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Work will start on two new ports, eight new airports, new industrial corridors and Rail projects in the next few months, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his Independence Day address to the nation, the last before the 2014 general elections.
There was no shower of freebies, no announcement of populist schemes. Instead the PM recounted and reviewed nine years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and said with some satisfacton that the schemes for the poor had worked well and more would be in the offing, thus reinforcing the belief that the UPA will continue with what it believes is its USP: “new rights to the common man which have led to his social and economic empowerment”.
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Singh emphasised agricultural growth in the nine years of the plan period and said record agricultural priduction had enabled the Fod Security Law which would be passed soon. Rural wages had also increased much faster in this period. MNREGA provides employment to crores of people in rural areas, he said.
While conceding measuring poverty was a difficult task, Singh said no matter what the definition, “it cannot be denied that the pace of reduction in poverty has increased after 2004”.
Singh enumerated the strides in education – through the mid day meals schemes, the Right to Education and the fact that the number of young men and women going to college has more than doubled in the last 9 years. 8 new IITs, 7 New IIMs, 16 new Central universities and 10 new NITs had been opened, he said. All this was poised to give India the benefit of the demographic dividend.
Singh, unexpectedly, accepted that the government's skills development programme had not had the desired results: “In the area of Skill Development, we could not initially achieve as much progress as we wanted. But now the pace has picked up. We have established the National Skill Development Authority a few months back. We will shortly launch a new scheme under which those who have successfully acquired new skills will be given a grant of about Rupees 10,000. This scheme will benefit about 10 lakh young men and women in the next 12 months”.
He also cited infreastructural development: “About 2 lakh km of new roads have been constructed for connecting villages under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana. More than 37,000 km of new Highways have been built, facilitating travel and trade. More than 40 airports have been built or upgraded. In 2004, only 7 percent of the people had telephone connections. Today, 73 percent enjoy this facility. In rural areas, this figure has gone up from 2 to 40. There has been a record addition to our capacity for electricity generation”. But he added that growth rates had gone down because of global conditions. Yet, efforts were being made to improve the economic situation.
Interstingly, the Aadhar project, touted by many in the government as a game changer was mentioned only in passing by the PM in his address. The major portion of his address was dedicated to an overview of the pro-poor schemes his government had introduced in nine years in the socialo welfare, health, education, employment and food security sectors, possibly indicating the election slogn of the UPA in the 2014 general election.
