The second area is human development through access to good quality education and healthcare to make every citizen productive and fulfilled.
Despite our long-standing commitment to these goals, the results are uneven and far from satisfactory. Allocation of resources is undoubtedly inadequate leading to huge unmet demand. Even what is spent is not very productive in outcomes. Yet even private sector is not delivering effectively because of systemic inadequacies.
We need to reorient public finances in order to direct resources to human development. But even more vitally, we need to redesign our delivery mechanisms in an innovative manner based on past experience and best practices and deploy the nation’s finest talent in these sectors.
Most of the nation’s gene pool is wasted because of inadequate and poor quality of school education. Higher education too is not very successful in promoting excellence of producing service providers, leaders, managers and wealth creators, for the future. There are other clear danger signals, which need to be acknowledged and addressed immediately.
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For instance as public health system has been unsatisfactory and inadequate, private health expenditure, which already accounts for about 80% of total expenditure, is growing (14% per annum) much faster than GDP The resultant high cost and poor access would seriously undermine our human development and perpetuate misery and poverty.
The governance system should be geared to address these fundamental challenges through sensible and innovative policy, effective and competent delivery, and meaningful incentives and accountability mechanisms.