Biotechnology, IT to be used for reducing poverty -- Digvijay

Biotechnology, IT to be used for reducing poverty -- Digvijay
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

GENEVA, JUNE 28: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh today said breakthroughs in biotechnology and Information Technology should be put to work for reducing poverty and creating a knowledge-sharing world.

Addressing the Geneva Forum Social Summit on poverty reduction strategies, he said, "Today, when development discussions are exclusively focussed on a global financial architecture, what the world needs to focus is on a global architecture for equalising opportunities".

Singh called for a vision that could restore a moral core to technological advance and emphasised on participation as the real test of freedom.

Sharing his experiences with decentralisation and community-based management in Madhya Pradesh in implementing the Education Guarantee Scheme and Mission for Watershed Development, he said there was need to revise development strategies within a framework of decentralisation.

Singh referred to India's vision of development as inclusive of human poverty and capability deprivation and recalled that the challenge of independence in India was defined as the "struggle to end poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity".

He said that through a decentralised framework of action where people and local governments shared tasks, Madhya Pradesh was able to move closer to many of the goals set at the Social Summit in 1995.

The Chief Minister recalled how his state had gone ahead in many of the goals of the summit-like decentralisation and pro-poor local governance through panchayti raj, reaching education and health care through the Education Guarantee Scheme and Jan Swastya Rakshak Scheme and creation of sustainable livelihoods through Watershed Management Mission and Joint Forest Management.

He pointed out that Madhya Pradesh was the first state in the world to produce a Sub-National Human Development Report in 1995 and follow it up with another report in 1998.