Chennai: Tamil Nadu faces serious challenges on the economic front and the State should take up bold initiatives to generate large-scale employment and create wealth and abandon freebies, M.G. Devasahayam, an economist and a distinguished administrator, says.
TN has very serious challenges, the most important is the economy is not only stagnating but also going on the reverse side. This will have dangerous implications for the future, particularly for the youth, in terms of employment generation and wealth creation. Even the government revenue will be very badly impacted. The first priority should be to reverse this trend of going downhill and restore some amount of growth.
For this purpose, they must take a very strong and important decision on freebie, which is the enemy of development, productivity, creativity and even work. The concept of freebies is absolutely antagonistic to the concept of development.
This mentality should change. These are certain aspects, which the Budget could focus upon. Thirdly, agriculture is in terrible distress. Government is only talking about loan waiver. The most basic thing, which is water management, is not being addressed.
They are clamouring only about Cauvery water but the issue is how are you managing your water resources and river basins? How are you conserving the water and what kind of investment is there in water conservation? while all along the farmers are starving. Even the Delta region is on the verge of becoming a semi-desert. What have they done and what is the investment and what is the development? Nothing!
Create an economic development model for Tamil Nadu
Does TN has an economic development model based on our own resources? Large-scale employment is not generated through big industries. Thousands of acres are being allotted to MNCs, but they will generate some jobs only to the well educated. But what is the scope for jobs for ordinary people who are unskilled or semi-skilled? This is where the MSME can come in and play a bigger role in terms of creating employment.
They now claim that TN is prosperous. This is because of what K. Kamaraj, Subramaniam and R. Venkatraman did to set up small and micro industries and distributed the industrial development. They never concentrated on large industries. Every district should get an industrial estate, an industrial cluster. So, small and micro industries could come up with investment to generate employment. Most of these have faded away. Everybody is now talking about big industries near Chennai and it was a foolish thing to expand the Chennai metropolitan area by 7,000 sq. km. So many big industries have come up near Chennai and so much of sops were extended to them. The question is how many jobs did they all create and what kind of jobs?
For a country like India with a high level of population and high unemployment levels with every youth searching for jobs – educated, un-educated and semi-educated how can projects like the defence industrial corridor generate more jobs. The Special Economic Zone experiment has been a total flop as they could not create employment in a big way because they were all capital intensive bringing in latest machinery and automating production. We don’t need this kind of development.
The government should go in for small and micro industries all over the state instead of concentrating on industrial corridors or development near Chennai, which only encourages migration and this is very bad because people abandon farming and migrate to larger cities. Farming should develop so also farm based products. The Budget should concentrate on all these issues
