TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: Union Rural Development Ministry has sought a reply from the State government over media reports in connection with the celebrities including film stars and cricketers were listed as beneficiaries under the centrally sponsored Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) in Goa.
In a letter, written to the State Chief Secretary on Wednesday, the Ministry has directed government to clarify on the issue at the earliest and enclosed the cuttings of newspaper reports.
District Rural Development Agency project director V N Shetye confirmed that they had received the communication from the Ministry. “This was expected as the media had hyped incorrect information made available to them by an NGO for its personal publicity stunt,” he claimed.
Goa Parivartan Manch had last week produced several documents before the press wherein the list with names of Bollywood celebrities such as Amitabh Bachahan, Aamir Khan, Paresh Rawal and cricketers Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Yuvaraj Singh and Ricky Ponting, claiming that the money under the MGNREGA scheme was siphoned off. The name of state chief minister Manohar Parrikar was also in the list.
These names were shown as residing at Chimbel village. However, the DRDA had refuted any sort of scam in the matter clarifying that the names of these celebrities were registered during the training process for the officials connected with the implementation of this scheme, and subsequently these names were dropped. On the list itself they were marked with an asterisk.
Shetye told Herald on Monday that the misleading information would make the state suffer since funds under the scheme would be delayed, due to the misleading information. The Union Ministry since the implementation of the scheme in 2008 till March 2014 has released nearly Rs 23 crores under the scheme and had even cited Goa as a model state for implementation of MGNREGA scheme.
