When Niti Aayog announced the Delta Rankings for the month of May, it emerged that Bihar’s Gaya district has performed really well in certain parameters to get the number 1 position among 112 aspirational districts. Gaya was awarded the top spot on the basis of five indicators – health and nutrition, agriculture resources, financial inclusion and skill developm ent, education and basic infrastructure.
The district topped in health and nutrition with 52.2 points in May, compared to 43.2 points in the month of April. Whereas, the district ranked as third position in education indicator with 52.7 in the points table.
In an exclusive conversation with Indian Masterminds, District Magistrate of Gaya, Mr. Thiyagarajan S.M., IAS, talked about the particular initiatives that helped the district to top the list.
WONDER APP
The administration organised two specific programmes throughout the district which worked in their favour. The first programme is the WONDER app, which is for ‘women’s obstetrical neonatal death evaluation and reduction’. It is specifically focused upon maternal death reduction. The app was launched in February 2022 in Bodhgaya and was slowly expanded to other areas.
Mr. Thiyagarajan told Indian Masterminds that the app is focussed upon collecting a database with all the details of pregnant women in the district. This database also categorises the pregnant women according to their risk, like generating red alert according to their category of anemia. For example, if a woman has 5 mg of haemoglobin, then it will categorise the woman in red alert category. Ideally, it should be at least more than 11 mg in Indian conditions.
“Secondly, the project also deals with referral tracking which is done through the WONDER portal, through which, the centre knows the referral patient beforehand, which helps them to prepare before the patient arrives,” the officer said.
SHRAVAN SHRUTI PROGRAMME
The second programme the administration focused on is Shravan Shruti. The initiative aims at screening children of 0-6 age group for hearing loss. The initiative was launched in the month of February.
So far, the programme has screened 12,000 children and the administration has found out that 43 children have hearing loss within the range of 0-6 years. And, out of these children, 24 needed temporary treatment and 7 needed permanent cochlear implant because they had deeper problems.
Mr. Thiyagarajan said, “WHO figures says that 5-7% of children out of 1000 are prone to hearing loss in the world. In that ratio, we have treated 43 children out of 12,000. Once we screen these children, they automatically turn up in the anganwadi centres with their parents and nutrition is provided to them.”
EDUCATION
The district ranked as third in the education indicator with 52.7 in the points table, after focusing upon improving the quality education through regular inspections.
Every Thursday and Wednesday, the administration does inspection of schools in all the panchayats. Every week, around 150 schools are being inspected. “These increase in the inspection with quality as the major parametre is one of the reasons that we have ranked third in the list, Mr. Thiyagrajan said.
AGRICULTURE AND WATER RESOURCES
However, although the district topped in two indicators, its performance dropped in the agriculture and water resources by 39.4 points in May. The administration attributed this to “inadequate rainfall this year till now, which is one of the reasons for the drop in the performance”.
Mr. Thiyagrajan said that the state government has developed a project to bring Ganga water to Gaya and Bodhgaya. The said project is in the final stage and very soon, the water from the Ganga will reach Gaya and Bodhgaya.
“This will also help in rising the water level adequately. Water resources department is doing this project and, additionally, we have taken up construction of check dams, digging of canals and ponds, and, also, renovation of ponds on a large scale,” Mr. Thiyagarajan said.
COOPERATION OF GAYA PEOPLE
He further acknowledged Gaya people’s cooperation, because of which, the administration was able to screen 12,000 children in just a time span of three months.
He said, “We thank the people of Gaya for their cooperation. We have a long way to go, we have to improve in many other indicators and we definitely seek their cooperation in every other achievement. This is just the beginning and we are happy that our performance has been recognised by Niti Aayog and we hope that in the future, too, we will be able to keep up the performance.”
