Uttar Pradesh (Aryavarth) After securing a historic consecutive term in office, the Yogi Adityanath government has revived its earlier proposal to hire a private consultant to help his government achieve a $1 trillion economy in the state in next five years.
On Tuesday, the Yogi government invited bids for this ambitious project, saying it wanted to boost its economy to the $1 trillion level by 2027. The bids will be opened next month. Yogi government’s idea is to contribute big to Narendra Modi government’s aim of making India a $5 trillion economy in the years to come.
The Uttar Pradesh GSDP is estimated to be at around Rs 21.73 lakh crore in 2021-22, translating to about $270 billion. So the target is to increase the economy’s size by nearly four times over the next five years. UP contributes 8% of the national GDP and the CM plans to align the state with the national target and play a leading role.
The BJP government claimed during the elections that under Yogi Adityanath, UP had become the country’s second-largest economy from being at the sixth and seventh position in earlier years.
An earlier tender for appointing a consultant was invited by the Yogi government in 2020 but it was scrapped in 2021 for reasons that were unknown. 2021 was also the year when the second Covid-19 wave had hit India.
Clearly, the new targets of the Yogi Adityanath government would require raising the current growth rate of the state substantially and would necessitate a significant increase in the investment rate, besides improvement in basic infrastructure and would require sustained and aggressive efforts at the state level, the Yogi Adityanath government has said in the latest proposal.
The government may look at organisational restructuring, focussed policies and rules for more effective governance, faster decision-making process and improved accountability and the consultant could be expected to do a critical analysis of macro and micro-economic sectoral data around GSDP, trade, investment, expenditure, saving, workforce participation, inflation, import and export in the state. All key sectors could be studied for the scope of growth.
The consultant may also be asked to compare the structural, institutional, financial, and governance reforms carried out and outcomes achieved in top three states of India and top three countries across the globe, with similarities to Uttar Pradesh, determine multipliers between sectoral growth and impact on the GSDP and assign targets and how to achieve them for each sector towards $1 trillion economy.
A strategy may also be made for PPP options across all sectors, design KRAs for each sector and fix achievable timelines for the target. Another plan is to create reporting mechanism and dashboards from Panchayat to Chief Minister’s Office level and link this to big data analytics.
A special team will be created by the Yogi Adityanath government to implement this task.