| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 14, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| INTERNATIONAL -- ASIAN COVER STORY
Digvijay Singh, Chief Minister, Madhya Pradesh, India (int'l edition) FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, Digvijay Singh has been working to release the entrepreneurial spirit in Madhya Pradesh's people, all 78 million of them. To accomplish that, the Minister starts his 18-hour days with yoga at 5 a.m. A princeling from one of the state's former royal houses who is known affectionately as Diggy Raja, he travels throughout the state 20 days in a month in his helicopter, making frequent unscheduled stops. Singh's ambition is to ensure that his programs for building schools, irrigating land, and improving health care are implemented by Madhya Pradesh's people themselves. Singh's reforms are making a difference. By decentralizing power from the capital, Bhopal, to villages, Singh, 52, is encouraging people to take more responsibility. For example, instead of giving poor farmers repeated but meager handouts during droughts, Singh initiated a program to teach farmers to build tiny dams and extend small loans to them for crops and other private farming businesses. The effort has revived nearly half of the state's 3.4 million hectares of parched land. Says Singh: ''We provide the resources, the people provide the energy.'' _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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