officers will camp in these aspirational districts to over-see the implementation of Prime Minister Modi's welfare schemes.

The PM plans to depute nearly 750 officers of the Centre who will be tasked in coming months to cover 45,000 villages in 115 ‘aspirational districts’ with seven government schemes. The scheme is being closely monitored by the Prime Minister’s Office.

An officer has been designated for every 75 villages and each has been tasked to undertake at least three visits to the village spanning four seven days. While each district has been assigned a ‘prabhari officer’ in a joint or an additional secretary role, 322 directors and deputy secretary officers and another 322 under-secretaries have been assigned the jobs of ‘nodal officers’. Four to 10 such nodal officers have been tagged with each prabhari officer, who will assign villages for tour scheduling and coordinate the visits of nodal officers. In the first phase, 80 officers have been chosen who will visit 80 districts spanning over several states.

The government is also set to announce a package of benefits for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) spread across these 80 districts. They will monitor social security benefits for workers

The scheme is part of Modi's pre-election push for the MSME sector which employs over a 120 million people in over 6 crores units. The list of clusters range from food processing units to steel ancillary, to Pharma and other sectors in these seven districts of Maharashtra and one in Goa. They will work with officers from banks, EPFO, ECIS, SIDBI to ensure that targets are met. The officers will see whether these units have been trained to get the benefits of government's e-marketplace (GeM) portal.

This will help them to ensure that government and its agencies can buy directly from the small units.