India'will wipe out poverty/unemployment by 2020'

[Guest guest]

India 'will wipe out poverty and unemployment by 2020'

 

 

NEW DELHI:

 

There will be virtually no poverty, nor unemployment in India in 2020

while the population will be 100 per cent literate, the government

said yesterday in a "vision paper" for the future.

 

"India 2020 will be bustling with energy, entrepreneurship and

innovation," said the report by the country's top think tank, the

Planning Commission.

 

"The country's 1.3 billion people will be better fed, dressed and

housed, taller and healthier, more educated and longer-living than

any generation in the country's long history. Illiteracy and all

major contagious diseases will have disappeared."

 

The commission's deputy director K C Pant, a close adviser to Prime

Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, made clear that the paper did not

outline real targets but a vision of where "India wants to be in

2020".

 

He said unemployment and education were the two top areas considered

by the panel.

 

The paper visualised an India with "almost no unemployment and no

poor" by 2020. Literacy would be 100pc and gross domestic product

would rise by eight to nine per cent a year.

 

Currently, an estimated one-quarter of Indians live below the poverty

line and the literacy rate is about 68pc for men and 44pc for women.

 

The vision paper said unemployment should be "nil" compared with the

present official figure of 7.3pc and there would be four to six

million new jobs in the IT sector.

 

Tourist inflow would increase by three to four times.

 

The paper said per capita income should increase four times even as

the population increased from one billion to 1.3 billion -

potentially making India surpass China as the world's most populous

country.

 

The vision paper said life expectancy would rise from 64 to 71 and

there would be total food security.

 

All villages would have electricity and there would be 200 telephones

for every 1,000 people, compared with only 34 today.

 

On India's foreign relations, the paper said China could pose an

increasing threat even as ties remained sour with Pakistan.

 

"Fundamental ideological conflict between Pakistan and India is

unlikely to be resolved without a major social-political change in

Pakistan," the paper said.