Hyderabad: The Telangana government's 2019 decision making it mandatory for every gram panchayat to purchase a tractor, trolley and water tanker to maintain sanitation and greenery has helped these civic bodies have a new revenue-earning source.
Chief Minister Chandrashekar Rao took this decision a couple of months after assuming office for a second term in December 2018 and passed a new Panchayat Raj law to this effect.
The government had asked the sarpanches to purchase these with the funds of the gram panchayats or by taking bank loans and paying EMIs. This evoked resistance from the sarpanches. They said they had no means to pay the installments every month.
Barring a few gram panchayats in the vicinity of cities and towns earning good revenue, the majority of the gram panchayats located in remote areas were struggling to pay even the salaries to the sanitation staff. Despite this, the state government insisted on them to do the purchases and threatened them to halt release of funds for them if they failed to do so. The new law had provisions to suspend the sarpanches if they failed to implement government orders.
Faced with such threats, the sarpanches unwillingly bought these implements and struggled to pay EMIs in the initial months. Several of them defaulted on the EMI payments. However, after three years, these vehicles have turned into a boom, these having become revenue-earning sources for the cash-starved gram panchayats.
Earlier, the gram panchayats used to take private vehicles on hire and thus incurred huge expenditure every month. With the purchase of their own vehicles, the gram panchayats recorded good savings in three years.
The civic bodies used tractors and trolleys to collect and transport garbage and for the watering of plants under Haritha Haram scheme. The government is releasing NREGA funds to gram panchayats to meet the expenditure incurred on those activities. The gram panchayats thus received Rs 180 crore so far towards this expenditure. If the civic bodies did not have their own vehicles, this amount would have mostly gone to private vehicle owners.
Minister for panchayat raj and rural development Errabelli Dayakar expressed happiness over the gram panchayats benefiting from the purchase of their own vehicles.
“The Opposition parties had ridiculed the chief minister. But, this plan proved a grand success and gram panchayats are becoming financially self-reliant. This transformed villages across Telangana. Today every village is clean and green. This was proven right from the fact that the Centre is announcing a lot of awards to villages in Telangana every year for sanitation and greenery while other states stand nowhere near Telangana in these respects,” he said.
