After “smart cities”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is now set to develop “smart villages”.





A meeting of the Union Cabinet chaired by the prime minister on Wednesday approved a project for development of rural growth clusters with latent potentials for growth.



The project has been named after Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, earlier incarnation of the Bhrartiya Janata Party.



The government approved an outlay of Rs 5142.08 crore for the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM), which draws inspiration from a programme initiated in Gujarat during Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister of the State to provide urban amenities in rural areas.



The SPMRM is aimed at creating 300 ‘rurban’ growth clusters across the country over the next three years, said Rural Development Minister Birender Singh.



The mission will have multiple components to speed up economic activities in the clusters, develop skill and local entrepreneurship and provide infrastructure amenities, he said, briefing journalists about the decision of the Union Cabinet.



Singh was joined by Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who told mediapersons that Modi Government was keen to develop not only smart cities, but also smart villages.

Prime Minister vowed to build 100 smart cities across India.



The Ministry of Urban Development already short-listed 98 cities, which would be developed as “smart cities”.



The opposition parties have been criticizing the Modi government for focussing only on cities, while ignoring villages.



The SPMRM will in fact replace an old scheme called Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA), which was launched by the erstwhile Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.



The PURA was intended to undertake projects like water supply, sanitation, street lighting, tourism and improvement of roads through public-private partnership mode in rural-urban areas across the country.



“(The) PURA was limited to private sector. There was no government participation in it. That is why it failed. It was planned that the project would be implemented at 13 places. But it could not take off in four places, while outcome on the nine others were also not good,” said Singh.



Development of “rurban clusters” will be funded by converging various schemes of the Government, while the SPMRM will provide an additional funding support of up to 30 percent of the project cost per cluster as Critical Gap Funding.

