Focus on uplifting the poor

S Vishnu Sharmaa, INN/Chennai, @Svs037

Focus of our development must be on improving the lives of marginalised sections, said Shashi Tharoor, member of Parliament. He was speaking at the 10th anniversary lecture at O.P.Jindal Global University (JGU).

Former Union Minister was lecturing on ‘India in Transition: Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond.’ There is a need to brighten the lives of those who live at the bottom levels.

‘We can grow at 5 percent or 9 percent, that is not important. What matters is what we do for the bottom 25 percent of India.’ The charm of brightest markets will not lure them who cannot afford to enter it. We need to give some help to them so that they can enter the market and become consumers, said Sashi Tharoor.

We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the infrastructural progress we need to make, and the software of development, the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a decent school, and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives to transform themselves. We have to tackle and end corruption, he said.

The picture about our nation is not all that rosy. Challenges are still there and they have to be addressed, said Shashi Tharoor. We have the best scientists and engineers, but good deal of our citizens are illiterate, lot of children donot go to school at all.

We have 4.3 million child labourers and 40 percent of the children in our government schools drop out by the eighth standard. We have 487 million in the workforce but more than two-thirds of our employers are struggling to find employable workers.

In India, only 2.3 per cent of the workforce has received training in formal skills in comparison to 52 per cent in the US and 68 per cent in the UK. JGU founding vice-chancellor Professor C Raj Kumar also spoke.

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

%d bloggers like this: