Gujarat is no. 1 in implementing MNREGA: Gujarat minister

Gujarat's Rural Development Minister Jayanti Kavadiya today claimed that the state was number one in India in implementing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA).
During his speech in the Assembly while seeking the House's approval for budgetary allocations to his department, Kavadiya claimed that the Gujarat government had alloted Rs 69 crores for MNREGA for the year 2014-15, while the Centre is expected to give Rs 626 crore for the same.
"In the previous year, Gujarat remained number one across India for completing 77 per cent of total work undertaken for MNREGA in the state. In addition, participation of Scheduled Tribes (ST) under MNREGA was 41 per cent in Gujarat, which is 24 per cent more than the national average of just 17 per cent," said the Minister of State for Panchayat, Rural Housing and Rural Development in his speech in the Assembly.

Kavadiya gave details about several schemes and projects to be implemented in the current year, including the 'Smart E-Gram Centre', an upgrade of the already running 'E-Gram Centres', where several village panchayat offices are connected with broadband to provide different certificates and land records to villagers through online government portals.
"At present, 13,685 villages are already connected with a 96 mbps speed Internet connection. In this year, we plan to connect all those villages with more than a 5,000 population, using cable network to upgrade E-Gram Centres into Smart E-Gram centres," Kavadiya said.
"This initiative will enable kiosk-based banking at their doorstep. After the successful implementation of this scheme, Gujarat will become number one in connecting each and every village through the Internet" Kavadiya claimed in the House.