Jagan urges World Bank to make study on key AP sectors

VIJAYAWADA: Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has urged the World Bank to make a comprehensive study on several programmes being implemented by Andhra Pradesh in key sectors like education, healthcare and agriculture and proposed World Bank participation in such programmes.

A delegation from the World Bank, led by its India wing director Auguste Tano
Koume, called on the Chief Minister here on Monday to review the three
programmes that have WB support -- namely strengthening of public health, the
Supporting Andhra’s Learning Transformation (SALT) endeavour and the AP
Integrated Irrigation and Agriculture Transformation Project (APIIATP).

The CM told the World Bank delegation that his government was taking up
transformation of all government schools by providing 12 basic amenities
alongside installation of interactive flat panels in schools from Class VI in
June by ensuring that such endeavours would help even in the method of teaching.

He said the state was taking up digitalisation of classrooms and spending a huge amount under the ‘Nadu-Nedu’ programme in Phase-2. It aimed to enhance the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), he said, and added that unlike the earlier case where the GER used to be less than the national average in primary education, it had gone up soon after the state started a series of reforms in school education.
He said there was a time when government schools were unable to compete with private schools in terms of amenities and quality of education. Now the government was confident of changing the situation in two years’ time in ways that the private schools would eventually need to compete with government schools.

The CM listed out several facilities being offered to the students like tablets to Class VIII students, quality and nutritious mid-day meal, bilingual textbooks and workbooks, dictionary and the Amma Vodi to encourage mothers to send their children to schools.

This apart, Jagan Mohan Reddy said the state government was implementing welfare schemes tagged with their attendance in schools. “AP is offering 100 per cent fee reimbursement and financial support for students to pursue higher education abroad with an aim to create more experts from the state like “our own” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

The CM informed the delegation that in addition to the existing six, four new ports
were coming up in AP. “We are providing training personnel to make them work in industry-based units with requisite skills,” he said and sought the support for
this from the World Bank.

Jagan Mohan Reddy also called for World Bank support in the health sector. “We recruited nearly 40,000 personnel in this sector and are setting up 17 new medical colleges, as also promoting the family doctor concept and implementing the Arogyasri scheme and several other such schemes.”

Earlier, World Bank director Auguste Tano Koume said his team had taken a special note of the innovative programmes being implemented in several key sectors in Andhra Pradesh. “By doing so, you have proven that a government could provide all kinds of services to its people,” the official noted and expressed his wholehearted appreciation of such initiatives.

He said that the World Bank was offering financial support in the form of loans to
22 states and said other states should take AP as a role model in the
implementation of several programmes in a time-bound manner so as to provide
better services to its people.

The official assured AP that the World Bank would extend its full support for realisation of the CM’s vision and mission to develop the state.

Auguste Tano Koume noted that AP was one of the states where rapid economic growth was realised, surpassing even the average national economic growth rate in India, and added that the people in the state were getting better services, and sectors like industries and healthcare were flourishing.

He said several programmes being taken up in AP with the support from the World Bank were being implemented well and some of them like tele-medicine in the healthcare sector were serving as a source of inspiration at the national level.