Plan panel deflates Gujarat growth model

Commission quotes NGO to highlight 'dismal' level of education, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 18, 2013, 02:57:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The face-off between Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and the UPA government is likely to get more fiery with the Planning Commission finding gaping holes in the state's development model.

The panel quoted a study by Pratham, an NGO, to indicate Gujarat's poor quality of school education in comparison with the Congress-NCP ruled Maharashtra.

Highlighting the poor state of actual education, it said about 52% of Class V and 29% of Class VII children in Gujarat were unable to read Class II texts as compared to 42% and 21%, respectively in Maharashtra.

The panel also said about 93% of Class V students and 65% of Class VII students in Gujarat are unable to read simple sentences in English as against in Maharashtra where the figures were 79% and 50%, respectively.

Maharashtra also scored over Gujarat when it came to the ability to perform simple arithmetic division.

Gujarat's gross enrollment ratio in higher secondary schools was three percentage points lower than the national average of 39.3% in 2010-11.

It got worse in the case of deprived sections such as scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST). The panel also said that Gujarat's school drop-out ratio of 57.9% was much higher than the national average of 49.3%.

Despite high economic growth, the panel found 41.1% of children in Gujarat were suffering from malnutrition, 53% of women were anemic and one-third of women in the 15-49 age-group having a body-mass index of less than 18.5.

The panel also disagreed with Modi's criticism of the Centre at the last meeting of the National Development Council, especially on infrastructure development and disbursement of central taxes to Gujarat, and said it was not differentiating between UPA and non-UPA ruled states.

The panel also countered Modi's claim of not a kilometre of railway line being added since the creation of Gujarat saying there had been many double gauge conversion projects including port connectivity.

It also said tax distribution issues have been dealt with effectively.

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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