TIRUPATI: The two-day national seminar held here under the sponsorship of the Union Ministry of Panchayat Raj became a platform for the evaluation of the implementation of the Article 73 and 74 of Constitutional amendments.

The seminar also came out with what the organisers called the "Tirupati Declaration" comprising 15 points covering the entire PR spectrum.

The meet attended among others by the chairperson of the National Commission on Farmers, M.S. Swaminathan, State Governor Rameshwar Thakur and the Union Minister of State for Planning, M.V. Rajasekharan, also felt that it was time to introduce the second generation of Panchayat Raj reforms a decade after the first generation was launched. According to D. Sundar Ram, Director of AGRASRI, a Tirupati-based NGO, which organised the seminar, the declaration felt the need for a movement from the grassroot level with the involvement of NGOs, intellectuals, opinion makers, universities, research institutions, media and CBOs to realise the potential of the two landmark amendments.

The document also pointed out that funds for the Centrally-sponsored programmes and schemes must be channelised only through PR bodies and that functional domains of the PR institutions must be clearly demarcated to avoid overlapping and duplication.

It needs mapping out of the activities under the 29 subjects to be transferred to the PR bodies under the reforms, the declaration added.

In an apparent move to make the State Governments comply with the condition that they must constitute their District Planning Boards, the declaration suggested that the Centre could separately allocate funds to the States, which had complied with the condition.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail