10% growth not achievable: Plan panel to tell PM

The Planning Commission will be telling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday that achieving the economic growth target of 10 % in the 12th plan will not be possible. Instead, the government should aim at a target of 9-9.5%.

Updated on: Apr 19, 2011, 23:37:09 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Planning Commission will be telling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday that achieving the economic growth target of 10 % in the 12th plan will not be possible. Instead, the government should aim at a target of 9-9.5%.

“We want to present the Prime Minister a picture which is achievable,” MoS for planning Ashwini Kumar said, after an internal plan panel meeting.

There were a lot of differences among the plan panel members on what should be the India’s target for the 12th plan.

Some members were of the view that the government should not aim at more than 8 to 8.5 % if the inflation has to be kept under control. “Targeting growth rate of more than 9 % will mean high inflation in double digits,” a member, who was not willing to be quoted said.

There was a dominant view that the resource generation because of high economic growth can be pumped into agriculture sector to improve productivity to tame inflation.

With it, the panel decided that despite the global economy still being sluggish the government will aim at an agriculture growth target of atleast 4% growth during the next plan period. And for manufacturing sector the growth target set was 11-12%.

Aiming for 4% agriculture growth will not be possible ample focus on water management and technological innovation to enhance food production in the country.

“We have to reduce the dependency on import to check inflation which is a major challenge,” Kumar said.

The panel will also tell the Prime Minister that achieving the high growth target will not be possible without infusing higher private investment to push infrastructure sector, a key to India’s high growth.

India had failed to achieve the target of 35% private investment in the 11th plan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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