Rs 35,00,000 crore development funds for 12th plan

Focus to be on harnessing demographic dividend and improving health and education.

Updated on: Jul 23, 2012, 21:09:02 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Despite the economic slowdown, the UPA-II is set to double allocation for key social sector and infrastructure schemes in the 12th five-year plan in a bid to harness country’s youth demographic divident.

Country’s top advisory body, the Planning Commission is likely to earmark around Rs 35,00,000 crore for the 12th plan (2012-17) likely to be placed before the Union Cabinet next month. The plan would be ready for implementation once it is approved by the National Development Council -- a body of key Central ministries and all state chief ministers -- sometime this September.

The increase is huge considering that the size of the 11th plan (2007-12) was Rs 14,21,000 crore and of the 10th plan (2002-2007) 7,06,000 crore.

The plan panel insiders point that the Rs 35,00,000 crore can be misleading as there has been some juggling of schemes to indicate substantial increase. "Several erstwhile non-plan schemes such as police modernization and banks capitalisation are now part of the plan allocations," a senior planning commission official said.

Still, the official said, the social sector -- health and education -- and youth development will get a huge leap in allocations in the 12th plan. In addition, there will be increase in Central funding for the country’s 200 most backward districts.

The Central government plans to allocate around one lakh crore for supporting a scholarship scheme to support meritorious students from schools to the doctorate level. "We aim to provide skill training to every school or college leaving student," a senior plan panel functionary said, adding that would be adequate funds for research and quality education. "Funds will not be a constraint," the functionary said.

With health being considered the biggest contributor to in-debtness in rural economy, the government would be launching a National Health Mission to cover entire country in the 12th plan. The new scheme will provide an insurance cover for basic medical requirements and better public health facilities. Officials, however, said that several recommendations of an expert group of Universalisation of Health may remain unimplemented because of fund shortage.

The panel also wants to change how the Central government schemes are implemented but its proposal is being resisted by the Central government ministries. The panel wants the state governments to have flexibility in spending around 40% of the Central funds as per ground realities but the Central ministries are willing to loose their hold over how the money is spent.

“For every penny, the state governments have to take approval of the Centre. The state project has to fit into one universal model. It often results in delays and poor project implementation,” an official said, adding that the panel wants to “reform it”.

The final picture will emerge once the full Planning Commission meets in this August.

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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