Thaindian News

Chandigarh, Sep 9 (IANS) Congress party general secretary Rahul Gandhi will constitute teams of and train youths in Punjab to supervise proper implementation of the central government’s schemes and to curb corruption.
The Youth Congress in Punjab, to which Gandhi has given special attention over the last one year and made it a model state for Youth Congress elections, is all set to launch his brainchild project ‘Aam Admi Ka Sipahi’ (AAKS - soldier of the common man) in the coming days.

“Initially we are launching this pilot project in Punjab and based on the response it will be implemented in other parts of the country. This is a huge project and we have to cover every village of the state so it will certainly take time,” Punjab Youth Congress president Ravneet Singh Bittu told media here Wednesday.

Bittu said that Punjab youths would be informed about projects like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

“In the beginning, a four-day camp will be organised at Ludhiana Sep 14-17, and Rahul Gandhi will come there to train the participating youths on Sep 15,” he added.

Training to the youth would be imparted by Youth Congress national president and MP Ashok Tanwar, MP from Tamil Nadu Manik Tagore and Rajasthan MP Jitender Singh.

Ludhiana, the industrial hub of Punjab, is around 100 km from here.

“During this four-day training, over 400 youths, including block presidents, district presidents and already selected volunteers will undergo training from our four experts. They will further train other youths of the state by organising over 2,000 camps,” said Bittu, a grandson of former Punjab chief minister Beant Singh, and first-time MP from Punjab’s Anandpur Sahib constituency.

He said there are over 12,000 villages in Punjab and seven to nine youths from every village would be trained. For this project, Punjab has been divided into 210 blocks. Each block has 70-80 villages.

“The Akali (Dal) government is playing politics of favouritism. A central government scheme like the NREGA has failed to yield desired results just because of the lack of awareness and widespread corruption in the present state government,” he added.

After Punjab, the AAKS project will be launched in Gujarat and in the union territory of Daman and Diu.

In September last year, Rahul Gandhi launched a pilot project of recruiting Youth Congress members in Punjab. The response was encouraging as nearly 400,000 Punjab youths joined this force on the persuasion of Gandhi, Bittu said.