Building Bac Ninh Urban Center into Civilized, Modern City

Resolution 11-NQ/TU dated September 10, 2013 of the Standing Committee of the Bac Ninh Provincial Party Committee put forth directions and tasks of development of Bac Ninh City to 2020, and orientations to 2030: Developing Bac Ninh into a civilized, modern city, rich in cultural identity, towards a knowledge economy and a smart city. The Party Committee, authorities and people of Bac Ninh have been making great efforts to realize these goals.

In recent years, Bac Ninh City has obtained many achievements. Especially, in 2016-2018, in the context of the impact of the complicated and unpredictable world economic situation, the city still maintained a high and sustainable economic growth rate with an increase of 12.61% on average per year.

In 2018, the city achieved an economic growth of 13.1%; the economic structure shifted positively towards industrialization and modernization with the proportion of trade in services, industry and construction accounting for 98.84%, while agriculture, forestry and fishery were still 1.16%. Along with the strong shift of economic structure, the labor structure has changed rapidly from agriculture to industrial production, trade and services. As a result, the city has created over 5,000 jobs annually. The city's budget revenue in 2018 reached over VND2,680 billion, 2.18 times that of 2015; per capita gross social product in the period 2016-2018 reached about US$6,721 per year. Per capita income reached over VND156.4 million per year, the poverty rate fell to only 1.2%. The material and spiritual life of city people has been improved day by day and the urban quality has been increasingly upgraded. Along with socio-economic development, the city is also striving to preserve and develop traditional cultural values. Education and training has witnessed great development, leading the educational movement in the whole province; the rate schools meeting national standard reaches 92.96%. These achievements are contributing to the educational movement of Bac Ninh, helping it secure ranking in the top 10 provinces of the country.

The strong development of the Bac Ninh urban area has made the city more spacious, beautiful and modern, helping it attract more investment in the fields of commerce, services, education, training, and health, and improve living standards, creating a foundation for Bac Ninh to become a first-class centrally governed city in the coming time. The city will drastically and synchronously implement breakthrough solutions, including accelerating administrative procedure reform; building government of integrity to create better services for people and businesses; building smart city services and e-government and ensuring openness and transparency; drastically transforming the economic structure and improving competitiveness and sustainable growth; implementing the planning, construction and urban management in order to create an open, smart urban space with modern green architecture imbued with Kinh Bac culture and urban quality; improving the quality of social- technical infrastructure in a synchronous, modern and intelligent manner; mobilizing all resources to promote culture, education and training, health care; preserving the traditional cultural values of Kinh Bac. These goals aim to turn Bac Ninh city into a modern, smart livable city.

With over 22 years of development along with the glorious tradition of Bac Ninh- Kinh Bac homeland, Bac Ninh city has many favorable factors to develop into the first-class urban, political, economic- cultural center of Bac Ninh province.

Effectiveness from Consensus

Following the motto "The State and people work together", after 10 years of implementing the National Target Program on New Rural Construction, Nam Dinh and Dong Nai are the first localities in the country to reach the target of 100% of district units completing the program. This result clearly reflects the determination and efforts of the entire political system, the consensus of all strata of people, in which the leadership and direction of the Party Committees and the people are focused and promoted.

After nearly eight years of implementing the New Rural construction program, the appearance of Nam Dinh has greatly improved, and its countryside of Nam Dinh has been flourishing. Essential infrastructure is focused on investment and synchronous development. The province has upgraded and built 1,984.6 km of rural roads, 5,190 communal irrigation works, 496 transformer stations, 1,503.5 km of low voltage lines, 3,505 classrooms, 45 communal culture houses, 423 village cultural and sports areas, 114 communal post offices, hundreds of communal radio stations, 26 commune health stations, 58 rural markets and 11 rural clean water supply projects. New rural development is a continuous process and there is no end point.

Mr. Pham Dinh Nghi, Chairman of Nam Dinh People's Committee, shared that the achievements Nam Dinh province has obtained are attributed to the joint efforts of the people and local authorities. Leverage of all the movements is the motto "the people do, the State supports". In the coming time, Nam Dinh will continue to speed up the construction of new rural villages/communes. In 2019, the province will basically form six new rural models. Up to 2020, there will be 100 communes meeting the advanced new rural standards, 11 basic new rural models. At the same time, the province will implement the "pilot project of new rural areas in Hai Hau district for sustainable development in 2018-2023.

In fact, in building new countryside in Nam Dinh, each locality is always proactive in tapping potential and specific advantage to reach the target. The province has gradually developed its agriculture towards high-tech applications. Advanced technologies and breeding techniques are quickly applied on farms. Up to now, the whole province has nine farms that have been certified VietGAP. Initially, the province perfects some farming processes and technologies such as white-legged shrimp, yellow finned pompano. From 2015-2018, the province instructed 13 establishments to build and apply the advanced quality management program; guided the formulation and publication of quality standards for 90 products of 62 production and business establishments; support QRcode traceability labeling for 130 agricultural products and foodstuffs; coordinating to build a collective brand for Giao Chau Fish Sauce and Nghia Hung Gobies. There are seven reputable product brands in the market (Toan Xuan clean rice, Minh Duong dried agricultural products, Hung Vuong fish cakes, Ninh Co fish sauce, Lenger clean clams, Giao Thuy clean clams, Royal light sea salt). Nam Dinh Clean Agriculture Association has 33 members and over 130 products with quality controlled and labeled by a traceability stamp.

Nam Dinh has been implementing many synchronous solutions, comprehensively and positively changing the rural face. The province promotes the movement "All people unite to build cultural life", the campaign "All people unite to build civilized urban area". The results achieved in developing new rural areas once again affirm the guidelines, methods and practices of Nam Dinh province which are completely correct and effective. Building new rural towards the highest goal is to improve the material and spiritual life of the rural people. Since then, Nam Dinh province has been gradually built up to prosperity, bringing happiness to people's lives.

Minh Ngoc