NITI Aayog to focus on ‘Viksit Bharat @2047’

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chair NITI Aayog's 9th Governing Council meeting on July 27, which will focus on making India a developed nation by 2047, an official statement said on Friday. The council, the apex body of NITI Aayog, includes all state chief ministers, lieutenant governors of Union Territories, and several Union ministers.

Modi is the chairman of NITI Aayog. According to the statement, the meeting aims to foster participative governance and collaboration between the Centre and state governments, enhancing the quality of life for both rural and urban populations by strengthening the delivery mechanisms of government interventions. "The Governing Council Meeting on July 27, 2024 will discuss the Approach Paper for the Vision Document on Viksit Bharat @2047...The meeting will also see detailed deliberations on the role of states in achieving the goal of Viksit Bharat @2047," the statement said.

The meeting will also focus on recommendations of the 3rd National Conference of Chief Secretaries held in December last year. During the conference, recommendations were made on five key themes--drinking water: access, quantity, and quality; electricity: quality, efficiency, and reliability; health: accessibility, affordability, and quality of care; schooling: access and quality and land and property: accessibility, digitization, registration, and mutation.

Special sessions were also held to deliberate on cyber security, aspirational districts and blocks programme, role of states, and AI in governance which was also discussed during the National Conference of Chief Secretaries. Meanwhile, chief ministers of three Congress-ruled states -- Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu and Telangana's Revanth Reddy -- have announced they will not attend the NITI Aayog meeting over alleged bias against their states in the Union Budget. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK leader M K Stalin, Kerala's CM and CPI(M) leader Pinnarayi Vijayan as well as Aam Aadmi Party-led Punjab and Delhi governments have also boycotted the meeting.