NITI Aayog to Transform UP

National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, at the instance of Prime Minister Office, has drawn up plan to transform Uttar Pradesh, with focus on tackling education, health & poverty, tourism, infrastructure creation, connectivity and the complete development of the state. Centre to assist UP on mission mode with efforts to pull state out of poverty and lift its performance across indices to lift the state from its existing dismal position, with a vision to get the state on the development road map, and make it an attractive destination for investments while improving social indicators.

Salient features of project UP of NITI Aayog are:

• To lift the state’s performance across key social indicators: education, health poverty and connectivity
• To build the state’s capacity in infrastructure project delivery and management on public-private partnership mode.
• To focus on projects that can be completed with minimum intervention.
• To focus on doubling farmers’ incomes, livelihood opportunities, enterprise among other things
• Project-level support to include technical, financial and legal studies as well as end-to-end transaction management.
• Centre to assist the state to work on the mission mode and get things moving, especially across priority areas.

Uttar Pradesh has been a strategically important state but over the last several decades it has slipped on multiple parameters because of poor infrastructure, education, health and poor law and order. Barring Noida, the state has failed in attracting industry or creating employment opportunities for its youth. There is a huge potential to transform the state as it has been lagging behind in following areas:

• Highest number of un-electrified households at 1.8 crore
• High number of dropout rates at elementary level in 21 out of the identified 100 districts
• Adverse pupil teacher ratio in 32 of its districts
• Children under five years who suffer from stunted growth in its 29 districts
• One–fifth poor districts in the country are in UP
• In the field of micro irrigation it ranks 13 out of 16 large states.
• Out of 100 distress districts in the country identified on the basis of performance across education, health, connectivity and poverty, the largest number are in Uttar Pradesh.

NITI Aayog will take inputs from state officials and take stock of pending decisions or proposals before the central ministries. If the model/experience with UP works, Aayog may convert visits planned for other states into similar exercise.