Rahul Gandhi's plans to help discover Amethi ruined
Gandhi had repeatedly used the Rs 400-crore Amethi Discovery Park, which was opened in July 2009, to fire the imagination of his electorate. In his speeches he used to say that flowers grown in Amethi will decorate American homes.
Rahul Gandhi had a dream that the world will discover Amethi. For that he had wielded the Discovery Park - the tool for rural empowerment through transfer of agricultural technologies. But a Congress vice-president without any power at the Centre cannot really empower his constituency.
With the change of guard at the Centre, the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Allahabad - which was tasked to manage the park at its Amethi campus - has decided to close the project owing to "fund crunch". The Union government's Department of Science and Technology has reportedly halted its grant of Rs 5 crore to the park. Simply put, the National Democratic Alliance's victory in the Lok Sabha elections ended the Gandhi scion's 'Discovery in Amethi'.
Gandhi had repeatedly used the Rs 400-crore Amethi Discovery Park, which was opened in July 2009, to fire the imagination of his electorate. In his speeches he used to say that flowers grown in Amethi will decorate American homes. He promised them self-employment with the help of sub-centres that were to be part of the park. The idea was to collaborate with Purdue University in the USA which successfully runs a Discovery Park there. And armed with all those ideas, Gandhi's pet project began its journey at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Information Technology (RGIIT). But now the IIIT-A authorities have decided to put an end to it all.
The Board of Management of IIIT-A held a meeting on May 29, just two days after the formation of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, and discussed about the future of the park. "We decided to close the Discovery Park after a discussion at the meeting of the Board of Management of IIIT. We have communicated to the Department of Science and Technology about the decision," said IIIT-A director Dr. Somenath Biswas. Sources told Mail Today that a proposal for funds send in June also did not evoke any response from the Union government.
Not surprisingly, the Congress is crying foul. The party is smelling rat in the closure, blaming it all on the NDA government at the Centre. "The new government should have taken forward the good projects. Closing of the park indicates their narrow mindedness," said Uttar Pradesh Congress spokesperson Diwjendra Tripathi. He was also critical of the IIIT-A for expanding the park beyond capacity. "The authorities of IIIT-A were proactive when the Congress was in power. They had opened eight village resource sub-centres in Rae Bareli, Lalganj, Unchahar, Jagdishpur, Jais, Amethi, Gauriganj and Tikarmafi without any such suggestion from Rahulji because they wanted to make him happy. IIIT-A authorities boasted that they were providing information to the rural people about agriculture, environment, education and health from these sub-centres. Now the same people don't see any viability," he said.
Sources said that IIIT-A had got huge funds for running the Discovery Park. It already had Rs 40 crore in its kitty. But after spending about Rs 1.5 core for giving salary to park employees, the institute stopped disbursing salaries. There seems to be no word about the rest of `40 crore. And it all happened after the Congress lost in the Lok Sabha elections. Sources in the institute told Mail Today that the authorities are also not taking interest in coordinating with the Purdue University.
According to sources, the IIIT-A management was in a rush to appease Gandhi and expanded the project beyond capacity. In 2012, IIIT-A had claimed that they had reached more than 26,000 families through e-agriculture and bioinformatics in the first phase. In the second phase, they were gearing up to start e-vocal education and e-enterprises through cyber centers. The park was also to provide training in agriculture, horticulture, soil science, plant protection and agronomy.
It also appears that data were fudged to please Gandhi. A source at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow told MAIL TODAY that they too had started a telemedicine centre at the park. "But there was no one to manage it. The centre remained inactive from the first day because of internal politics. The senior members of the institute were more interested in providing false details about the success of the park than honestly working on it," the source told MAIL TODAY.