CHENNAI: Union Minister for Panchayati Raj Mani Shankar Aiyar on Friday asked industry to adopt the "4Ps" strategy--public-private-panchayat partnership--for tapping the potential of the rural economy instead of looking at its rural development programmes as charitable actions in the name of corporate social responsibility.

Industry should learn to interact with elected local bodies and leaders who constituted governance in the vast rural sector and not try to solve its problems through officials like village patwaris or district Collectors, he said.

Addressing the open session of the 170th annual general meeting of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI), Mr. Aiyar warned that the current situation, whereby India ranked eighth in the world in terms of the number of millionaires, but 217th in the human development index, was not sustainable and would pose a danger to the survival of democracy in the country.

Divide widening

The Minister said the urban-rural divide was widening, while the media was becoming a captive of the "upwardly mobile upper middle class."

The country could not be expected to progress if the problems and basic needs of those who paid the price of development, be it for a dam or a steel plant, were ignored, because the rural masses had become aware of their conditions.

Also, the revival of the Panchayati Raj system, at the initiative of Rajiv Gandhi, had led to the "unprecedented social and political empowerment" of the rural populace, particularly women, of whom there were more than one million elected representatives.

Mr. Aiyar said his Ministry was prepared to address the problems of industry if these related to availability and augmentation of locally available resources, both human and natural, organising "atomised individual skills" in the rural areas under a common arrangement and obtaining the cooperation of the local community. Industry should try to integrate its operations with the skills and potentials of the rural economy and not look at the rural population merely as potential consumers of its products.

He said the Rural Business Hub programme of his Ministry had drawn only 32 responses from the organised sector, but many of even these were motivated by extraneous considerations and had not made progress.

V. Balaraman, outgoing president of the chamber, said industry was trying to tackle the problem of unemployability of the educated unemployed.

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