APJ
Abdul Kalam has for the past decade been talking about how to make
India a developed country. In his latest book, 'Target 3 Billion',
co-authored by Srijan Pal Singh, he recommends a sustainable and inclusive
system to uplift the rural poor through entrepreneurship and community
participation. In an interview with Shobhan Saxena, the former President of
India talks about his new concept. Excerpts:
Will you explain the concept of
PURA that you talk about in your book?
PURA means Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas. The concept started a
decade ago. It came from Prof Indireshan, who was director of IIT, Madras
and Delhi, and a close friend of mine. We have a huge rural population -
nearly 600,000 villages and a lot of migration happens from villages to
cities because urban areas have certain facilities like power and
education. Under PURA, we are looking at how capacity building can be done
at the village level itself; how we can use the core competence of a
fishing village or a farming village or a village connected with tourism to
develop it.
How will it help eradicate
poverty?
Poverty begins if there is no capacity building. For example, a fisherman
catches fish but because of the short shelf life - a few hours - of his
catch, he sells it to a middleman for very little profit. He does so
because he doesn't have the infrastructure - cold stores etc - to grow. So
our purpose is to identify a core competence and then give knowledge to
people so that they can enhance their capacity. PURA talks of three
connectivities - physical, like roads and trains; electronic, like
telephone and internet; and knowledge. If these three connectivities are
given to villagers, then economic connectivity will come to villages. This
will empower the villagers and poverty will come down.
So you think FDI in retail will
be good for our villages?
Villagers only know how to produce things. We have to tell them how to
market their produce, how to do value addition. One of the things we have
talked about a lot in the book is cooperative farming. In India, farmers
have small holdings but if they form a cooperative, it becomes a large
holding and then the farmer has bargaining power. FDI in retail will help
the farmer only when the farmer is empowered to bargain.
More than 60 years of
independence and hundreds of thousands of crores
spent on development and we are still the poorest country in the world in
terms of absolute numbers. Where have we gone wrong?
In the past, the government, private and public sectors have taken up
rural development in parts. For example, starting educational institutions
and health-care centres, laying roads, building houses, building marketing
complexes, providing communication links in rural areas have been taken up
in the past as individual activities. During the last few decades, it has
been our experience that these initiatives start well, just like heavy rain
resulting in multiple streams of waterflow. But as soon as the rain stops,
the streams dry up because there are no waterbodies to collect and store
that surplus water. For the first time, PURA envisages an integrated
sustainable development plan with employment-generation as the focus,
driven by provision of the habitat, health care, education, skill
development, physical and electronic connectivity, and marketing as a
public-private partnership initiative.
That is why a roadmap has been
provided for the implementation of the
sustainable development system of PURA for the empowerment of 600,000
villages of the nation.
How can a country alleviate
poverty if it can't even decide the number of
poor people it has? The figure ranges from 350 million to 800 million. Why
is it so difficult?
According to me, the Planning Commission has come out with the number that
out of a billion people, 350 million live below the poverty line, and the
numbers may vary. What is more important is how we are building capacity in
them for value-added empowerment.
In the past 20 years, we have
been following American-style capitalism in
the hope that prosperity will trickle down but it hasn't. Does it make
sense to follow a model that has polluted the planet right in front of our
eyes?
The Indian economy, compared to the economies of the West, has withstood
the American and European-originated crisis much better. PURA is being
promoted uniquely from India as a capacity-building tool among rural and
suburban areas, and it will be a model system for collapsing economies. In
the book, we have talked about the system of social stock and triple bottom
line, which means assessing along the equation: benefits = income +
societal change + environment impact.
