Apropos Samuel Paul and Kala S Sridhar's article "The demand side of inclusive growth" (March 6), a basic difference in approach between the Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh governments has been factored into the states' growth rankings, as the authors have suggested. While Tamil Nadu had stepped up its efforts on primary education and health security in all rural areas, Uttar Pradesh clearly missed the bus. Some major factors are:
(a) The benefit of reservation policies and scholarships was taken away by the so-called creamy layers of other backward classes and reserved categories, depriving the poor and needy from joining the race;
(b) The condition of primary schools in villages continued to remain poor, despite huge fund allocations. A considerable number of children did not even go to primary schools;
(c) The benefit of a big corpus allocated for the rural health programme never reached the poor. Even today, people in several villages travel 20-40 km to get a blood test or X-ray;
(d) Various employment schemes by all governments, where money was doled out in cash without getting any productive work done, increased labour rates and production costs. Besides, labour working in fields became complacent since they got money for doing nothing. A good number of small and medium-scale industries had to close down owing to labour troubles and power shortage.
Pramod Dixit Vadodara
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