india

Updated: Jun 16, 2019 07:30 IST

In the first 100 days after being reconstituted, Niti Aayog will focus on employment generation, coming up with blueprint for the drought situation, setting up of health centres and the aspirational districts programme, its primary member and former DRDO chief VK Saraswat said.

“The basic focus that the government of India has identified in these 100 days we will be to look into employment, economy, drought situation in the country, setting up health centres,” Saraswat said. “We will also be focusing on our (Niti Aayog) programme on aspirational districts where we had identified 117 districts which had very low development in a bid to transform them,” he added.

Prime Minister Modi on Saturday held the fifth meeting of the think tank’s governing council. It is the premier body tasked with evolving a shared vision of national development priorities, sectors and strategies with the active involvement of States in shaping the development narrative. On the health sector, the Prime Minister in his opening remark of the governing council meeting said that several targets to be achieved by 2022 have to kept in mind. He also mentioned the target of eliminating tuberculosis by 2025.

The Aspirational District Programme was launched by PM Modi on January 5, 2018 with the aim to rapidly transform the districts that have shown relatively lesser progress in key social areas and have emerged as pockets of under-development.

“We would like to put our best foot forward to make sure that ranking and ratings of the districts is carried out properly, and all the schemes which are identified with each block are monitored by our teams. We have identified the areas where each aspirational district has to perform... We do a review of the districts every three months,” Saraswat said.

He said that a push for Methanol as an alternate fuel will also be on the planning body’s agenda. “We are also looking at all the key proposal we were working on which we had not been able to push in the previous tenure which would also include the program I was steering on Methanol economy. We have proposed 15 % methanol blending in all diesel generator sets, a note for the same will be sent for the Cabinet’s approval,” Saraswat said.

He also said the planning body’s committee on alternate fuels led by him has decided to seek the government’s nod for converting two-wheelers, three-wheelers and four-wheelers to run on methanol-blended fuel. “Auto companies are getting on board on this. We will be placing a paper on this for Cabinet approval for the same,” he added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on June 4 approved the reconstitution of the policy think tank of the government with Rajiv Kumar continuing as vice chairman, and VK Saraswat, Ramesh Chand and VK Paul as full-time members while the name of economist, Bibek Debroy, was dropped.