Niyad Nellanar Yojana

What is Niyad Nellanar Yojana?

Niyad Nellanar Yojana is a saturation-delivery programme of the Government of Chhattisgarh for villages in the Naxal-affected districts of Bastar division. The programme is driven by the Tribal and Scheduled Caste Development Department together with the Home Department and the district administrations, and it works by pulling many existing schemes of many departments into the same set of villages at the same time.

The name comes from the Dandami dialect spoken in south Bastar and means roughly "your good village", rendered in Hindi as आपका अच्छा गांव. It is also written as Niyad Nella Nar.

Chhattisgarh launched the programme on 15 February 2024. The design logic is geographic. Where a new security camp is established in a conflict-affected area, the villages within a defined radius of that camp become the unit for development delivery. Coverage began at a 5 km radius of security camps and was subsequently widened to 10 km, bringing in roughly 327 villages across Bijapur, Sukma, Dantewada, Narayanpur and Kanker districts.

Reported scope has grown as the programme has expanded. Early descriptions referred to 25 beneficiary-oriented schemes and 14 community facilities; a later review of the programme described benefits of 52 schemes across 17 departments along with 31 community facilities being made available in covered areas. Both figures describe the same idea: not a new entitlement, but every existing entitlement arriving at once in places that had received none of them.

Who is covered by Niyad Nellanar Yojana?

A household is covered if:

• The household lives in a village on the notified Niyad Nellanar list, which means a village within the defined radius of a security camp in one of the five covered districts.
• The household separately satisfies the eligibility rules of the underlying scheme, for example a ration card for food entitlements, or the Awas Plus survey list for housing.

There is no income test, caste test or age test at the programme level. The programme is a delivery mechanism; the tests sit inside each individual scheme it delivers.

A household is not eligible under this programme if:

• The village is outside the notified list. Residence anywhere in Bastar division is not by itself qualifying, the village must be within the radius around a security camp and on the district's list.
• The household is in a different district of Chhattisgarh altogether. The programme runs only in the five named districts.
• The household does not meet the underlying scheme's own conditions. A family not on the housing survey list, for instance, cannot get a Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana house through this programme.

Individuals cannot apply for Niyad Nellanar Yojana as a personal benefit at all, because it is not a personal benefit. What a resident of a covered village can do is claim each underlying scheme, and the programme's purpose is to make that claiming possible where it previously was not.

What benefits reach households under the programme?

According to state descriptions of the programme, households in covered villages have been given:

• Free LPG cylinders under Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana.
• Free rice, along with gram, salt, jaggery and sugar, through the public distribution system.
• Ration cards issued to families that had none.
• Irrigation pumps and free or subsidised electricity connections.
• Housing under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. A 2025 review reported 5,984 families approved.
• Household toilets — 6,460 reported constructed.
• Individual and community forest rights certificates under the Forest Rights Act.

At the village level, sanctioned and partly completed works reported in the same review include 31 new primary schools (13 operational), 20 sub-health centres (16 functional), 119 planned mobile towers (43 operational), high-mast lights in 92 villages, and 173 planned road and bridge projects (26 completed). Community halls, Anganwadi centres, sports grounds, bank branches, ATMs and helipads are part of the same facility list.

How to apply for benefits under Niyad Nellanar Yojana

Niyad Nellanar Yojana has no standalone application form. The practical route for a resident of a covered village runs through the camps and the Panchayat.

1. Confirm your village is on the list. Ask at the Gram Panchayat office or the Janpad Panchayat, or at the block office of the Tribal Development Department, whether your village is among the notified Niyad Nellanar villages.
2. Attend the village saturation camp when the district administration announces one. These camps bring officials from multiple departments to the village on a single day, and are the main point at which forms are filled and documents issued.
3. Get your base documents in order first: Aadhaar, ration card and an Aadhaar-seeded bank account. Camps normally include Aadhaar enrolment and bank correspondent services precisely because so many households lack these.
4. Apply scheme by scheme at the camp, Ujjwala for the gas connection, the food department for a ration card, the Panchayat for housing, the Forest Rights Committee for a forest rights claim, the social welfare officer for pensions.
5. Keep the acknowledgement slips issued for each application, and follow up at the Gram Panchayat or with the block nodal officer if a benefit does not arrive.

For village facilities. A road, a school, a health centre, a mobile tower, there is no household application at all. Those works are proposed by the Gram Sabha and the district administration and executed by the department concerned. The route for a villager is to raise the demand in the Gram Sabha, so that it enters the village development plan.

Why the programme is organised around security camps

Niyad Nellanar Yojana is built around security camps because the state's stated diagnosis was access, not entitlement. Villages in the interior of Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur were, on paper, eligible for the same schemes as the rest of India. In practice no departmental staff, contractor or bank correspondent reliably reached them, so ration cards were unissued, houses unbuilt and health centres unstaffed.

Establishing a camp changes what is physically possible in the surrounding area, and the programme uses that window to push the backlog of schemes through. Cases such as Regadgatta in Bijapur district have been reported in the press as villages that received electricity, road access and welfare benefits for the first time under this model.

A further phase, described as Niyad Nellanar 2.0, has been planned to extend the same approach to more remote Bastar villages under the state's wider Bastar development effort.

Key dates and figures for Niyad Nellanar Yojana

Because the programme is continuous rather than deadline-driven, there is no "last date to apply". What varies is the camp calendar in each district, and that is announced locally through the Gram Panchayat, the Janpad Panchayat and the district public relations office.

Where to raise a Niyad Nellanar grievance

• The Gram Panchayat Secretary and the Sarpanch, for scheme applications made at village level.
• The Janpad Panchayat and the block-level nodal officer appointed for the programme.
• The District Collectorate of Bijapur, Sukma, Dantewada, Narayanpur or Kanker, which coordinates the programme in the district.
• The Tribal and Scheduled Caste Development Department at tribal.cg.gov.in, for departmental contacts.

No fee is charged for any application made under the programme, and the camps themselves are free.