Budget Consultation-Odisha

Bikash Choudhury



EDUCATION:(I) 5 % of budget allocation for Schools & Mass Education Dept. for creating low cost Gurukul Ashram Schools in our old tradition to offer high quality education with traditional value system in rural areas & with full community participation and involvement of NGO.

School level education in rural areas suffers from poor quality. Sarva Sikhaya Avijan is attempting to address the issue which is just not sufficient. Community participation is extremely important to enhance the quality of education in our schools. Navodaya Schools was an effort in this direction but did not make an impact. One more attempt can be made by allocating just 5% of total budget of Mass Education department to Recreate Gurukul Ashram Schools with community participation and assistance of NGO. At least one Gurukul Ashram School can be created in each block.

1. Gurukul Ashram Schools can be created in rural areas in low cost. Land for Gurukul can be donated by village community, NGO may identify suitable educationist to run Gurukul in our old tradition with modern aid for education to offer high quality education to bright students in rural areas.
2. Suitable retired educationist/ or from corporate back ground can be deployed in such schools at minimum cost.


HIGHER EDUCATION: (II) 5% of Higher Education budget can be allocated for facility for Research in all Govt. colleges to encourage students and teachers to apply knowledge to solve problems faced by local community.

For last two centuries, India has not come out with any path breaking break through in any field that would grab global attention. This is precisely because we, as a community have conceded that we would be net consumer of western research led solution than producer of research led products in the country. This is because, we don’t have a mindset for investigation and learning; and, therefore we need to invest to create facility for research in our college to attract students and give them necessary exposure in methodology of research at an early age. Over a period of time State is going to benefit from new and emerging scientist from our Higher Education Institutes.


HEALTH: (I) 5% of Health Dept. budget can be earmarked for training in Basic Pharmacy; at least one youth in each fifty thousand plus villages of our State to provide proximate, 24X7, basic health solution in our villages. That would create 50,000 plus jobs and improve health indicators in rural areas of our State.

(II) Govt. may consider outsourcing health services of a district to private sector on a pilot basis by developing a suitable business model wherein Govt. could allocate current amount of public expenditure on health sector of the district to the private sector and balance financing if any, can be raised by Pvt. Sector from market forces and viability gap funding from multilateral agencies.

Recent survey done by HDF has unraveled the state of health in our State; to speedily improve the health indicators we need to use all our resources and deploy multiple strategies to arrive at internationally accepted protocol for health in our State as soon as possible. We need to be innovative and open to new Ideas in this sector.

AGRICULTURE: (I) Rs. 34 Crore can be earmarked for 17 District Central
Co-Operative Banks to create an Agriculture & Rural Development Consulting Business division to advise the farmers in entire area in the business of Agriculture to help farmers make a decent profit.

In recent past, news paper headline about farmer suicide has become so common that most of us have taken into our stride and move on with our lives; however, the problem still persists and would continue to hunt unless and until a permanent solution to this problem is found and attempted to implement with all seriousness and effectiveness.
Farmers are at the receiving end in terms of cost of credit from financial institutions, marketing their produce and storing their produce due to lack of local warehousing facility in the vicinity and further, due to lack of suitable market knowledge about demand for alternative crops; they continue to produce unproductive and un remunerative crops year after year and suffer under the weight of debt and some times few of them sacrifice their life for good. Is their any alternative?

RURAL DEVELOPMENT: Budget provision of Rs. 100 Crores to constitute Rural Economy Development Corporation in PPP model.

If we break up state economy into a smaller sets of ‘village cluster’ containing 10-15 villages and apply a new market oriented model for development in PPP; then we can effectively deal with the issue of development as smaller size economy would be easier to administer and cost effective to deliver public services.REDC main objective would be to encourage each cluster of villages to form their own economy development company in equal partnership with REDC that would offer management, technology, and marketing assistance to help the Village cluster to thrive economically in a collaborative effort. Each year we can establish 50-100 village cluster level entity that would drive rural development in break neck speed.