Eleventh Plan to focus on education: PM news
28 December 2007

Mumbai: The Eleventh Five-year Plan would give the highest priority for education, which could be the basis of achieving rapid and inclusive growth. It is, in fact, India's `Education Plan', prime minister Manmohan Singh said today.

"We have increased the outlay on education from 7.7 per cent of the total central gross budgetary support in the 10th Plan to over 19 per cent in the 11th Plan," the prime minister said, while addressing the Goa University convocation function.

"The actual outlays have been raised five-fold. This is an unprecedented increase in allocation for education in the history of our country," he said.

In addition, a nation-wide programme launched by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), is being implemented through the Ahmedabad-based National Innovation Foundation that was set up on a corpus of around Rs20 crore.

The programme will document, inventorise and incubate grassroots innovations before facilitating the commercial dimension. It has already netted about 39,400 grassroots-level innovations to date.

The Eleventh Plan envisages total investments of Rs36,00,000 crore in various sectors, with special emphasis on equitable growth. Important targets of the 11th Plan include reduction of poverty by 10 percentage points, generating 7 crore new employment opportunities and ensuring electricity connection to all villages.

The Eleventh Plan targets a 9 per cent growth rate, a substantial improvement from 7.6 per cent growth in the previous Plan period. The gross budgetary support for the Plan has been fixed at Rs10,00,000 crore.

The plan aims at achieving an average growth rate of 9 per cent, accelerating from 8 per cent in the first year to 10 per cent by the end of last year, 2011-12.


 search domain-b
  go
 
Eleventh Plan to focus on education: PM