Govt to set up information bank of projects for people

Kolkata: The state government will set up an information bank of various projects which have benefitted crores of people in the past few years.

The District Magistrates have been asked to give details of the names of the beneficiaries of the Sabujshree project. The main objective of the move is to ensure that the benefits have gone to the genuine persons. The preliminary report maintained that around 24 lakh families have got benefits of the Sabujshree project.

Sabujshree is one of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's pet projects. She has mentioned about the project over and again in her speeches.

Under the Sabujshree project, a sapling is given free-of-cost to the parents of newborn children in state-run healthcare establishments. The parents are asked to maintain the saplings and when the children become adults, the parents can sell the tree and the money thereby received can be spent for the higher education of their children. The scheme has gone very well with the parents of newborns. During the programmes, the Chief Minister herself had distributed saplings to the parents. Generally, saplings of Mahogany, Saal and Segun trees are given to the parents, the prices of which go up with time.

It may be mentioned that nearly one crore bicycles have been distributed among the students of Classes IX to XII of state-run and aided schools by the Backward Classes Welfare department (BCW).

The BCW department has names of the beneficiaries along with the names of their parents or guardians, names of the school where they are studying along with their classes and the date when they had received the cycles. Because of this solid database, the Sabuj Sathi project has even received an award from the United Nations.