March 1: Prioritising the social sector development with the establishment of basic minimum services (BMS), the Ninth Five-Year plan has suggested that mobilisation of funds from the state plans, Centrally sponsored schemes as well as from that of additional Central assistance in order to make the service a success this time round."The disparities in the availability of the services between the states and the districts have considerably widened over a period of time," said deputy chairman Madhu Dandavate. With this, the Ninth Plan has identified seven basic services under BMS which will be top priority in the Ninth Plan.
The prioritisation to the social sector in the Plan assumes higher significance in the wake of the fact that the attempts in the previous Plans through the minimum needs programme has fallen short attaining the set targets in the previous four Plan periods.
The Plan final draft emphasises that BMS has identified seven major areas of priority for the BMS. These would be the streamliningof the public distribution system, attainment of 100 per cent coverage of provision of drinking water, 100 per cent coverage of primary health service facilities in rural and urban areas, universalization of primary education, public housing, extension of mid-day meal programmes connectivity to all villages, targets at attaining primary health care, primary education, provision of drinking water as well as achievement of full literacy by the year 2005.
The BMS will be worked out for each state and a minimum adequate provision will be worked out for each state which will be earmarked for the BMS as a whole in the Plan of the state. There will be, however, no sectoral earmarking and the states will be free to allocate their own priorities within the BMS package.
The main strategy that the Plan aims at revitalising the public distribution system (PDS). The ninth plan has even suggested at upgrading the TPDS by making it more accessible to the rural poor by a better allocation of resources which accordingto the Plan panel is estimated to have a minor financial implications at about Rs 115 crore.
The working group of the Commission has suggested that the Central government should adopt the Commission estimates of the proportion of population below the poverty line available for 1987-88 as the criteria for allocating feasible annual levels of foodgrains to the states and the Union territories.
The Commission is alos of the view that desptie mounting subsidy bill, the system has miserably failed to translate into macro-level self sufficiency in foograins particularly at the household level food security for the poor. In a system with access to all, the quantum of PDS supply to each household formed only a small proportion of the family's total requirement. The increases in the minimum support prices by the government in the past has only led to corresponding increases in the consumer prices in the PDS thus adversely affecting the economic access of the poor to the PDS foodgrains.
One of the main concernsof the economic reforms process is to limit the quantum of explicit and implicit subisidies as well as other forms of non-plan expenditure while the tax and non-tax revenue were pushed up. The Plan points out that the lopsided growth of the non-Plan expenditure over revenues has brought about a severer fiscal imbalance with a rapid built of public debt as well as mounting interest burdens.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
