State govt to focus on health, education in rural areas: Patil

Mumbai, Mar 16: Maharashtra needs to bolster its human development index with greater focus to be given to the districts of Nandurbar in north Maharashtra, Jalna in Marathwada and Nanded, as the index in these three districts is at an abysmal low of 0.20 per cent, 0.23 per cent and 0.24 per cent respectively, State's Finance Minister Jayantrao Patil today said.

Giving the statistics in his address a the inaugural session of the fourth international conference on ''Communications Convergence Connecting India: The Global Challenge'', Mr Patil said the Maharashtra government had recently undertaken an exercise to compile a statewide human development index and the findings indicate that unless education and health standards are improved in the rural areas, the poor and backward regions will continue to remain backward.

Calling for a greater thrust to be given to health and education, Mr Patil said that providing IT connectivity to rural areas would go a long way in elevating the basic living standards of the people living there and eliminate the digital divide that now exists between the urban and rural areas.

''Technology must reach those areas where people don't have even primary connectivity,'' Mr Patil said, adding that governments till now had not given priority to IT connectivity as much as they had given to road and rail connectivity.

He said that for elevating the human development index, the quality of education and health services needed to be improved radically and said that the Maharashtra government was now according top priority to bringing connectivity to the poorest areas of the State.

According to him, while the Mumbai-Pune corridor has successfully developed as the knowledge corridor of the country and with development now occurring strongly in Nagpur, there was now a need to push the development in other parts of the State.

''Poverty is the highest in Marathwada and in Amravati apart from north Maharashtra and the government is now focusing on development programmes in these districts,'' he said.

The State's planning department is presently mulling over measures to promote connectivity in the weaker areas such as eastern Maharashtra, Mr Patil said, adding that the government was fully committed to maximising utilisation of the potential of rural Maharashtra in order to push up economic growth.

''Unless rural growth is maximised, we can't achieve the 10 per cent plus GDP growth that the central government is now targeting,'' he averred.

UNI