By IANS
Gurgaon : High growth will wipe out poverty in India, Finance Minister P. Chidamabaram said Thursday, even as he urged the creation of a new matrix to “understand” whether society was also growing and developing.
“High growth will wipe out poverty. The antidote to poverty is high growth,” Chidambaram maintained while addressing the plenary on “Indices for development: Need for change”? on the second day of The Partnership Summit 2008 in this Haryana IT hub bordering the Indian capital.
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has organised the three-day summit that concludes Friday.
Noting that India had “all the prerequisites” for sustaining annual growth in the region of nine percent, the finance minister said: “We must also pause and ask if there are other indicators by which to measure growth.
“We need to devise a new matrix to understand whether society is growing and developing.”
“We need to embrace a broader approach to growth by including other indicators,” he added.
In this context, the minister noted that poverty related “not only to income poverty, but to lack of education, healthcare, property, skills and, finally, character. A combination of all these factors leads to poverty”.
“Thus, we have the human development index that measures the rise of the population on the human ladder. We also need to look at indices of infant and maternal mortality, literacy and life expectation at birth” to gain a true picture of the manner in which the country.
Chidambaram pointed to the benefits of high growth, saying that more jobs had been created in the five years between 1999 and 2004 than ever before.
“If we study the figures for 2004 onwards, I am sure we will find that more numbers (of jobs) have been added than ever before,” the finance minister contended.
“High growth creates opportunities for those who didn’t have them. With high growth, the benefits start to travel from the centre to the hinterland and create more opportunities.
“Take the automotive sector. It has resulted in spin offs like road construction, the establishment of workshops and the training of mechanics.”
High growth in the past four years, he said, had resulted in “revenue buoyancy” of the kind “that has not been witnessed in the past 10 years”.
“Due to the additional resources the center has been able to provide to the states, they have been able to wipe out their debt and are close to wiping out their fiscal deficits,” the finance minister said.
In his opening remarks, CII immediate past president R. Seshasayee said that while the risk of sustaining high growth had “receded”, it was also necessary to gauge whether this growth was inclusive or was only contributing to disparities.
“We need a new agenda. We need to ask whether this growth is in an inclusive manner. We need to ask if growth is being managed in a manner so that disparities don’t undermine growth,” said Seshasayee, who is the managing director of heavy vehicle maker Ashok Leyland.