Economic revival must be priority: PM

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 1. The Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, today told the Chief Ministers that revival of the economy should become the collective priority of the Centre and the State Governments.

Addressing the 49th meeting of the National Development Council (NDC), Mr. Vajpayee said the Centre and the States would have to take steps to end the crisis of investment - both public and private - and announced that the Centre would accelerate large- scale public investments in the infrastructure sector.

``You are aware of our recent initiatives in highways and rural roads. We are now determined to initiate long-pending reforms in the functioning of the railways. We have already announced a Rs 17,000-crore Railway Safety Fund to be spent in the next five years. We shall soon flag off a major investment package for the early completion of many critical and remunerative projects,'' the Prime Minister said.

It was also announced that the Centre proposed to take up 100 of the 461 projects being closely monitored by the Department of Programme Implementation. Since these projects could be completed in a short time, the required investment would be suitably provided for, Mr. Vajpayee said.

Referring to his Independence Day address, the Prime Minister said he had announced that the coming year would be the ``year of implementation.'' Towards this end, he called upon the Chief Ministers to do the same in their States, to set up new standards of implementation, monitoring and follow-up, which alone could guarantee achievement of the challenging objective of achieving eight per cent growth per annum in the Tenth Plan period.

Mr. Vajpayee also focussed on the health of the banking and financial systems and cautioned that many economies had got into serious trouble because of the bad debts which had led to the failure of the banking and financial institutions. ``We have enough warning signals and much sobering experience to go by''.

The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Mr. K.C. Pant, drew the attention of the Chief Ministers to the delicate fiscal situation of the Centre and the States.

Pointing out that the States had a positive balance from their current revenues up to 1990 and that the situation was manageable till 1997-98 (when the Fifth Pay Commission award came in), he said at the aggregate level for both the Central and the State Governments, the deficit from current revenues had gone up from Rs. 5,000 crores at the beginning of the 1990s to a staggering Rs. 90,000 crores at present.

Asking the Chief Ministers to urgently initiate hard but unavoidable decisions, Mr. Pant said the consequences of inaction were too serious to contemplate. Not only would growth falter and unemployment rise, but the situation could well threaten the cohesiveness of the country's social fabric. ``We cannot afford to fail,'' he warned.

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