The Hindu

• Plans afoot to repair national highways at Rs. 3 crore 
• MP directs authorities to identify sites for distribution to rural poor
• Government schools in Dakshina Kannada to get regular supply of water soon

Mangalore, Dec 21: The national highways in Dakshina Kannada barring the Shiradi Ghat Road will be repaired at a cost of Rs. 3 crore.

Member of Parliament D.S. Sadananda Gowda said this here on Saturday at a meeting held to review development projects in the district, at the zilla panchayat office.

Since the road repair at Shiradi Ghat was under litigation, this had been excluded from the scheme. The repair of the highways would begin immediately, even as the processing of this project had begun on Friday, Mr. Sadananda Gowda said.

The officials of various government departments in the district were told to speed up the implementation of development projects. The meeting set a deadline of December-end for preparing fine prints for allotting sites to the rural poor under Ashraya and Indira Awas Yojana schemes.

The MP and Deputy Commissioner M. Maheshwar Rao said that the officials concerned had failed to develop proper plans for allotment of sites to the rural poor. The lists furnished by taluk-level officials were vague. They had not identified the sites meant for allotment. This process should be started at village or gram panchayat levels, they said. One official, who claimed to have identified 25 beneficiaries for the scheme, could not specify how many of them could be allotted sites immediately. Mr. Rao said that such lapses on part of officials had led to failure of various welfare schemes.

Mr. Sadananda Gowda said that the progress was not satisfactory in the housing schemes and asked the executive officers of different taluks to complete it by December-end so that the beneficiaries could start building houses on their allotted sites by January. “People should be able to build their houses before the onset of monsoon,” he added.

The MP asked the authorities to circumvent the nagging problem of low wages in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) through some pragmatic approach to it. The officials in Kodagu district had diverted the funds to projects such as stormwater drain and pot-hole filling and were able to achieve some noteworthy progress there.

This could be done in Dakshina Kannada as well. In Sullia, the authorities had taken positive steps in this direction, he added.

The MP said that the 904 government primary schools and 148 government high schools in the district would soon be getting regular supply of drinking water.

An official from the Mangalore Electricity Supply Company Ltd. (Mescom) said that the problem of power supply in the district had improved to 16 to 18 hours a day. Electricity was being procured from the barge-mounted power project at Tannirbhavi, he said.

K.P. Sucharita Shetty, president of zilla panchayat, and P. Shivashankar, its chief executive officer were present.