'Uttar Pradesh racing ahead on all fronts'

With a strong focus on infrastructure, law and order and industry, MSMEs, and agile policymaking, the Yogi Adityanath government is taking every possible step to make the state a $1 trillion economy and contribute to India's goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy

- BS REPORTER

Uttar Pradesh is demographically the country’s youngest state, with 56 per cent of its population — 240 million — in the working-age.

The state government is working to leverage this advantage by strengthening law and order and rolling out policies whose impact is visible in sectors such as finance, infrastructure, transport, tourism, health care, and education.

Ministers, senior officials, academics, and policymakers who participated in Business Standard’s “Samriddhi” — a programme in Lucknow — said robust law and order, coupled with people-centric policies, had accelerated the state’s all-round development.

Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak laid emphasis on law and order. He said that no investor or businessman would even consider a state where law and order was weak.

Pathak said the biggest challenge for the government, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, was infrastructure development, for which revenues were needed. But, revenue would come only if law and order had improved.

However, in contrast the state was in the grip of criminal gangs and anarchy. Not just that, basic amenities such as electricity, midday meal for children, and road infrastructure were in a shambles.

“Our government gradually transformed each one of them in the past more than eight years and slowly law and order improved, and work was done on basic amenities such as roads, electricity, schools and hospitals, which resulted in an all-round development of the state,” Pathak said.

He said owing to all this enrolment in schools rose from 11.2 million to 19 million, mafias were controlled, and around 800,000 government jobs were created and given by fair means.

“The number of medical colleges, government and private, in the state has doubled to almost 81. Of those, more than 40 were just added in the last eight years,” Pathak said.