Seventh Five Year Plan FY2016 – FY2020 - Accelerating Growth, Empowering Citizens.

This Seventh Five Year Plan FY2016 – FY2020 is a national wide multi-sectoral policy document. The economic growth strategy of 7th FYP includes four pivotal themes: 1. Break out of the sphere of 6% growth and raise the annual average growth rate to 7.4%; 2. Growth will be inclusive, pro-poor, adapt well to the urban transition and be environmentally sustainable; 3. By the end of the 7 th FYP, poverty and extreme poverty will be substantially lowered; 4. All the additional labour force will be gainfully employed, including much of the underemployed.
The Plan helps eliminate food insecurity and malnutrition. The overall agriculture strategy for 7 th FYP will be to accelerate the process of transformation from already existing semisubsistence farming to commercialization of agriculture. The target for water and sanitation will be: Safe drinking water for all. Strategies have also been proposed for improvement of water resource management for supporting agriculture growth. Water management will emphasize the sustained and balanced use of water resources for irrigation, drinking water and water transport while reducing vulnerabilities from flooding, water logging, salinity and river siltation.
The Plan seeks to make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and sustainable, and enable more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems. The key targets include: Increase productive forest coverage to 20 percent; 500 meter wide permanent green belt established and protected along the coast; an agriculture sector strategy which will require achieving productivity gains, diversification, value addition and agro-processing commensurate with national environmental protection and climate change adaptation strategies. The Forestry sub-sector strategy will include continuing moratorium on felling in the natural forests, increasing tree density of the existing forests and older plantations through 'enrichment planting' and 'assisted natural regeneration', and intensification of plantation activities in coastal zones. Different measures will be taken to conserve and protect wildlife with special attention to Royal Bengal Tiger. Social forestry development will continue to be an important strategy. The crop subsector, encouraging agricultural growth through various policy changes/adjustments ranging from applying new technology and extension services to providing credit to small farmers will be intensified. Livestock sub-sector development strategies and policies for 7th FYP includes support for dairy product development, production of better beef breeds and the block Bengal goat for higher meat production, and poultry development for both meat and egg production and finding export markets. On the other hand, the key elements of the strategy for the Fisheries subsector include improvement and development of open water fisheries management, inland aquaculture through maintaining purity of brood stock of indigenous fish species, shrimp and coastal aquaculture, and that of marine fisheries. Adequate support will be designed and implemented to increase export.
The Plan seeks to reduce rural poverty. The core targets under the 7th FYP include: 1. Attaining average real GDP growth rate of 7.4% per year over the Plan period; 2. Reduction in the head-count poverty ratio by 6.2 percentage points; 3. Reduction in extreme poverty by about 4.0 percentage points; 4. Creating good jobs for the large pool of under-employed and new labour force entrants by increasing the share of employment in the manufacturing sector from 15 percent to 20 percent; 5. Proportion of rural population with access to sanitary latrines to be raised to 90 percent; 5. Female to male ratio in tertiary education to be raised from current 70 percent to 100 percent 6. The ratio of literate female to male for age group 20-24 to be raised to 100 percent from the current 86 percent 7. Encourage female enrolment in technical and vocational education 8. Reduce or maintain the current income inequality of 0.45 9. Spending on Social Protection as a share of GDP to be increased to 2.3% of GDP; etc.
The Plan promotes to increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters through setting up key target as: Environmental, Climate Change and disaster risk reduction considerations are integrated into project design, budgetary allocations and implementation process.