Sonia Gandhi flummoxed the nation and the international community by not accepting the prime minister''s post. And she did not stop at that. She went on to deliver a doosra by annointing Manmohan Singh as the prime minister and a teesra by appointing P Chidambaram as the finance minister.

The good thing about Manmohan Singh is that he posses a rare prime ministerial virtue, which is social sensitivity. He understands and cares for the needs of the poor, the downtrodden and the dispossessed. That should stand him in good stead.

The bad thing about Chidambaram is that he tends to play to the gallery. However, having lost and won parliamentary elections from a backyard constituency named Sivaganga, he should have by now known the needs and concerns of the poor, the downtrodden and the dispossessed. That should stand him in good stead.

Unlike in the old socialistic days, the poor are no longer singing the old cliched song about the ''the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.'' Today, they do not seem to give a damn about the rich getting richer, as long as the poor do not get poorer. This is the task cut out for Singh and Chidambaram — not an unenviable task, if it is only approached with a proper frame of mind and attitude.

Accordingly, the preamble to the common minimum programme (CMP) says that it plans to work for ''progressive forces, for parties wedded to the welfare of farmers, agricultural labour, weavers, workers and weaker sections of society, for parties irrevocably committed to the daily well-being of the common man across the country.''

To provide employment, the new government proposes to enact a National Employment Guarantee Act immediately. This will provide a legal guarantee of at least 100 days of employment, to begin with, on asset-creating public works programmes every year at minimum wages for at least one able-bodied person in every rural, urban poor and lower middle class household. In the interim, a massive food-for-work programme will be started.

The government also proposes to establish a National Commission, which will examine the problems facing enterprises in the unorganised, informal sector. The Commission will be asked to make appropriate recommendations to provide technical, marketing and credit support to these enterprises. A national fund will be created for this purpose.

The administration will revamp the functioning of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission and launch new programmes for the modernisation of the coir, handlooms, powerlooms, garments, rubber, cashew, handicrafts, food processing, sericulture, wool development, leather, pottery and other cottage industries.

The new dispensation will give the highest investment, credit and technological priority to the continued growth of agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, floriculture, afforestation, dairy farming and agro-processing that will significantly add to the creation of new jobs. This is the new team''s intent spelt out in the CMP. The team could also seriously consider schemes articulated by president APJ Abdul Kalam, which has come to be known as provision of urban amenities to rural areas (PURA) and has been endorsed and finalised by the earlier government.

The essence of PURA is that it boosts economic growth and development by providing urban amenities in selected rural clusters around selected rural towns. This will stimulate further economic activities and generate a ripple effect in the surrounding areas.

PURA is based on the concept that villages around a town have an in-built potential to develop rapidly and if infrastructure facilities are extended to these villages, they not only develop but become growth centres for adjacent areas too. This will essentially augment the existing development schemes of the cen-tral and state governments and meet infrastructure gaps through funding from PURA.

The implementation of PURA begins with preparation of a detailed project re-port for each of the selected cluster, which would zero in on various infrastructure facilities to be created in their respective cluster. The facilities could range from provision of power supply, water supply, road and transportation facil-ities, telecom, internet and IT servic-es to upgrading existing schools to the next higher level, health facilities and marketing facilities for agricultural produce.

Further, while programmes for expan-sion of secondary and technical educa-tion in the rural areas have been under implementation, encouragement to private sector to either set up new technical training institutes or up-grade the existing IITs / polytechnics that are located in the identified clus-ters would be encouraged.

In all, 5000 rural clusters, each consisting of 10 to 15 villages will be covered under PURA over five years. Every year, work on about 1,000 clusters will be started and each cluster will be fully developed over 2 to 3 years. In this, the most backward towns with low number of elec-tricity connections, common literacy rates, low percentage of households availing piped water have been given preference. In hilly areas, where there are no to towns, the district headquarter towns would be taken up for identifying rural clusters. Till date, 826 towns have been identified around which rural clusters are to be taken up.

Thus, while the task is cut out for Singh and Chidambaram, the blueprint for action has been drawn up under the CMP and PURA. All the duo need to do now is to stick to the plan, keeping in mind that in a democracy, the interests of the majority comes first and in this election the majority which comprises the under privileged have spoken.