Sir, this volume, the Progress Report for the year 2003-04, is before the House and Members will have discovered for themselves that this volume is replete with useful information. It consists of a large volume of facts and figures and it is hardly necessary for me to make a lengthy introduction. This Report is the basis of discussion now. I would make only one request to hon. Members. They will have a lot to say about the various aspects of our economic situation and economic progress of the country. We would welcome all that; they are entitled to make an appraisal of the activities. Let it be a critical appraisal and I hope, Sir, that it will also be a fair appraisal. In doing so, we will have to think not of today, not of the conditions in which we are functioning but we have to take our minds back to the days when the idea of a Plan took shape, when the proposals that are now before us and the action that has been taken on them was conceived of. What were those conditions? It will be very easy for all of us to recall the days of anxiety through which we were passing then. We were not sure of our food supplies for the next month. We were, as some people said, living from ship to mouth. We had a certain nervousness about our food supply. We had, on account of frantic demands from all parts of the country, to move food from one part to another and rush it to places where stocks were low. We had to import large quantities spending large amounts of foreign exchange. We had also to give heavy subsidies and, yet, people were not satisfied and they could not be. There were controls and there were difficulties experienced by many people. The quantities consumed then were low relative to what a normal human being must consume. Sir, this was the situation in respect of food and in respect of other consumer goods also. Cloth was so difficult to obtain even to cover the minimum needs of an ordinary family. We had difficulties in other directions also, difficulties about transport and so on and then it was in those very days that the problem of rehabilitation of displaced persons was prominent. We had started tackling it but we had not completed that yet. Prices were rising and so many people felt that at those high prices an average family could not subsist. There were inflationary pressures and so, anything that we could do to relieve the situation, to increase production, to spend money for making large investments created those dangers of increasing inflation, of a further rise in prices. That was the dilemma. What is the position now? When we judge of ourselves today, we should not think of today. On the basis of conditions today, we determine the future and our future performance but so far as the past is concerned, it is these conditions that determined our present. What is it that we find today? Our major headaches have been relieved. Nobody can say that food is scarce; nobody can say that cloth is not to be had. In the matter of transport, we have greatly improved and our position in several other directions has also improved. For these things, it is not necessary to give any figures; the thing is there in the air and it is part of everybody's experience in the country that the difficulties and the anxieties have, more or less, gone and that we can breathe freely and can think of the future with confidence. The chief difficulty both in industry and in agriculture was, of course, that there was not enough production. We were faced with the spectacle of high prices and scarcity of food, etc. Also, our industries were not running full capacity; existing capacities were not being utilised; in the case of several industries, we were using only a part of that capacity. Therefore, agriculture was the key to the whole situation. We must produce more raw materials in order to run our industries well. Sir, this is what we started doing. We came to the conclusion that we must do everything possible in the course of the five years that we had before us to bring about an increase in agricultural production to the maximum possible extent. We made up our minds that we will free ourselves from the necessity of importing food from outside countries; we wanted to be relieved of this dependence. Sir, we have succeeded in that, but for doing that we had also to decide that the major part of our resources should be applied to this sector and we decided to increase irrigation facilities, major and minor. We decided to make programmes for giving more fertilisers, manures, improved seeds and reclamation of waste land. In all these directions we have spent some money and we have achieved results in physical terms and those results are very heartening. In the field of irrigation, for example, we can legitimately take a measure of pride in what has been achieved already. By the end of this year, the area irrigated by projects is expected to exceed five million acres. The river valley projects which had been begun before the Plan are now making rapid progress. Work on the new river valley schemes which were included in the Plan for the first time, such as the Chambal, the Kosi and the Tungbhadra has also begun. On the Kosi, preliminary work has been completed and construction is about to begin. Some Members were anxious about Kosi. Estimates of about 7 or 8 crores of rupees have been sanctioned and all preliminary work has been completed. I may tell them that in a few days construction will be taken in hand. At the Kosi Project, we also hope to witness the heartening spectacle of large scale public participation. Submit