Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla will visit Shillong on February 25-26 and address members of the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly, following which he will visit the construction site of the new Meghalaya Legislative Assembly Building at Mawdiangdiang.
On Thursday, the speaker will inaugurate the ‘Outreach and Familiarization Programme for Local Bodies’ of Meghalaya and other North Eastern states scheduled to be held at the State Convention Centre, Pinewood Hotel, Shillong.
“Initiated by the Lok Sabha Speaker, this first of its kind programme is being organized by the Parliamentary Research and Training Institute for Democracies (PRIDE), Lok Sabha Secretariat and the programme focuses on enhancing participatory democracy through a greater awareness of the procedures and processes followed by democratic institutions functioning at various levels right from the grassroots to the apex level. The programme is intended to strengthen the institutions of governance and planning at the grass-root level, since maximizing self-governance is critical to empowering people. Apart from Panchayati Raj System, there is a need for mobilizing and strengthening traditional grassroot level institutions as present in the 5th and 6th Schedule States,” an official statement said.
The first such Outreach Programme was organized at Dehradun, Uttarakhand on January 8, 2021 and the second on the theme ‘Panchayati Raj System/Autonomous District Councils: Strengthening the Decentralized Democracy’ will be held in Shillong.
Eighty representatives from the local self government bodies of other North Eastern States including 25 zila parishad chairmen from Arunachal Pradesh, 26 zila parishad chairmen from Assam, 6 zila parishad chairmen from Manipur, 6 MDCs from Mizoram, nominated 5 heads of village councils from Nagaland, 4 zila parishad chairmen from Sikkim and 8 zila parishad chairmen from Tripura will also be present for the programme.
It may be mentioned that a large part of North-East India is governed by the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution. Three states, namely, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland are exempted from the purview of the 73rd Amendment and come under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.
