Two months after the rural development minister C P Joshi expressed his desire to start a Kaun Banega Crorepati kind of quiz programme for the rural India; his ministry has come up with a plan to start a quiz show from October 2.

“In order to enhance the literacy programmes in rural areas, ministry plans to launch a national quiz programme on DD news of Doordarshan on October 2, 2010,” ministry’s note on the quiz show said. “The teams participating in the quiz programme will be constituted by the elected representatives of the panchayati raj institutions from a selected gram panchayat of the state. It will comprise the sarpanch, a ward member, panchayat samiti member and zilla parishad member who is a voter/resident of the select gram panchayat,” it further said.

The cash award for the winning team has not been worked out yet. Earlier, on July 23, Joshi had mooted the idea about the quiz show. “Let’s launch a Kaun Banega Crorepati for people living in villages. And the question asked should be on slew of poverty alleviation and welfare schemes that affect them directly,” he had said addressing an audience of officials from rural development ministry, information and broadcasting ministry, rural development secretaries from states, and representatives of state institutes of rural development, gathered at the capital for a workshop to strengthen local self-governance.

The idea, he said, was to encourage people to learn the important sections and subsections of the various Acts and laws that affect them directly and the knowledge of which will help them to demand what is due to them. “The government of India has been spending so much money on welfare schemes targeted at people in rural India. But the tragedy is the majority of the population is not aware of these schemes. Tell me how many of our brothers and sisters know about the unemployment allowance clause in the NREGA, how many of them know about Right to Information act that they can so easily use to know why money that the government has allocated for their welfare under any schemes is not getting to them,” he questioned.

Knowledge about these schemes will make a huge difference in their successful implementation of and launching a quiz show might just do what so much of publicity has not done he argued. “Lets give a crore to person who answer all questions on the section and subsection of NREGA, or PESA or IAY ,” he said.