A select group of panchayat leaders from 19 districts will be trained soon at the Panchayat Academy, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), in Kuthambakkam village in Tiruvallur.
Speaking at a conference organised by ‘Thannatchi’ on local governance here on Sunday, R. Elango, a former scientist at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who later served as the president of the Kuthambakkam panchayat, said the training programme would focus on developing the panchayats to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
He said the training programme was part of a larger goal to form clusters of well-functioning panchayats in all districts that can be shown as models to be replicated. He said each cluster would have five or six panchayats. He told The Hindu that the training programme would be organised with the support of Mission Samriddhi, an organisation working to promote local governance, and with the consent of the departments concerned in Tamil Nadu.
A number of elected leaders from local bodies across the State spoke at the conference, highlighting the hurdles they faced in discharging their duties effectively.
K. Saravanan, president of Thannatchi, a collective working to strengthen local bodies, said the leaders of local bodies had not received adequate powers as envisioned in the Constitutional amendments and Acts passed to strengthen local governance. For instance, he highlighted the non-functioning of area and ward level committees in Tamil Nadu.
