Lucknow, June 3 : Uttar Pradesh IAS officer Heera Lal has earned praise from Niti Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar for his efforts to turn backward rural areas into model villages through public participation. Heera Lal, as district magistrate of Banda, had carried out projects on water conservation with public participation. He said that he was thrilled to have the work of NGO 'Model Gaon' recognised. In a tweet on Wednesday, Rajiv Kumar said: "IAS officer Heera Lal's endeavour to convert rural and downtrodden villages of Uttar Pradesh into 'Model Villages' through active public participation is a tremendous step. Ground work like this is important for India's holistic development. Great work!" Lal, who is an advisor to Model Gaon concept, said, "The project was conceptualised by Munish Gangwar, retired chief general manager of NABARD. We started the project in January this year and already, 1,500 village manifestos, outlining how the locals would like to develop their village and what facilities they would like to have there, have been made. We are approaching newly elected pradhans, farmer producer organisations, Nehru Yuva Kendra members and asking them to join the effort Lal said that his work in Banda while he was district magistrate, inspired Gangwar to take up the project at a macro level. His programmes like organizing learning tours for rural entrepreneurs proved revolutionary. A team of village heads (Gram Pradhans) were sent to 'Ralegan-Siddhi' (model village of Shri Anna Hazare) and 'Hivade Bazar' village ( Padam Shri Popat Rao's model village) to acquire practical know-how from changemakers' work. Through this tour, agricultural and village management administrative knowledge of villagers increased. In Banda, he said, his administration followed a bottom-up approach in implementing water conservation schemes, increasing crop productivity etc, through direct involvement of residents in these projects. "We have an example of a village pradhan from Gorakhpur who won the recent panchayat elections on the basis of a model village manifesto. We are now in the process of collaborating with him to help in the implementation of the manifesto which will see villagers come together for water conservation, creation of farmer producer companies to protect interest of farmers etc," he said. /IANS