Award winning Gram Panchayat Digambarpur in West Bengal

A GramPanchayat, about 100 km away from Kolkata has been judged the best Gram Panchayat in the country by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, competing with 2.5 lakh other GPs. DNA paid a visit to the place to Digambarpur Gram Panchayat in South 24 Parganas district.

As the state was prepared for the Panchayat polls on May 14, there is hardly any wall writing or other poll campaigning here. Rather, administrative officials here are busy with what they do throughout the year – ensuring purified water to households, proper waste management and good, clean roads for residents here.

Of the 15 Gram Panchayat seats in the last election in 2013, the TMC won 11 and this time they intend to make a clean sweep winning 15 of 15. “Of three Zila Parishad seats we have targeted of winning all three and 40 of the 45 Panchayat Samity seats,” said Samir Kumar Jana, the local TMC MLA.

He said there was no need to resort to violence to ensure their win because they were confident of the work they had been doing. In what is being touted as the first in Bengal, this far-flung Gram Panchayat has installed water meters in households for supplying purified water to them. In a pilot project households were told that if they pay Rs 50 a month they would get 200 litres of potable water every day. There were some resistance in the beginning but a women brigade was mobilised to spread awareness among households. “There was an initial resistance among people who said why should we pay money for water when it is not charged anywhere in the state? We made them understand that against a sum of Rs 50 a month they were getting 6,000 litre of drinking water every month. It sunk into the people’s mind and the result was such that demand has been rising ever since. The administration has also made arrangement of payment of installation of pipelines in instalments,” said Tusi Samanta one of the members of Bhagini Nivedita Water People, the committee which looked into the water woes of the area. The Public Health Engineering department of the state had also earmarked to more tanks to extend the amenity to more households. Amalesh Samanta, a local resident, had donated 10 cottahs of his land for the water project and in return had found employment at the pumping station for Rs 3500 per month.

Next was waste management in which the GP has done an exemplary job. “We have provided households with two dustbins each – one for liquid waste another for solid waste. Every morning, the waste is collected and brought to a treatment centre where the waste is sorted and then the bio-degradable ones are used to make organic fertilizer,” said Rabindranath Bera, the panchayat pradhan.

For this service the households are charged Rs 10 per month.

One of the most important aspect of the GPs success is women’s participation in welfare activities. “We had been working for women empowerment long before it was in fashion. Hundreds of women among the population of about 30,000 here have been involved in various activities. There are women who work in groups, helping others in varied activities from mushroom cultivation to micro finance. “We provide micro loans against interest of as low as .5 per cent. There is also a milk cooperative which collects the milk produced in the GP and sell it to the market,” said Sampa Bairagi, secretary of Anandadhara, the women’s committee.

Jana said that Opposition parties were almost non-existent and whatever little were there did not stand any chance because of the work that had been done at this GP area. “We are also developing Karmathirtha, an employment hub mostly for women here and had also requested Chief Minister for developing the tourism potential here,” he said.