By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, March 24, 2017: Odisha government on Friday decided to initiate planning for eradication of poverty from 1342 gram panchayats out of the total 6234 in the state.

Plans are afoot to make 22 per cent of the gram panchayats poverty free in the next two years, officials said.

The proposal for the poverty free gram panchayats was made by the panchayat raj department at the State Level Empowered Committee (SLEC) meeting held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary A P Padhi.

The meeting decided to take up 1342 GPs and develop those as model Poverty Free Gram Panchayat (PFGP) by October 2, 2019.

The programme would be part of the Centre’s Mission Antodaya for building around 50,000 poverty free GPs across the country by October 2, 2019.

The chief secretary asked the department to focus on sustainable income, green environment, quality education, health and hygiene of the GPs which would be selected for the programme.

Secretary to Panchayati Raj department, Deoranjan Singh said the state government would like to adopt a four-pronged approach like enhancing agricultural productivity, skilling of youth, creating opportunities for high order farm and non-farm activities and better targeting of safety net schemes for combating poverty at the panchayat level.

“With this road map, it was decided to have systematic interventions at four levels like the individual level, household level, community level and GP level,” Singh said adding the the Mission objectives include strengthening grass root governance, creation of durable and income generating assets, creating good infrastructure and ensuring effective basic service delivery.

Creation of mass awareness on entitlements of the people under various schemes and efficient utilization of funds at the GP level are other objectives of the Mission, Singh said.

The SLEC has been constituted under chairmanship of the chief secretary for implementation of Mission Antadoya. The secretaries of various departments like finance, electronics and IT, agriculture, ST and SC development, SME and energy are the committee members.

The SLEC will meet at least once in every quarter to review the progress and resolve the issues cropping up in the process of implementation, Singh said.