Village panchayat proceedings on cable TV from March

In an initiative aimed at offering a more transparent and result-oriented system of governance, proceedings of meetings of as many as 1,000 gram panchayats in Karnataka will go live over cable TV from March. There are 5,600 village panchayats in the State.

Announcing at a press conference on 31 December, Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj H.K. Patil said that Rs. 10 crore would be immediately released for implementing it. It involves a one-time investment of Rs. 1.5 lakh to Rs. 2 lakh for each cable set. The village panchayats, which have provided toilet facility for more people, would be given priority in the allotment of telecast facility.

Mr. Patil said that bio-metric attendance would be introduced in all village panchayats before March next year and it would be connected to the Panchatantra system. The development of infrastructure would be speeded up by bringing the department under a commissioner.

The Minister said that the Union government had released Rs. 1,203 crore of the State’s share of Rs. 2,113 crore under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Nearly 70,000 works were going on under 15 programmes. A request had been made seeking the release of the balance amount. The State had received Rs. 11,087 crore, in all, under the scheme. Nearly seven lakh man days had been created spending Rs. 20 crore, he said.

He said that work under MGNREGA had dipped to 162.51 lakh man days during 2012-13. During this year up to December, it had reached 228.73 lakh man days accounting for an increase of 40 per cent, he added.

He said that the government had encouraged setting up such organisations in all the districts, on the lines of the Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheswara Education Society’s RUDSET.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/cable-news/item/3932-village-panchayat-proceedings-on-cable-tv-from-march.htmlSource: http://cablequest.org/news/cable-news/item/3932-village-panchayat-proceedings-on-cable-tv-from-march.html