Murli Manohar Joshi
Aug 26, 2016
Here’s the plan: Fundamentals will have to be redefined and reinvented.
PRIME Minister Narendra Modi’s new direction to Niti Aayog is timely, bold and a welcome move, and deserves serious attention. Through this, the Prime Minister laid down the road map for India in the next century, and has set a very high benchmark for Niti Aayog. His call of planning for preparing India for the 22nd century is something, I believe, that the Niti Aayog members would not have envisaged.
The Prime Minister has rightly cautioned the Aayog members, and called for not repeating the mistakes of the past, and also suggested ways to avoid them. PM Modi has clearly conveyed that he expects a transformational change that positions and prepares India for the next century.
The agenda discussion gives a sense that the Aayog should start in the right direction. Indications are that over the next three decades, India could grow at near double-digits, but this will bring its own set of challenges and opportunities as well. India will have to plan for resources that not only take care of the increasing population, but also the changes within the total population and the fast-changing country’s landscape. This will need to forecast and provision for water, nutrition, health, human resources, education and energy will have to be made for the increasing population, and the generation of adequate resources to support the roadmap. The Prime Minister’s vision calls for productive jobs for every hand, with a focus on agricultural productivity and profitability. Importantly, the Aayog will need to factor the impact on environment in all plans that have to be achieved.
Demographic explosion — The Biggest Challenge: According to the Global Footprint Network report for 2016, in just over seven months, we have already consumed our year’s worth of natural resources. And it is estimated that the global population doubles every 30 years or more. In any case, India would be reaching a population level where it would become very difficult to meet the needs and aspirations of so many more people in so short a time. This, and other issues, are interlinked globally and the Aayog has to select its expertise with great care. The pace of growth of the geriatric population is faster now, and India will double its proportion of people above 64 years in age over the next 25 years. In many high-income countries, this kind of demographic transition has taken more than a century to happen. Also, one needs to take into account the fact that people above the age of 65 have a higher per capita consumption on healthcare, which is between 3.4 times to 5.4 times higher than the amount spent on healthcare by people below 65. The Aayog will need to pick up the lessons from the ageing society of Japan and factor measures based on our requirements.
The dependency ratio in India has increased from 7.8 in 1950 to 11.1 in 2010 — the average number of economically dependent population per 100 economically productive population, for a given country, territory or geographic area, at a specific point in time — and this would be a challenge for a developing country like India.
In my view, the interactions between demographic growth and economic growth are quite complex, particularly when both are reaching unprecedented levels. The growing number of people will, over time, result in a lower standard of life and a more complex web of socio-economic problems.
It is therefore imperative for the planners at the Aayog to present a document with a clear road map for: population stabilisation; address the issue of quality of life without freezing growth; increasing life expectancy and keeping the dependency ratio lo; increasing incomes and removing disparities; and bridging the urban and rural infrastructural divide.
The review at the Aayog gives thrust to create employment opportunities and wealth, technology, natural resources, food and nutrition for the increasing population and zero import regime in agriculture. The Aayog will need to give special emphasis to renewable and solar energy to make the requirements future-proof.
The Aayog will also have to factor the transition between rural-tribal- urban and smart cities over the next 100 years. The Aayog will have to look at building a socio-economic framework that supports social harmony as we progress materially and culturally, with high ethical standards.
The Aayog need visionaries, people with experience in the execution of projects and programmes, a strong team of metrologists to provide with real-time data and work in tandem with inter-disciplinary teams and the department of statistics. Also, now, since the GST Bill has been passed, the Aayog must work towards creating a business-friendly ecosystem.
The Prime Minister has also clearly pointed the underlying principles for the transformation of India, suggesting and inviting more subject matter experts rooted in Indian experiences over the millennia, crowd sourcing ideas, and also giving adequate hearing to different viewpoints with patience. If we did this, we will be better equipped to make failure-proof and future-proof plans and policies.
All this would mean redefining and reinventing fundamentals for future planning and development, and this requires a totally new level of thinking. A lot of this will depend on the Aayog’s team composition and approach.
The Prime Minister has set the direction for the Aayog team. It’s now upon the Aayog to live up to the expectations and deliver.
— The writer is a senior BJP leader
No comments:
Post a Comment