Alleging large scale irregularities and corruption flourishing in Rural Development Department, scores of Panthers Party activists led by Harsh Dev Singh, its chairman held a protest demonstration here on Wednesday. While torching the effigy of the Rural Dev Department, the protestors raised slogans against the RDD officers and J&K UT Administration. They termed the Back to Village programme of the Union Govt as total flop show and a futile exercise. Addressing the media-persons, Harsh Dev Singh took a pot shot at much hyped Back to Village-3 programme organized by RDD and dubbed it as a flop show. He said that the third phase of the B2V has apparently evoked disappointment and dissatisfaction among the Sarpanches and Panches all across the UT of J&K and Jammu region in particular. “Almost everywhere, they have expressed indignation with several and boycotts of the said programmes in view of the officials not backing their promises made in the two prior editions. Back to Village Scheme was a total failure with hardly any delivery on the ground. There have been reports that every Panchayat was allocated the grant of Rs 14000 for meeting expenses related to arrangements of the programme but in reality only few thousands ranging from Rs 2000 to Rs 7000 percolated down to several hundreds of Panchayats with hundreds of them having been altogether ignored and the said grants reportedly bungled by corrupt officials.” Harsh Dev alleged. NPP leader expressed grave concern over the non-payment of pending liabilities under MGNREGA for the last three-four years resulting in untold hardships for the affected people especially the poor labourers. He said that fiscal profligacy and extravaganza on the part of unscrupulous officers had been responsible for creation of huge liabilities which kept burgeoning year after year resulting in deprivation of poor labour class and other Panchayat level workers. He said that not only under MGNREGA, but the bad pocket grants, CDF and Panchayat funds were also reported to have been misappropriated by the reckless functionaries in various Blocks. Prominent among those who spoke on the occasion included Rajesh Padgotra, Parshotam Parihar, Surinder Chouhan, Capt Dina Nath, BDC Chairman; Karnail Singh, Sarpanch; Rajesh Kumar, Sarpanch; Balwant Raj, Sarpanch; Nirmal Kesar, Naib Sarpanch, Kewal Kumar and others.
