Don't penalise efficient states: Modi

New Delhi, Dec 9 (UNI) Seeking a change in the Gadgil-Mukherjee formula for devolution of funds to the states, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi today charged the Centre with penalising industrially developed and efficient states and said their better performance needed to be rewarded.

''Eleventh Five-Year Plan needs to review the paradigm of Central support to the States. The efficient states should be encouraged by way of incentives for their performance,'' Mr Modi said in his address at the National Development Council (NDC) meeting, presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The charismatic but controversial chief minister said the basis for Central devolutions so far had largely been on incidence of poverty, backwardness and population, resulting in constant shrinking of Central support to the states which had lesser population and poverty.

The Gadgil-Mukherjee formula, using a complex methodology, is weighed in favour of those states having these three parameters.

''In a way, this encourages inefficiency...The states which pro-actively put innovative schemes from their resources and achieve certain parameters of development, remain deprived of similar schemes announced by the Centre later,'' he pointed out.

Elaborating, Mr Modi said Gujarat had attained nearly full rural roads connectivity and thus had been deprived of the benefits of Prime Minister Grameen Sadak Yojana (PMGSY).

Making a strong pitch for decentralised planning at the Central level, he said no state, howsoever progressive, was without its own sectors of weaknesses.

''It is time that Central schemes should address issues unique to different states. One way of doing such decentralised planning at Central level could be to allow each state to identify at least three areas of acute weakness, and seek proposals from States for Central support for such schemes,'' he said.

This could be in the form of additional Central assistance to the schemes by making them outcome-oriented, he added.

Mr Modi, who arrived at Vigyan Bhavan, the cenue of the NDC meeting, with a catalogue of demands, said inter-state river grid linkages should be given priority in the 11th Plan for optimising water resources management and giving greater incentives to dtip irrigation schemes.

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