When the next governor takes office, Córdoba will continue to be among the provinces with the highest level of poverty. The data regarding poor girls and boys are even more worrying. What must be done for this to change is arduous and complex.
There are serious social demands on the services provided by the provincial State: security and justice, education and health. Also in the cost of taxes and services that are among the highest in Argentina. What do we do with Epec and the Retirement Fund? How do we remove gross income? They are pending debates.
We’ll have to break a the state in which 25 years and challenge ourselves again with concrete, ambitious, but achievable goals.
How much can we reduce poverty? With economic recovery –a new national government more sensible in its macro policies– and removing tax and bureaucratic constraints that hinder the creation of formal employment, we can aspire to a reduction of 25% in four years. There is a strip that maintains the ability to reintegrate into the middle class, if they are given the opportunity. Indigence is something else: to reduce it by half in eight years it will be necessary to concentrate all the direct action of the State.
At the security level, the data is false, because people no longer report it. A forceful call will be necessary for the neighbors to get involved and denounce them virtually and in real time.
In prevention we do not need more police, but training, innovation and technology. We must aspire to reduce theft by a third, via prevention. And that in parallel we can increase by two thirds the number of reported cases that manage to find the culprit (today less than three percent of the total). Justice should set itself the objective of increasing the number of sentences with prisoners by two thirds in four years. And we will have to build or expand prisons because we will have two thirds more inmates. Regarding drug trafficking, we commit to raising the number of seizures by 300 percent.
At the level of public education we must propose to reduce school dropout rates by at least half. Duplicate the results of the tests on reading and mathematics in primary school boys. And double the number of teachers with university degrees teaching. We need to generate an output of trades. And increase the percentage of technical and university graduates in the careers we most need, such as engineering. The National University cannot continue being a capsule alien to the economic reality of Córdoba.
Specific objectives also for Health. Define with an open mind the future of Apross. And how we recover the private medicine network, which tends to disappear. At an economic level, specify how many new companies we need, how many with a new formal employee or more, how many with export capacity. And so with Tourism, with Agriculture, the environment, and so on.
If we put the objectives in numbers, it will be easier to discuss the how and then measure. We have 11 months to do this exercise. And leave the measures ready from the first minute of the new management, to implement them. Let’s do it.
* Manager PRO Córdoba; President of Civilitas and Secretary of the +CBA Foundation