Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday expressed concern over the increasing divide among rural-urban and inter-regional areas.
He said that although the task was Herculean, the government has initiated several policies and programmes to bridge the gap.
Inaugurating the golden jubilee celebrations of the Institute of Economic Growth here, Dr Singh said that the investment that the government was making in rural infrastructure, rural education and healthcare besides promoting non-farm employment in rural areas should help in this regard. He sought the co-operation of the states in this task.
Noting that inter-regional imbalances in development have both economic and political causes and consequences, he said parts of northwestern, western and southern India were marching ahead of central, eastern and northeastern India.
“We cannot allow these regional imbalances to persist. A large part of our population lives in the less-developed parts of our country.
This is contributing to increased migration of labour force and with all its attendant social consequences. We have to move from a situation where people are migrating to where jobs exist, to a situation where jobs migrate to where people live.
This means taking development — in particular industrial development — to backward regions and increasing avenues for non-farm employment in rural areas,” the prime minister said.
Long-term strategy
Noting that his government has taken several steps in each of these directions, he said that any long-term strategy for addressing both the challenges should focus on agricultural development and agrarian change, development of human resources and on promoting labour intensive industrialisation in backward regions.
Creative thinking
The prime minister said that he found there was inadequate creative thinking on how to address some of these challenges.
“The debate about state vs market addresses these issues only up to a limited point. By liberating private enterprise from the stranglehold of the licence-permit-control-inspection Raj, we have succeeded in creating new incomes and new employment.
But, this alone cannot address the two imbalances in development which I have referred to.”