Ramadoss demands white paper on ‘Vision 2023’

Founder and President of Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) Ramadoss has castigated the State government for dragging its feet over Vision 2023, which was released as long ago as March 2012. “Nearly four years later, it has not taken a single step forward,” he said, seeking a detailed white paper from the government on this.

Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had claimed that the Vision 2023 document would ensure that there would be no more poverty in the state and prosperity would be achieved, he remarked. Then on February 22, 2014, Jayalalithaa released a statement on the second report on the scheme being implemented, but nothing was carried forward.

According to him, the current figures were not consonant with the targets of the scheme. For example, according to the document, the state would have an annual growth rate of 11 per cent till 2023 and per capita income would be Rs 6.50 lakh that year. But average growth in the last four years had not crossed even 5 per cent. Siimilarly, per capita income before the end of the current financial year should be Rs 2.16 lakhs, but it had not crossed even Rs 1 lakh so far, he said. The CM had promised full employment under the document, but the number of unemployed people in 2012--73 lakhs – had grown to 86 lakhs, according to estimates. The infant and maternal mortality rate had not reduced as envisaged in the document, with hospitals across the state reporting high death rates in this category, Ramadoss said. 

Infrastructure should have been developed at the cost of Rs 15 lakh crore, the document had said, which ought to have entailed expenditure of Rs 6 lakh crore during the last four years. But not even Rs 6,000 crores had been spent, he added. Vision 2023 had spoken about 10 types of targets to be reached, but none of these were anywhere in sight four years later, Ramadoss said.