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January 25, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 2
Putin's May Decrees and the 12 "national projects" take shape, but lacunae remain
a strategy to “eliminate all unauthorised dumps” and create “an integrated system for the treat- ment of solid municipal waste” as part of the “May Decrees.”
These decrees are a series of objectives for the next six years, and have been published since 2012, but this time they were divided into 12 “na- tional projects” with the aim of modernising and revitalising the Russian economy and society. The details are still being worked out and many ques- tions remain. Many of the “plans” are no more than bullet points and the source of funds for billions of dollars of investment remain vague in many sections.
One key point is that these national projects as they are described in the decree are not actual, specific projects. Rather, the decree sets up a list of priority sectors in which investment should be made (demography, healthcare, education, liv- ing conditions, ecology, roads, labour productivity, science, digital economy, culture, small business and international cooperation) but doesn’t specify what exactly should be done or how much money should be invested.
The wording of the decree did show a shift in the government’s priorities, from social policies and the military in 2012 to infrastructure, healthcare and digital issues in 2018. Some national projects such as labour productivity or small businesses
were not mentioned in the 2012 decrees, but the most striking difference is probably the fact that any mention of the military or the defence sec- tor are entirely absent from the May 2018 Decree. (There’s a single exception, a reference to the mil- itary-industrial complex in the “ecology” section: “improving the quality of drinking water through the modernisation of water supply systems using water treatment technologies, including technolo- gies developed by organizations of the military- industrial complex.”)
Passport to prosperity
Starting in September, ministries started publish- ing “passports” for each of the 12 national pro- jects detailing the financing as well as the actual tasks (along with their completion date) for each section. It’s on this passport that the first men- tion of a “federal waste operator” appeared, as the idea was absent from the initial May Decree. Financing was, during the summer, a hotly ne- gotiated topic: in late September, RBC reported that the budget for the “ecology” national project had jumped from RUB1.5 trillion to RUB6.4 tril- lion, though the published version of the passport brought it down to RUB4 trillion ($60.7bn).
The publication of the passports provided much-needed details to projects which, in the May Decrees, remained exceedingly vague: the “healthcare” national project is for example one of the longest in the decree and includes ambi- tious targets such as decreasing infant mortal- ity to 4.5 per 1,000 births (it is currently sitting at 6.5 – the US is at 5.7) or decreasing the mortality rate of the working population to 350 per 100,000 people (from 477 in 2017). But the tasks set out
to achieve these objectives were closer to a wish list than an actual plan, with bullet points such as “introduction of innovative medical technologies,” “formation of a system to protect patients’ rights”