Good governance was among the major poll planks of the YSRCP in the 2019 general elections. A conscious effort has since been made to implement the welfare schemes and deliver the services without any scope for exploitation of the people by middlemen.
It was with this goal in mind that Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy had contemplated ward and village secretariats and gave them a tangible shape on October 2, 2019, as a significant step towards achieving the ‘Gram Swaraj’, the concept which Mahatma Gandhi had espoused.
The Chief Minister announced on May 30, 2019, that the ward and village secretariats were a part of the revolutionary changes conceived by his government, for strengthening the schemes and service delivery system at the grassroots level.
In tune with the vision, 3,913 ward secretariats and 11,162 village secretariats were set up and more than 4.50 lakh staff were recruited through an examination conducted in September first week in 2019. This was a record of sorts in the country as no State government had undertaken such a massive recruitment drive.
Principal Secretary Ajay Jain told The Hindu that the ward and village secretariats had so far delivered two crore services to the people.
“Impressed by the idea of taking governance to the people’s doorsteps, Karnataka, Punjab, Rajasthan and some other States have evinced interest to adopt similar systems,” he said. Mr. Jain expressed confidence that a national-level recognition would eventually come for this innovative mechanism of public outreach.
The ward and village secretariats are acting as one-stop shops for implementation of all welfare and development activities by the Secretaries and their department-wise assistants who are in turn aided by an army of volunteers deployed in every nook and corner of the State. They also helped contain the coronavirus pandemic when it seemed to spiral out of control. The effective implementation of ‘Navaratnalu’, the government’s flagship welfare schemes, is the key objective of these secretariats that are mandated to resolve the grievances brought to their notice by the volunteers, each one of whom takes care of 50 households.
Clear-cut guidelines and rules have been framed for the secretariats and a separate department has been created to have a focused approach to achieve the goals.
Services at doorstep
The ward and village secretaries are vested with overall responsibility to implement the welfare schemes and they have assistants discharging various functions across departments such as Panchayat Raj, land and survey, medical and health, animal husbandry, dairy and fisheries, police, women and child welfare, water supply, power, agriculture and horticulture and tribal welfare.
Grievance redressal
Each secretariat has been provided Internet connection and other infrastructure required to cater to the citizens’ requirements.
A call centre with toll-free number 1902 has been set up to enable the people to register their grievances and also obtain feedback on the welfare schemes. The secretariats are essentially a milestone in the government’s journey towards decentralisation of administration and they have started yielding the desired results while the Chief Minister himself keep a tab on them.
