Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr Artamonov, economically the country is in good shape overall. Industrial production growth is over 9% nationally and 43.3% in the Kaluga Region. Industry has grown considerably, even agriculture, despite the drought...

Anatoly Artamonov: It has been growing for four years.

Vladimir Putin: Yes. The harvest is smaller of course, but the total volume of agricultural production has increased.

You built much more housing in the region than the average across the country.

There are other good results as well, such as investment projects, particularly in the auto industry. Volkswagen has spent over 500 million euros on auto assembly projects in Russia and has also started producing many components here. It abandoned the use of prefabricated component parts, as promised. There are other German companies here now, and a French one - L'Oréal, I think it is.

Anatoly Artamonov: L'Oréal it is, and Samsung is here as well...

Vladimir Putin: Samsung has started producing TV sets. The Italians will be producing earth-moving equipment.

Do you have any problems? What are they?

Anatoly Artamonov: Our region would probably be a sad place without problems, Mr Putin. We always have problems, of course, and the more of them we have, the stronger we become. We are working hard to not stand still. We passed through the crisis quite well. In particular, we set a goal to increase budget revenues by 30% this year, and we increased them by 32%.

Five years ago or so we agreed with local municipalities to monitor prices at the regional level, which stabilised the whole process. Prices increased 11.3% this year and we expect them to grow by no more than 9% in 2011. This is the task I set. Still, we are always tempted to make further investments, as many infrastructure systems are dilapidated and need repair. But, I believe we should take advantage of a public-private partnership rather than simply take money from the public. Our services have lost their high quality, so we can't raise prices for no real reason.

For four years, we have been third in the Central Federal District in terms of salary growth - after Moscow and the Moscow Region, which we are far from catching up with, obviously. The average salary now is 17,950 roubles. This makes us more confident in our future.

I have recently written a budget directive, in which we set the goal to repair over 700 kilometres of roads in three years. We also set goals in other areas, such as education and healthcare.

On September 1, I visited the Kaluga branch of Bauman Moscow State Technical University and explained how we will improve our regional education. We decided to give a grand building where we - the region's government, the governor and the legislative assembly - work, to students from this university.

We hope to create a joint project between Technische Universität München and Bauman State Technical University there to improve the investment appeal of our region and gain other benefits.

As for problems, we think that there is not enough money in the regional budget. We have to improve quickly. There are many buildings in disrepair now. Thank you, Mr Putin, for the adopted programme. We are trying to spend this money sparingly.

Vladimir Putin: How much did you receive in 2010?

Anatoly Artamonov: Almost two billion roubles so far. These funds will be spent on programmes for this year. And of course, we expect to increase our revenues, including through energy conservation projects. But we need to fund them first. This issue received little attention until recently, and actually few people cared about it at all. No one complained or asked for anything. The same was true for the infrastructure of natural gas pipelines. But when this plan got off the ground, more people became concerned about it. Everyone wants to have it finished as soon as possible - it's clear.

Vladimir Putin: Some buildings haven't seen repairs for dozens of years, I assume...

Anatoly Artamonov: That's true. Some of them have never been repaired at all, including the many panel buildings and other low-quality structures. We are building new blocks of flats and attracting investment through our resettlement programme.

This is our major challenge, I think: repairing the existing housing stock and building new homes. We made a decision to provide people with land so that they can build their own cottages there. Many people are willing to take advantage of this initiative. This land will be provided at very low prices, practically for free. There's only one requirement - the owner of this land must start construction within a year. Otherwise, they'll have to concede it to the next person on the waiting list.

Vladimir Putin: Is this programme being implemented in separate cities and towns or in the region as a whole?

Anatoly Artamonov: In the region as a whole, but predominantly in urban areas.

Vladimir Putin: What about the infrastructure?

Anatoly Artamonov: Our local authorities have taken it up. We have adopted a programme, Housing for Professionals, targeted at factory workers, doctors, teachers, and those employed at government-funded organisations in general. This programme is part of our plan to create industrial parks. We have implemented similar projects in several industries in the past decade - they proved very effective. We have six industrial parks, and will use the experience we gained while creating them to address the problem of housing more effectively. We will build the necessary infrastructure, communications and roads, and then have every right to ask contractors to provide a part of housing to those on the waiting list, and at a fixed price, set for our region at the federal level.

We tested this plan while developing villages for young families. We have already created several such villages. And young families have been happy to live there. We sold these cottages to them at 18,600 roubles per square metre. They're small cottages; the smallest is 36 square metres. But when we toured one such village today we saw some cottages that were 72 square metres - they built the second story themselves. This is good because instead of hanging out with friends and drinking beer at the weekends, young people are improving their homes.

We will carry on with this project. Many people say that they're still young and don't earn enough to afford a cottage that costs 700,000 roubles. They ask for land and promise to build a cottage on their own. There's enough gravel, sand and water, and they can buy the cement, they say. So we agreed to start this project. We have an example to follow - Governor Savchenko (Belgorod Region Governor) started a similar project long ago, and it has proved very effective.