Dong Lac determined to reach the finish line of model new rural area

New look

Overcoming many difficulties and challenges, in 2023, Dong Lac became one of the advanced new rural communes of Nam Sach district. Small and narrow concrete roads have been replaced by wide and long roads in all villages and hamlets. Spacious, clean village roads and high-rise buildings are the appearance of Dong Lac today.

In recent times, along with maintaining the achieved criteria, Dong Lac commune has mobilized many resources to upgrade infrastructure, focus on economic development, improve people's lives, and create resources for building advanced new rural areas. The commune Party Committee has developed a plan and assigned specific tasks to each member. The New Rural Development Board in all villages has held meetings to discuss plans and time to complete unachieved criteria.

The locality also promoted propaganda to help cadres and people understand the meaning and importance of the movement, and at the same time integrated and effectively implemented it with other emulation movements. With the motto: "People know, people discuss, people do, people inspect and people benefit", people actively responded with specific actions such as donating land to expand village roads, renovating houses, building advanced new rural cultural families, investing in production development and increasing people's income.

Since starting to implement the construction of advanced new rural areas, the commune has mobilized over 100 billion VND to improve the quality of criteria for transportation, culture, schools, production organization, health care, environment and living environment quality. In 2022, the commune completed and put into use many new classrooms, expanded 6 intra-field traffic routes in 4 villages with a total length of 1.2 km. Village roads only 4-5 m wide were also expanded by people's contributions to 6-7 m, many sections of roads were paved with asphalt concrete, with trees on both sides of the road and high-voltage electricity, creating a civilized and modern rural space.

As a local elder, Mr. Pham Duy Nhan in Truc Khe village could not help but be moved when witnessing the changes in his hometown. “Dong Lac countryside is changing every day, every hour. People benefit a lot from the traffic routes, cultural and educational institutions. Material life is taken care of. People’s spiritual life is taken care of, we have places to play, exercise and play sports at clubs…”, Mr. Nhan said.

Investing in culture

Determining that building a new countryside “only has a beginning, no end”, after reaching the finish line in building an advanced new countryside, the Party Committee, government and people of the commune continue to strive to reach the model new countryside this year. The commune has currently completed 3 out of 4 criteria of a model new countryside commune. The average income per capita of the commune has reached over 79 million VND/person/year. The commune is building a modern “Smart Village” model with many conveniences for the people.

Truc Khe was chosen to build a smart village model because the living standards of the people here are higher than other villages. Moreover, the village's infrastructure has been basically invested in modernly. The village has a cultural and spiritual center including a pagoda and a cultural house, a memorial stele, a martyrs' temple, etc. which have been invested in modernly. The funding source is entirely supported by businesses, philanthropists and children living far from home. The village has installed a solar-powered street lighting system, and installed 15 surveillance cameras at the beginning of the main roads of the village to ensure security and order in residential areas. The public area has been renovated with lotus and green trees and equipped with outdoor sports and exercise equipment to meet most of the needs of the people.

Mr. Vo Hong Nam, Party Secretary, Head of the Steering Committee for New Rural Development in Dong Lac commune affirmed: “Investing in culture is to improve the quality of life of rural people. Therefore, the locality chooses culture as an outstanding field. This is also the only criterion that the locality has not achieved. We have developed a plan to complete this criterion, determined to reach the model rural finish line this year”.

Through review, the locality has 3 cultural houses out of 8 villages that have degraded. These cultural houses were built in the 90s of the last century. To complete the criteria, the commune has planned to build new cultural houses in 3 villages: Nham Cap, Mieu Lang and Dong Phan with a total budget of 8.8 billion VND. This is a large budget, so in addition to mobilizing local resources, the locality also requested the District People's Committee to support the budget.