Poverty alleviation at the core of Modi’s agenda
Throughout his election campaign, and in the past seven months that he has been in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken often and at length about his plans for the country. He has shared with the public blueprints of his Government's pet projects and flagship schemes, he has talked about reforms, and promised us good governance.
However, it was only this past week, while speaking at a global business summit, that he effectively strung together all these different elements of policy-making and offered a comprehensive vision for the future — and that too in a format that is easily accessible to the layman.
That this speech comes only weeks before the annual Budget is to be placed in Parliament makes it that much more indicative of what lies ahead. It was especially remarkable for the manner in which it connected the economic aspects of policy-making with the social and the political, and, ideally, should go a long way in fighting criticism that the Modi Government is only concerned with pleasing big businesses, often at the cost of the poor.
The Prime Minister put poverty elimination at the very core of his governance mantra and made it clear that his idea of economic growth was inexorably linked to the prosperity and welfare of all citizens. His focus on development processes that create jobs, on jobs that are enabled by skills, on skills that are synced with production and on production that is benchmarked to quality that in turn matches global standards, delineates an entirely new eco-system. Such an eco-system is as much about catering to domestic needs as it is about carving a niche in the global scheme of things. It is also a larger picture perspective.
A more specific example of how Mr Modi views linkages between the economic and social domains is his take on subsidies. He says in no uncertain terms that a “welfare and subsidy mechanism”, especially in the fields of healthcare and education, is needed to protect the poorest of the poor, but also adds that such a mechanism must be “well designed”.
Here, the emphasis is on effective delivery systems and ensuring that the Government is held accountable for the taxpayers' money that it spends. This has also been reiterated in the Prime Minister's comments on the public distribution system which, he rightly noted, needed to be overhauled at the earliest.
In this context, he also underlined the role of technology in reducing human interface and increasing productivity — be it in computerising the entire PDS system to contain leakages or introducing biometric attendance markers to instill a sense of discipline and punctuality. Notably, the former is a big ticket reform plan while the latter is a smaller, essentially administrative measure, but they both serve as building blocks for the overall idea of new India.