Development priorities!

Sometime back I had blogged about the priorities of government at its cutting edge, as represented by the amount of time spent by District Collectors on various development sectors. I had argued that District Collectors, who head the implementation machinery, spend most of their time on poverty mitigation welfare programs at the cost of economic growth creating development.

Here is a Venn Diagram representation of the priorities of a District Collector in a typical Indian District.



The "everything else" includes electricity, roads, urban development, drinking water, other infrastructure, health, education, and so on. The skewedness in priorities, a reflection of the priorities of governments themselves, is stark.