Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Mani Shankar Aiyar said on Sunday the authorities were not taking enough steps to bridge the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
He raised questions over the implementation of major schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) and accused the Union government of “relentlessly” supporting the stock market, thinking its health reflected the people’s health.
Delivering a lecture here on the status of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals in India, Mr. Aiyar faulted the government’s emphasis on higher education, echoing his party colleague Digvijay Singh, who wanted the Human Resource Development Ministry to focus on primary education.
Quoting figures from the Rural Development Ministry, Mr. Aiyar said the MNREGS had provided 100 days of work only to 36.6 per cent of all entitled households in Tripura. “Far more upsetting is that in the most poverty-stricken States the share drops to a mere 14 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and to 8 per cent or less in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar and even further below 6 per cent in Orissa and Uttaranchal.”
Many of these States were precisely those most seriously afflicted with “Left-wing extremism,” as the “Home Ministry archly describes the Naxalite or Maoist menace.”
The “pathetic performance” of this key programme makes “one despair of the present system of delivering development ever attaining the much-desired Millennium Development Goals.” — PTI