The poor have to benefit from growth: PM

Helsinki, Oct 13: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said growth alone is not enough to eradicate poverty and suggested to adopt a policy which guarantees distribution of more wealth to the poorest sections of society in the form of jobs, education and health care.

In an interview to a Finnish magazine Kuvalehti, on the eve of his four-day visit to attend the India-EU Summit, the Prime Minister said by this only we can eradicate extreme poverty that still affected the lives of million and millions of Indians.

''For example, we still struggle to provide education for all children. We also have to ensure that the quality of education is sufficient. And we still have a long way to go to reach a level of health care that is available in the most developed states of the country. There are vast differences between the states. It will still take along time before we can call India a developed country.

But if we look at our human resources, this gap can be bridged,'' he said.

The Prime Minister said India is already fifth or sixth largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power parity and ''I believe our relative share of the world economy will continue to grow. Our goal is that the economy will grow to 8 to 10 per cent per year in the future. That would significantly raise the role of India in the world economy, world capital flows and global technology cooperation.'' ''But by international comparison, India is still a very poor country,'' he noted.

He said approximately ''half of our GDP comes from services and the service industry will grow. Many people will be needed in that sector but above all, we need educated people. This creates a challenge for Indian education system.'' The expenditure on education is now about 3.9 per cent of GDP and ''our goal is to raise it about 6 per cent in five years.'' ''We committed to this already during the previous elections.'' On making education a basic right to everyone, Dr Singh said ''we wanted to reach a national consensus on the issue. If the central government had passed the law, it would have also had to find the resources to implement it, and our resources are limited. A very large share of the responsibility of providing education rests with the states and we hope that the states will be active partners in the matter.''

UNI

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