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HYDERABAD, Dec. 22

DESCRIBING the reforms process as irreversible, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Mr N. Chandrababu Naidu, has called for a political consensus on the agenda for reforms as this will ensure faster development process and meet projected growth targets.

A GDP growth rate of 8 per cent and other targets set by the Planning Commission for the Tenth Plan could only be achieved only if the reform process was further accelerated jointly by the Centre and the States.

And a strategy to address these issues would have to be formulated keeping in mind these challenges and opportunities. Given this backdrop, Mr Naidu said reforms were no longer a matter of choice, but had become a matter of necessity. The Government's efforts in reforming the telecom and insurance sectors were commendable, he said.

The Government role would have to be redefined with the Government playing a facilitating role for economic development and limiting its role to the critical sectors of growth and development. The impact of globalisation and WTO-free trade regime on the planning process in the country would have to be taken note of while formulating strategies for the Tenth Plan, he said.

Addressing the 50th meeting of the National Development Council held at New Delhi to finalise the Tenth Plan (2002-2007), Mr Naidu said in spite of the remarkable progress achieved in different sectors through the planning process, certain major areas of concern still remained to be addressed. These needed immediate attention at this juncture while formulating strategies and setting priorities for the Tenth Five-Year Plan.

The gains of the planning process should be further consolidatedThe potential of each State and region should be fully exploited reinforcing the latent strengths.

The weakness should be addressed while setting new goals and priorities and the delivery system should be revamped to focus on efficiency improvement, he said.

While detailing some of the State's achievements, Mr Naidu said however, there were certain major constraints that seriously affected the level of achievements in the growth targets in different sectors during the Ninth Five-Year Plan.

The State had incurred irreparable loss during the 1997 cyclone, which shattered the life and economy of the coastal region. Recurring drought had impacted the economic growth of the State, as agriculture was the backbone of the State's economy, he said.

Disaster management and its integration with the development process need to be focussed while formulating future strategies for the Tenth Five-Year Plan, he said. Extremist activities and factionalism in certain parts of the State had affected the development process though there had been tremendous improvement in the maintenance of law and order in the State in the recent past, Mr Naidu said.

"Some of the reforms initiatives undertaken at the State level during the Ninth Plan have yielded significant results. Our approach has been to implement the reforms process with a human face. The State has set the trend in public sector privatisation in the country with 11 units already privatised and with another 23 being in the process.

Revival of loss-making public sector units had been major success with units such as the Singareni Collieries making a turnaround from an accumulated loss of Rs 1,219 crore in 1996-97 to an expected level of profit of Rs 447 crore in 2002-2003, Mr Naidu said.

Private sector participation in higher education had set a new trend in the country with the total number of engineering colleges going up from 32 in 1995-96 to 217 in 2002-2003 and the number of seats increased from 8000 to 62,715.

The human resource base had also helped the State to achieve rapid strides in IT services and IT-enabled services with the State recording a growth rate of about 323 per cent in ITES during the year 2001-2002, according to the recent study of Nasscom.

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