55 MPs from WB lead list of 108 MPs yet to adopt SAGY village

A total of 108 MPs, of whom 55 are from West Bengal alone, are yet to adopt any village under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojna (SAGY) even nine months after the launch of the scheme.
Rural Development Minister Chaudhary Birender Singh today asked these MPs to associate with the "mainstream" and adopt a village even as he promised that the government would remove any bottlenecks encountered by them in this regard.
"Around 108 MPs, who have not identified Gram Panchayats so far, have been asked to name the same without delay. Of these MPs, 55 belong to West Bengal alone while the remaining 53 are from the rest of India," said Singh.

While Singh made it clear that the two BJP Lok Sabha MPs from West Bengal had already adopted a village each, he avoided a question seeking his opinion on whether he felt that the ruling Trinamool Congress in the state was doing politics over the matter.
"I am not talking about a party. What I am saying is about the state. I will not say that they are doing politics, but I will definitely say that they should associate with the mainstream," he told the media after the first National-Level Committee meeting on SAGY.
Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy had earlier said that their MPs did not join the initiative due to a lack of funds. There is no separate fund allocation for SAGY, which is an initiative-driven programme.

The minister, meanwhile, said it was no mean achievement that 86 per cent of the MPs have already identified the villages they would be adopting under the scheme.

The meeting on SAGY saw the participants raise a number of queries regarding the difficulty of selecting a village and deciding on the funding pattern of the scheme.
With a number MPs saying it would not be possible to carry out any infrastructure work under the scheme without assistance vis-a-vis funding, the minister said convergence of a number of central and state schemes would enable financing through the pooling together of resources.

Trinamool Congress has 46 MPs -- 34 in Lok Sabha and 12 in Rajya Sabha.
The list of MPs from West Bengal who are yet to adopt a village under SAGY includes the names mostly of TMC leaders along with other prominent ones like that of CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury and Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.