India's Development Plan: Infrastructure, Investment, Innovation, Inclusiveness

Washington, Oct 23 (PTI) Infrastructure, investment, innovation and inclusiveness are the four key focus areas for the Narendra Modi government to make India a developed nation by 2047, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday.

She made the remarks during an interaction with the students of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The minister arrived here on Tuesday afternoon to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She drove from New York to Washington DC with a stopover at the University of Pennsylvania.

"In the year when we will be celebrating 100 years of Independence from British rule, that is 2047, we want to be and we aspire to be a developed country," Sitharaman told the students.

To achieve that, the government has identified four key areas -- infrastructure, investment, innovation and inclusiveness, the finance minister said.

"The first is infrastructure, whether it is physical such as bridges and ports or digital which is critical for so many different purposes. The second would be to invest in it. In that comes the element of private investments. But more importantly, have public investment go in to kick-start the whole thing," she said.

Sitharaman said the third focus area is innovation and stressed the need for innovative solutions for the problems specific to India and its aspirations.

"For many of the things that we want solutions for cannot be made somewhere and then brought here. The costs will go up and they may not be appropriate to the situation for which we want a solution. We want in-situ solutions for many of our problems. That itself becomes the challenge for innovations to work out," she said.

The most important is inclusiveness, Sitharaman said. "In everything that we do, we want to make sure that everybody gets included."

She also said, "Affirmative action is given in the Constitution. You will have to uplift the poor, you will have to uplift the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. It is a commitment given in the Constitution."

But other than that there is a need to address the needs of four groups -- farmers, women, youth and the poor -- and make sure that they get access to resources and opportunities, the minister said.