Other States - Rajasthan   

Amarpura, India’s first millennium village

JAIPUR: Amarpura, a tiny arid zone village in Churu district of Rajasthan has come on the development radar of the world agencies with the United Nations Millennium Project listing it recently as one of the millennium villages. More than 50 per cent of 1,174 people of the village belong to the Scheduled Castes. It is the first millennium village in India.

Amarpura has the usual traits of a Rajasthani village — poverty, absence of resources and lack of employment avenues — but it falls in Rajgarh tehsil, the place to which L.M. Mittal, one of the world’s richest men, belongs. His family’s Gita Mittal Foundation, therefore, had a major role in bringing it to the notice of the U.N. agencies.

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute; Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, Health Coordinator, Millennium Village Project; Joanna Rubenstein, a public health expert and Nirupam Bajpai, Director of the South Asia Programs Centre on Globalisation and Sustainable Development, were in Amarpura on Monday. They interacted with the villagers, Collector Arjun Ram Meghwal and other district functionaries and the MLA from Tara Nagar constituency, Chandra Shekhar Baid.

“Don’t expect miracles to happen overnight. You will have to work very hard. Your hard work and our support will one day show results,” Professor Sachs, who is Special Adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, told the villagers.

Dr. Baid said: “Amarpura is the right choice. It fulfils all the criteria of being under-developed. Most of the people here live below the poverty line. There are no resources and opportunities.

“This is going to be a unique opportunity for the village to come out of the morass of deprivation and want.

“Professor Sachs promised me to link Amarpura with the Net within a year so that children there can pursue their education through the net.”

The millennium village status is granted for five years. Until the funds from the U.N. agencies and other groups firm up, the Gita Mittal Foundation will support the project.

The U.N. Millennium Project was commissioned in 2002 with the aim of developing a “concrete action plan for the world to achieve the millennium development goals and reverse the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people.”

The first millennium villages were announced in 2006 and belong to 10 African countries — Kenya (2), Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Malawi, Senegal, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda.

All these villages were located at places where chronic hunger, often accompanied by high prevalence of diseases, lack of access to medical care and lack of infrastructure existed. The choice was also influenced by their location in a “reasonably peaceful nation governed by an accountable government.”

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