TEHRAN – The Ministry of Interior has prepared a plan according to which villages with at least 20 households will have rural administrations.

Previously, villages with more than 30 households received permits to establish rural administrations, deputy minister Mehdi Jamalinejad said, adding that the plan will cover over 8,000 villages across the country.

Noting that 30 percent of the country's population lives in rural areas, he said that “despite the oppressive sanctions and the poor economic condition, the government has taken valuable steps to provide services to the villages,” IRNA reported on Friday.

Rural development

In Iran, where villages account for generating 20-23 percent of the value-added in the country, the development of rural areas has been always a top agenda of the governments’ activities.

The sustainable economic, social, and cultural development of the villages is one of the major priorities of the current government, and many projects implemented and underway in this regard have led to outstanding development in the rural regions.

One of the sectors with noticeable achievements in this field is gas supplying, while the number of villages supplied with natural gas has doubled during the past seven years since the current government started its activity.

Based on the statistics, 18,000 villages (each week 50 villages on average) have been connected to the national gas network over the past seven years, and now about 4.8 million families in 32,000 villages enjoy natural gas in the country. It means that 82 percent of the villages are connected to the gas network.

Many other efforts have been made over the past couple of years by the government to support villagers and slow down the trend of migration from rural areas to cities while decreasing rural community dependency on one main economic sector (agriculture, forestry, energy, or mining), including rural tourism, agritourism, religious tourism, and ecotourism.

FB/MG