Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday elaborated on reimagining welfare delivery and talked about the delivery of bank accounts, loans, housing, property rights, toilets, electricity, and clean cooking fuel.
“Our focus was to empower the poor to enable them to contribute to the rapid growth of the country with their full potential”, he said addressing the ET Global Business Summit at Hotel Taj Palace in Delhi on Friday.
According to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, giving an example of Direct Benefit Transfer, PM Modi remembered former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s remark on leakage that only 15 paisa out of one rupee reached the intended beneficiaries.
“Our government has so far transferred Rs 28 lakh crore via DBT under different schemes. If Rajiv Gandhi’s remark had remained true even today, then 85 per cent of it i.e. Rs 24 lakh crore would have been looted. But today it is also reaching the poor”, the Prime Minister said.
The Prime Minister said even Pandit Nehru knew that when every Indian will have a toilet facility, it will mean that India has reached a new height of development. PM Modi said that 10 crore toilets were constructed after 2014 taking sanitation coverage from below 40 per cent to 100 per cent in rural areas.
Giving examples of aspirational districts the Prime Minister said in 2014 more than 100 districts were very backward. “We reimagined this concept of backwardness and made these districts aspirational districts”, the Prime Minister said.
The Prime Minister gave several examples such as institutional deliveries increasing from 47 to 91 per cent in Aspirational District Fatehpur of UP. The number of fully immunized children in the Aspirational District Barwani of Madhya Pradesh has now increased from 40 per cent to 90 per cent. In Aspirational District Washim of Maharashtra, in 2015, the success rate of TB treatment has increased from 48 to nearly 90 per cent. Now the number of Gram Panchayats with broadband connectivity has increased from 20 to 80 per cent in the Aspirational District of Yadgir, Karnataka.
