According to the author, with the passage of time, the effect of which of the following is being felt at the national level?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:

The past decade has upset many preconceptions about development and this more than anything else, makes it difficult to be overly definite about what the next decade has in store. But there are a few things that can be asserted with some confidence. First, education, health and productive employment are crucial - both for growth and for equity. We have tended to assume that all of these are the consequences of rapid economic growth and that only growth can generate the resources required for these purposes. But increasingly, it appears that these are better seen as the causes rather than as consequences of development. Virtually, every case of successful development involves a prior improvement in literacy, technical skills, health status and access to productive work.
Secondly, technological competence is the most important resource endowment and it explains a far larger proportion of growth in output and trade than more conventional factors like natural resources or capital accumulation. The competence required is not just in research. In fact technological dynamism in the factory and the farm is more important than the presence of larger research establishments.
Third, the environmental imperative can no longer be ignored. Today, as an international issue, it is second only to disarmament. Nationally, the developmental consequences of environmental neglect are increasingly obvious.
In the Indian context, there are at least two further factors which reinforce the above propositions. The first is the population growth. Given the pace of expansion of the population and the work force, human resource development acquires an added urgency. Necessarily the most important factor, which underlines environmental stress in rural and urban areas. The second factor is that as a larger country, we cannot carve out an independent position in the global system without building up a substantial capacity for self-reliant growth. The acquisition of technical competence is crucial for this purpose.     
Until now, we have tended to treat human resource development technology issues and environment as subsidiary to the main task of planning. The thrust has been on quantitative expansion of infrastructure and production with a focus on production targets like tonnes of steel, kilowatts of electricity; capacity targets like road length, rail kilometreage; and coverage targets like number of school and students, catching up with known technologies – thus, the maximum mobilisaton of financial resources.