Uttarakhand CM dissolves district development authorities after complaints

Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat on late Tuesday announced that all district development authorities would be dissolved due to problems in their functioning.

Rawat made the announcement while addressing media in Almora district during a three-day visit. The chief minister further said that a formal order in this regard will be issued soon.

“We had been receiving many complaints regarding problems in the functioning of the district development authorities, so the chief minister has decided to dissolve the authorities. This is only being done for rural development authorities in all the districts,” the chief minister’s media coordinator Darshan Singh Rawat said.

He also said that the state government would be looking into the situation and decide on the next course of action.

Earlier in November, Bansidhar Bhagat, the chief of the Uttarakhand unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had submitted a memorandum to the chief minister, urging him to dissolve development authorities in the state in the public interest as they were not fulfilling the purpose for which they had been created.

Bhagat had said after touring various areas of the state and interacting with people and party cadre, that one of the main complaints was that “development authorities had failed to fulfil the expectations of the people”.

The BJP chief said these development authorities were not contributing much to the development of their respective areas. “On the contrary, people are facing difficulties due to them. Easy procedures are being made difficult for people. In some places, I even got complaints about corruption in the authorities. Against this backdrop, I realised there was no justification for the continuation of these development authorities in the state”, he had said.

The opposition Congress reacted to chief minister Rawat’s decision said the government should have focused on why these bodies were not working properly

Suryakant Dhasmana, vice-president of state Congress unit said, “Since the district development authorities are government bodies which have failed to help the public, the government should be focusing on checking why the bodies were not working properly. This government first takes wrong decisions and then takes a U-turn and praises itself.”