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8 pc growth unachievable by 2007, says PM New Delhi, June 27 This is largely due to the particularly poor performance of the agriculture over the last decade, he said, and obliquely remarked that the UPA’s predecessor governments — the NDA, and the United Front — were unable to halt the downslide. The NDC, one of the highest decision-making bodies of the country with the Prime Minister at the Chair and all Chief Ministers as members of the council, is meeting to adopt the mid-term appraisal of the 10th Plan. “The growth target for the 10th Plan (2002-07) was set at 8.1 per cent and the mid-term appraisal (MTA) shows that performance thus far is well below this target, averaging 6.5 per cent in the past three years…we cannot achieve the original 10th Plan target of 8 per cent over the Plan period as a whole”, he said. The Prime Minister termed the deficient performance of the rural economy as a “particularly disturbing aspect”. “The cornerstone of the Plan strategy was a reversal of the declining trend in the growth rate of agriculture and with a target for agricultural growth at 4 per cent. Unfortunately, the actual performance of agriculture appears to have deteriorated even further and will possibly not exceed 1.5 per cent during the first three years of the Plan”, he said. In these circumstances, he said, it was hardly surprising that a perception had grown that the benefits of growth had “bypassed a substantial section of our people.” He set the target of doubling agricultural production in the next 10 years and mooted the idea of setting up a sub-committee of the NDC to thrash out the broad contours of a strategy to fulfill this objective. On the critical area of finances, the Prime Minister said the MTA drew attention to the fact that the total Plan expenditure of the Centre and the states in the first four years of the 10th Plan was less than what it should have been if the targets were to be fully achieved. Even as he acknowledged the apprehension expressed by certain state governments that the new system of devolution of grants could adversely affect the finances of the state government, he said in the long run it would increase the flexibility of the state governments and lead to a “more healthy relationship between the Centre and the states”. In the immediate future, however, special effort would be required to ensure that the financing of the Plan could be assured at reasonable levels. The Prime Minister also dropped hints that the Central funds to the state governments under the Urban Renewal Mission would be tied to certain conditionalities. “The Urban Development Ministry and the Planning Commission would shortly be in touch with you (state governments) on the critical elements of reforms that would need to be undertaken in order to access the Central assistance under the mission”, he said. Public health was another area, Dr Singh said, where the “pace of progress is painfully slow” and the rural-urban divide and the gender gap did not appear to be reducing in any significant manner. He termed the present high levels of maternal mortality rate as a “matter of national shame”. “Do we care so little for our women and children that we allow preventable deaths to occur even when we know the nature of the interventions required?” the Prime Minister asked. The MTA, he said, emphasised the critical importance of infrastructure development even though the resources needed for capacity expansion “are simply not available in the public sector”. “Hence the need for public-private partnership. We must leverage limited public sector resources by resorting to private investment and public private partnerships to the maximum extent possible”, he said. Dr Singh identified power shortage as a major problem area and added that the aim should be bring down losses by 10 percentage points in two years. The national highway development programme, another critical area, also required crucial support from the state government, especially in “checking unplanned roadside development “which threatens to severely devalue and impair the road assets that are being created”.  |
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