Minister issues directive to DoNER officials
NEW DELHI: The newly-appointed DoNER Minister Jitendra Singh has directed the officials of the department to give special focus on the North-East so that each state gets developed and come at par with the rest of the country.
“The region is gradually limping back from insurgency to resurgence and the officers should go all out to carry on the developmental work in the remote and backward region,” the Union Minister said.
Singh was speaking at a meeting of DoNER officers convened to discuss a comprehensive development plan for trade and tourism in the Northeastern region on Tuesday here.
Singh said the Centre had approved two-laning and four-laning of 6,418 km of various categories of roads under Phase ‘A’. He said the Ministry’s responsibility was to ensure that all these eight sister States receive equal share of fund so that they could live in harmony without grudging against each other.
At the same time, the Ministry’s responsibility was also to ensure that these eight states considered themselves “real” sisters and not “cousin” sisters of the rest 21 States and seven UTs outside Northeast, he added.
Issuing instructions for immediately expediting all the pending projects of the NE region, Singh told the officials that the message must go out to all the eight Chief Ministers and 39 MPs from Northeast that the DoNER Ministry is here to act as a ‘facilitator’ and not as an arbitrator.
Singh also pointed out that as the Northeastern region had set an example of gradually limping back from insurgency to resurgence, the Government of India’s focus in the next few years would be to promote trade and tourism potentials of the area which would not only raise the economic standards of the region but also inspire the rest of the country to look East for business and tourism.
