Indian Prime Minster Dr. Manmohan Singh very worried over Growing urban-rural divide and the digital gap
Media Release
Jun. 16, 2006

The Planning Commission's alarm bells over increasing poverty and growing urban-rural divide has made "Dr Liberalisation" in Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh sit up to examine if the liberalisation he set rolling in early ninties was really doing the damage. The left parties have been saying so and said it again on Thursday at the UPA-Left coordination committee meeting here. Dr Manmohan Singh has been dismissive of their criticism as he shows how much the government is spending in social sectors for poverty alleviation.

An economist in him, however, woke up when his own liberalisation commander-in-arms Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, suggested an urgent reorientation of the liberation policy to protect the rural poor.

Dr Ahluwalia's recommendation has come in the Planning Commission's draft approach paper on the upcoming 11th five-year Plan that stresses that "there is a point beyond which the urban sector cannot grow without being complimented by the rural sector" and hence the urgency to launch an aggressive economic campaign targeting the rural poor.

The paper's pointer is that a plethora of rural programmes launched by the government were not doing the magic of transforming life of the poor as it is rather becoming worse and worse. And, so Dr Manmohan Singh has decided to himself travel to the villages from this month end to personally dissect what ails the government policies. He descends on Nagpur on June 30 and will be extensively travelling to the rural areas in Nagpur and other surrounding districts of the Vidarbha region in Maharashtra for three days to study why the rural employment guarantee scheme, Bharat Nirman, rural healthcare mission and other programmes are not yielding the expected results. Sources in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said he chose Vidarbha to be his first destination since it has recorded the highest number of 540 farmer suicides in the last one year. He will be interacting with the farmers to understand their problems to enable him to prescribe the short-term and long-term remedies for the root cause of the suicides. The Prime Minister's next destinations are Bihar and Orissa as the poverty is in the worst form in these two states. Both the states are ruled by the opposition parties but that did not deter him from inclusion in his travel plans for spot assessment and review of all rural programmes. Notwithstanding the Congress convening a conference of its DCC presidents here last month to actively involve partymen in the government programmes, orders have gone out to ensure minimum political personalities are included in his trips to the villages as he wants to devote his maximum time in interacting with the officials actually implementing various programmes as then only he can know why they are not reducing the poverty. Sources said, Dr Manmohan Singh also wants to make his Vidarbha trip a learning mission as he wants to pick up something to implement from Mahatma Gandhi's Sevagram and Vinoba Bhave's Paunar Ashram. He shall be staying overnight in one of the two places to have better interaction with the inmates. The 11th Plan's draft approach paper envisages the growth rate of 8.5 to 9.5 per cent and recommends drastic changes in the priorities fixed in the previous Plans, with a promise that the new regime would ensure the average Indian's "real income" doubling in ten years. It envisages maximum benefit to the deprived people. The 10th Plan's targeted growth rate was 8 per cent but the Planning Commission officials now admit that it may be around 7 percent overall in five years.

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