Shillong, March 6: National People’s Party (NPP) national president and chief minister designate Conrad K Sangma on Monday reiterated his party’s commitment to resolve the border issue and to aggressively take up with Centre for implementation of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) in the state.

“Of course our objective would be to resolve the border issue within these five years or much earlier than five years,” Sangma told reporters after taking oath of office and secrecy as re-elected legislator of South Tura.

When asked if his government would continue to take up issues related to ILP and inclusion of Khasi and Garo languages in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, the CM designate said, “Absolutely, these commitments will remain. These are commitments we have made in the past…”

Spelling out his government’s priorities, Sangma said creating a large number of job opportunities will be one of top priorities in the next five years.

“Whether it is the IT sector, in the last five years, we have managed to open a 3,000 seater call centre and BPO IT Park. Our intent within the next five years is that we should open more than 20,000 seats if not we already have sanctioned 5,000 more seats. I am not saying we can do it but it is my target and goal that at the end of this term we should have 20,000 – 25,000 seats of BPO sector in our state,” he said.

The NPP leader also said that he wanted to push the tourism sector in the state, adding “because I strongly feel that tourism is one area which we can really work on. There are small ways in which we can create small avenues for livelihood and that’s going to be a big focus for us.”

“We feel value addition in agriculture is something very important and if done in the right way a lot of opportunities can be created in those areas. Of course, we have a very strong sense towards our health sector and education sector. We need to continue strengthening that as these are very complicated sectors and require a lot of investment,” he said while adding that another focus would be on the social sector and infrastructures.

He said that the MDA-I government had done a lot in the last five years in terms of road connectivity and water connectivity. “I hope we are able to saturate things in the next five years where we will ensure every household gets the water tap connection and ensure every village is connected in terms of road and every house is connected in terms of power – all these as our goals and objectives are there. We will be working out details of the economic programmes in the next few days,” he stated.

When asked about the scams alleged by political opponents, Sangma said that the word ‘scam’ has been given by the people who made the allegations against the government.

“So allegations are there but the word scam is not correct nomenclature to use. It is allegations made by individuals and other political parties. As I said, we have been transparent in the entire process. Whatever the opposition has demanded in the past we have gone ahead and done that,” he added.