Heavyweight ministers in the Manmohan Singh government, Sharad Pawar and Kamal Nath, have been pushing hard for inclusion of their respective constituencies in the list of select districts to get special treatment from the Centre and it is being done even at the cost of tweaking the existing norms.
The GoM headed by home minister P. Chidambaram, which met recently, has asked the officials to re-work the guidelines, so that the two districts — Mr Pawar’s constituency Pune and Mr Nath’s Chhindwara — get special financial assistance under Backward Region Grant Fund (BRGF).
Sources in the government revealed that as the two senior ministers had put the request for inclusion of Pune and Chhindwara in the list of 250 districts to get BRGF funding, the GoM took up the matter but failed to take a final decision.
“As the two districts do not fulfil the criteria to receive additional fund over and above the normal plan fund, it was decided by the GoM to ask the officials to re-work different weightages given to various parameters and pave the way for their inclusion,” they added.
Prominent among the various parameters include levels of local road connectivity, civic amenities, female literacy, maternal mortality rate (MMR) and infant mortality rate (IMR). The fund, which was created with a corpus of `3,750 crores in the first year of the 11th plan (2007-12), is aimed at redressing regional imbalances and bridge the critical gaps in local infrastructure and other developmental requirements, which are not being adequately met through the normal plan fund inflows.