Ri Bhoi second in NITI Aayog’s ranking

NEW DELHI: Ri Bhoi district has secured the second position next to Bijapur in Chhattisgarh, among the aspirational districts ranked by NITI Aayog, for the February-June 2020 period, according to official sources on Monday.
Bijapur district in Chhattisgarh has topped the list of aspirational districts ranked by the government think-tank for making progress in key areas of development.
Ri Bhoi and Bahraich (Uttar Pradesh) have been placed at the second and third positions respectively while Nawada (Bihar) has been ranked fourth and Moga (Punjab) has secured the fifth place. The rankings took into account incremental progress made by over 112 aspirational districts across six developmental areas during February-June this year.
Health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, financial inclusion, skill development and basic infrastructure were the development areas that were taken into consideration for the ranking.
The aspirational districts programme, launched in January 2018, aims to transform districts that have shown relatively lesser progress in key social areas and have emerged as pockets of under-development.
n total, there are 115 aspirational in the context that improvement in these districts can lead to the overall improvement in human development in India, official sources said.
The broad contours of the programme are: convergence (of central and state schemes) which brings together the horizontal and vertical tiers of the government, collaboration (of central, state-level ‘Prabhari’ officers and district collectors) which enables impactful partnerships between government, market and civil society, and competition among districts driven by a spirit of the mass movement.