Planning Commission making efforts to bring inclusive, sustainable growth

NEW DELHI: Planning Commission is making efforts to bring inclusiveness, sustainability and gender into the planning process of the country, though gender remains a real challenge, its member Syeda Hameed said today.

"Planning Commission has to make the effort to bring inclusiveness, sustainability and gender into the planning, and gender is the real challenge," Hameed said while addressing CSR-CSO Bridge programme organised by industry body CII here.

She said the corporates should put more efforts towards gender issues in their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to make the growth story more inclusive.

"One of the important area of CSR is how is the corporates (with) this burgeoning growth,...the growth paradigm is not complete unless inclusiveness is taken as a very important goal and objective," she said.

Hameed said in the gender and human development index, India remains where it was and so the corporates must take it as an important responsibility. Violence against women is one of the things that must be taken up by the corporates, she said.

"I think violence against women is the one thing that should be taken in a cross cutting way as a CSR...in the issue of foeticide, we have nothing to congratulate ourselves," she added.

She also said that India has not been really performing well on those parameters and as a planner body it needs to look at the areas where the expectations have not been met.

"In my travels across the country, I have found that we have not really been performing (in those parameters). As planners we need to look at where we need to do better and where we have not really met the expectations of the people, the beneficiaries that we are attempting to serve," Hameed said.

She said after the passage of the Companies Act 2013, there will be lot of debate in future as to how CSR and gender issues have to be taken up in a big way.

"What is CSR and what is not, I think that is a subject that is certainly up for a lot of debate in the months to come," he added further.