Plant and equipment for some of the major traditional industries like textiles and sugar are being produced internally. Over the last two decades the production of metals, electric power, industrial machinery, industrial chemicals and petroleum products — sinews of modern industry so to speak — has increased several fold. Instead of the traditional industries processing agricultural materials, new industries embodying a higher level of technology now dominate the industrial scene. The greatly increased capability of our industrial sector now needs to be exploited more fully for attaining faster growth and for providing a rapid and effective solution to our basic problems.
To provide for the basic minimum needs of the masses through the development of our own resources and capabilities is the over-riding aim of our development strategy. In the long run, sustained and rapid growth is the only effective way to solve the basic problem of underdevelopment. However, economic growth by itself does not automatically ensure a wider diffusion of the benefits of progress and cannot be relied upon to achieve speedy elimination of poverty. Even today pockets of poverty exist in the U.S.A. which has the most affluent society of our times. The problem of integrating the socially handicapped and the unemployed into the mainstream of economic life and of achieving greater social justice has, therefore, to be tackled directly. The resources and capabilities of the economy have now to be deployed for launching a direct and frontal assault on poverty and unemployment. These imperatives are fully reflected in the approach to the Fifth Plan as indeed in the annual budgets in recent years. The new approach to planning envisages the eradication of poverty through rapid expansion of employment opportunities so as to provide a basic minimum level of income from work to all. It also calls for a specific, phased programme for public provision of certain goods and services — such as elementary education, public health facilities, rural water supply and home sites for landless labour — to meet some of the essential needs of the unemployed. Thus, while rapid economic growth continues to be one of our prime concerns, direct measures to alleviate poverty and to ensure employment opportunities to our citizens seeking work will be an integral part of the planning blueprints.
