Green Shoots
The India Today State of the State Conclave on Madhya Pradesh put the spotlight on the huge strides the state has made vis-a-vis agriculture and also the distance it has to cover in some others areas of development
The people of Madhya Pradesh must analyse why ‘Mama’ is so necessary,” Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said at the India Today State of the State Conclave in Bhopal on March 29, in response to the query: why should the people of the state vote for him a fourth time? Chouhan is popularly referred to as mama (maternal uncle) across the state.
Delivering the keynote address, the chief minister chalked out a future roadmap for development and also gave an account of his government’s performance in the past decade. “When I took charge, my first priority was to improve the road network, electricity and agriculture,” he said. His reform measures in agriculture, including smart water management, have resulted not only in surplus production but also bumper crops even during a drought season.
Being an election year, Chouhan was eager to roll out the numbers. And some were impressive—irrigated land increased from 7.5 lakh hectare to 40 lakh hectare; the 24x7 power supply target achieved in
2013 with 18,000 MW electricity; seven new medical colleges set up; and the salary of government primary school teachers hiked up to Rs 50,000 per month.
The chief minister, however was unhappy with the state’s performance in education and healthcare, saying his government needs to work harder in these two areas. Chouhan also said that his government had put special focus on employment-generating industries like tourism and urban development. “We are going to spend Rs 83,000 crore on urban development,” he said.
The CM also pointed to the need for inclusive growth. To ensure social security for the poor, he said the MP government would offer free healthcare, education and housing for the poor. Dismissing criticism about the expenses on welfare schemes, he said he never faced a dearth of funds for development work. “If you have the will, funds can be organised,” he said.
The chief minister also released the India Today State of the State report on Madhya Pradesh, an in-depth study measuring the progress of the state’s 51 districts over the past decade based on key indicators like infrastructure, education, health, agriculture and industry and others.
Over the past 16 years, the India Today State of the State report has come to be recognised as the gold standard for evaluating the social and economic health of Indian states. In the last two decades, the action has moved from states to the districts. Making sense of this shift, the India Today group decided to conduct a series of studies in each state to evaluate the performance of districts.
During the day-long event, spread over nine riveting sessions, 35 eminent speakers, including Union minister for rural development, panchayati raj and mines Naren-
“Over 160,000 fake MGNREGA cards have been weeded out; 2.39 cr properties created under it are geo-tagged” NARENDRA SINGH TOMAR Union minister for rural development
dra Singh Tomar, state ministers Vishwas Sarang, Sanjay Pathak, Deepak Joshi and Umashankar Gupta, Congress leaders Shobha Ojha and Ajay Singh, several top bureaucrats, educationists, doctors and healthcare activists and acclaimed Dagarvani dhrupad singers Gundecha brothers debated and discussed the multi-dimensional growth trajectory of Madhya Pradesh.
Explaining his model of growth, Tomar said that a good development model rests on five pillars—finding the right path, organising funds, getting efficient manpower, setting a deadline and sticking to it while implementing the plan. He praised chief minister Chouhan for bringing Madhya Pradesh out of the BIMARU states category.
In an interesting take on challenges facing the agriculture sector, Patanjali, principal commissioner, income tax, and an expert on natural farming, said the country faced five big threats—cancer, dying and shrinking rivers, rising temperatures, poor quality of land and unemployment. According to him, the only solution to the five threats lies in agro forestry—multi-layered farming with judicious use of land, sun, rain and manpower. “We need to bring life back to our soil, else we are doomed,” he said.
In a panel discussion on industry, MSME minister Sanjay Pathak said that 300,000 small industrial units came up in the state in the last two years. On education in the state, Deepak Joshi, MoS (independent charge) for technical education, dwelt on the government’s plans to bridge the gap between quantity and quality of higher education in the state. Though the state is among the top eight with high density of colleges in the country, the government had to recently shut down 16 engineering colleges for not having enough students. Around 50 per cent of the 90,000 seats in engineering colleges found no takers.
Three other speakers, B. Raja Gopal Naidu, additional chief secretary, department of higher education, and Santosh Chaubey, chairman, AISECT University, were unanimous in their conclusion that the need of the hour was to create an ecosystem to encourage spread of skill education in the state. Madhu Verma, professor, Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, lamented the absence of emphasis on environmental education in state policy and the lack of infrastructure for higher education.
The focus of the healthcare panel was services in the rural areas. Health sector activist Chinmay Mishra said public private partnership in healthcare would lead to a collapse of primary healthcare in the state. He criticised the government policy of laying emphasis on building structures than providing health services to people. Gauri Singh, principal secretary, department of health, admitted that the state was facing a severe crunch of doctors but hoped the new medical colleges would fill the gap. Dr Gaurav J. Kumar, centre head for Medanta Medicity, Indore, said the stakeholders had to ensure the efficient functioning of India’s healthcare infrastructure, which is “the best in the world on paper”.
In a panel discussion titled ‘Good governance: Women in Government, Breaking the Glass Ceiling’, debunking the usual narrative, five women—Congress leader Shobha Oza, IAS officers Chhavi Bhardwaj and Swati Meena, police AIG Irmeen Shah and Bhakti Sharma, sarpanch of Barkhedi Abdulla village—said that their identity as women had never come in the way of performing their duties. While Shah said that a dialogue was needed between politicians and bureaucrats, Oza had a humorous take on the issue: “It’s like the relationship between a husband and a wife. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
‘Political divisions’ was the central theme of another session which saw Congress state president Ajay Singh in a battle of oneupmanship—laced with humour and satire, of course—with senior BJP leader and revenue minister Uma Shankar Gupta.