District level growth focus will create huge job opportunities: Prabhu

Focussing on district level growth in post-COVID period will help creating huge employment opportunities, contain migration from villages and push India's GDP, former union minister Sureshh Prabhu said on Wednesday.

He said that increasing district level growth by additional 3 per cent will help increase the national GDP.

The government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is focusing on districts as part of a bottoms-up approach for boosting growth, Prabhu, who is also India's Sherpa for G20 and G7 groups, said.

"District led growth will lead to huge employment generation, stop migration from villages to cities, and will develop entrepreneurs and self reliant villages," the Rajya Sabha member said.

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As workers and labourers are returning to villages, they would utilise and consume local resources, which would help in generating economic activities and it will also help in increasing their incomes, he added.

"Demand in agri, industry and services sectors too would increase," Prabhu said.

Further Prabhu said that institutions like IIM and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) have conducted study on six districts, including Sindhudurg, Ratnagiri, Solan, Varanasi and Vishakhapatnam, and has stated that additional 3 per cent growth in each distruct is doable.

District level focus will create a "new India in the post-Covid era," he sadi, adding it would also help in achieving the target of taking the country's GDP to USD 5 trillion.