NEW DELHI, OCT 28: Forget that when governments are made and unmade he is in the thick of things. Today, Chandrababu Naidu swears only by ``more development and less politics.'' Even if his development model does little to arrest the trend of farmers committing suicides or if it means forcefully quelling peaceful protests over electricity tariff hikes.Fresh from a 11-day ``learning experience'' in China, Japan and Hong Kong, the ``reformer'' took on the garb of a ``preacher'' telling us how India should adopt the ways and means adopted by these countries for progress. ``Once a year, I want to visit two countries to learn good things from them,'' he gushed.Playing dead-bat to queries on politics, including the one about the meeting his party leader K.Yerran Naidu had with Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray which sparked off a minor controversy, Naidu didn't want the focus to be shifted from his foreign jaunt.``Today, our per capita income is $ 400 while China's is $ 800. In 10 years, they are aiming to double the figure. If we don't catch up, there will bea big gap,'' the Andhra Chief Minister said.High technology, IT and software development were all fine, said one scribe, asking Naidu what his government was doing to stop despondent farmers from ending their lives. Naidu shot back: ``Suicides are being reported from every state. We're doing our best and I'm not denying that there are problems. At the same time, we can't ignore development.''After all, came his reminder, 23 per cent of the Indian software engineers working overseas were Telugus. Only yesterday, as a bad advertisement for this ``hitech'' state, another ground nut farmer in the dry Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh consumed pesticide following the loss of his ground nut crop. The police said B. Narayana (50) took the extreme step as he was unable to bear the mounting pressure from banks and money lenders to repay loans amounting Rs 1.50 lakh. With this, the number of ground nut farmers who had committed suicide in the district in the wake of crop failure and mounting debts has risen to 26.Naidu said that unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, the Indians were ``talking more on politics and less on development.'' The politicians and bureaucrats here, he added, needed to draw heavily from the success stories of those countries. ``They are clear about what policies they should pursue. We have to amend our procedures and create a work culture,'' Naidu said. India may have missed the agricultural and industrial revolutions but it had an opportunity to catch up with the rest in information technology, he said.India's pride was its strength in software development, he said, suggesting that there was enormous potential for it to have greater co-operation with China and Japan which were strong in hardware but weak in software.
