lucknow

Updated: Apr 25, 2017 17:42 IST

Uttar Pradesh will become an open defecation free (ODF) state by October 2018, a year prior to the national target. The state’s 30 out of 75 districts will achieve the target by October 2017 itself with Shamli already having been declared an ODF district.

Chief minister Yogi Adityanath made this announcement at a grand function held to observe the National Panchayati Raj Day in Lucknow on Monday.

Union rural development and panchayati raj minister Narendra Singh Tomar, deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, apart from a large number of pannchayati representatives from various parts of the country, were present at the function. Every year, April 24 is celebrated as National Panchayati Raj Day across India.

NATIONAL AWARDS The national awards — Deendayal Upadhyay Panchayat Sashaktikaran Puraskar and Nanaji Deshmukh Rashtriya Gaurav Gram Sabha Puraskar — were conferred on 250 panchayats selected from various states. There were three dozen recipients from UP. The nominations for Panchayats Awards are invited online every year.

The CM appealed to all the state’s 59,000 village panchayats, non-government organisations and cooperatives to pool in their efforts and resources to help achieve the target of an open defecation-free UP by October 2018.

Only Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Mizoram are ODF states at present.

He said his government will start a new system of identifying the best performing village panchayats and honour them as an incentive from time to time at functions to be organised at different places in the state.

CM Yogi Adityanath said his government had started supplying 18 hours of power to rural areas. “We will provide 24x7 electricity to villages from October 2018,” he said, adding, “But this facility will be given only to those villages where there is no power theft.” He said people in villages must cooperate with the government by subscribing to legal power connections and installing metres on their premises.

The CM said the government will soon launch a helpline where people can lodge their complaints if a damaged transformer is not replaced within 24 hours in cities and 48 hours in villages.

He claimed he did away with the VIP culture in the power sector by ensuring that all districts got electricity supply equally as opposed to the past practice of some VIP districts getting more power than others.

The chief minister said his government was also working on a scheme to set up a secretariat named after Chandra Shekhar Azad in each village panchayat.

CHANNEL LAUNCHED

The chief minister launched the union ministry of panchayati raj’s YouTube channel with short films on best practices and government schemes. He also launched sharing of audio-visual capacity building content for panchayati raj institutions through instant messaging apps over smart phones and released the quarterly magazine ‘Gramoday Sankalp’ and its online version.

Read more: Yogi adopts new work culture but how long can his sleep-deprived ministers cope?