Expand economic opportunities in rural areas - Experts
03 Dec '07
4 min read
With half the world now living in cities, India faces one of its greatest challenges – massive migration from rural communities, where 70% of its 1 billion people still live.
What steps can be taken to expand economic opportunities in rural areas? What is being done to improve infrastructure and ensure sustainable growth in urban areas? How should the strategies be linked?.
Spelling out the dual imperatives facing India – increasing investor frustration with its urban infrastructure and the economic and social needs of its rural population – session Chair Nik Gowing, Main Presenter, BBC World, United Kingdom, invited participants to define the challenge and possible solutions to these problems.
Mani Shankar Aiyar, Minister of Panchayati Raj and Youth Affairs and Sports of India, presented some alarming statistics. India's economy has “kissed” 10% growth – but on the Human Development index, it has sunk from 126th position to 128th.
Some 836 million Indians live on less than 20 rupees per day; a huge number live on less than nine rupees per day. “India is becoming prosperous, but not Indians,” he warned. And that prosperity only benefits a small number of Indians.
At the same time, he said, “India is not just the world's largest democracy, but the most represented democracy.” There are 250,000 institutes of elected government in the country – in the form of local government institutions – comprising 2.2 million representatives, of which half are women.
Yet these people are not being involved in national economic and social policies. “Elected self-governments should be a source of delivery to people. We need to use them to secure entitlements for the poor.
But they are still not within the policy perspective. Rural and urban are not separate; both are connected. Until we see that, India will become prosperous and Indians will remain poor.”
In terms of rural migration, Anand G. Mahindra, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra, India, and a Co-Chair of the India Economic Summit, pointed out that modernizing agriculture would in fact drive rural-to-urban migration up, but added that such migration is natural. “What do migrants want?” he asked.
“They want diversity of income, sanitation, drinking water, power, roads. But even when they get those, they will still want the life they see on their televisions. Human beings like to live in cities; they have done so for thousands of years.”
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