With a number of states in the country declaring drought, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said that efforts must be made to conserve and store rain water in villages and a campaign should be launched for this.
“It is imperative to conserve and store rain water in villages,” he said on his radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat, noting that a higher water table also improves the quality of water.
He also welcomed the recent announcement of good monsoon and said efforts must be made to improve crop productivity.
He also invited the youth to think of innovative ways for water conservation and said youth organisations like NCC, scouts and guides can use their widespread reach in efforts on water conservation.
Meanwhile, with two years of the NDA government set to be completed next month, the Prime Minister also said that the focus of governance is moving from outlays to outcomes.
Giving the example of education, he said that all these years the focus has been on expanding infrastructure and enrolments of students and teachers but now the focus should be on quality of the education. “From a mere literacy mission, education should be about ensuring quality learning,” he stressed.
The Prime Minister also welcomed the initiative by people to give up their cooking gas cylinder subsidies and said that one crore families have surrendered their subsidies.
This includes farmers, small shopkeepers and even retired teachers, he said. “The middle class and the lower middle class have also given up,” he said, adding that over 80 per cent of the people went to the distributor themselves and stood in a cue to give up the subsidy though they had the option to do it through their phones.
Noting that these efforts have compelled politicians and economists to think afresh, the Prime Minister said that even global experts and commentators would find that this is beyond their usual economic model constructs.
Earlier, the political discourse was about how many subsidised cooking gas cylinder should be given to families in a year, he said.
“I would like to urge the entire political class to at least trust the people on one thing in their domain…We can do a lot of experiments like this on some railway routes, we can have a system where no ticket checkers are deployed,” he said.