Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 19, 2007
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/211276.html
The thing that annoyed me about the prime
minister's very boring Independence Day speech was the way he made it sound
as if it was our fault that India remains poor and illiterate. "India
cannot become a nation with islands of high growth and vast areas untouched
by development, where the benefits of growth accrue only to a few. This is
good neither for our society nor for our polity," he said.
Whose fault is it? Should Indian businessmen
start doing badly to slow down growth rates? Or should government improve
governance so that the poorest Indians can benefit from an economy that is
doing better than ever before?
The reason why there are only 'islands of
high growth' is because governments have consistently failed to do their bit.
High growth rates and the economic boom we are experiencing are entirely due
to the enterprise of ordinary Indians. They have been achieved despite the
government's failure to build modern infrastructure or make policies that
would enable it to be built faster.
Why does it take 20 years to build a road
in India? Why do we take forever to build power plants? The prime minister
knows well that it is because our legendary bureaucratic delays are so entrenched
that even the grease of corruption fails to speed things up.
If 30 per cent of Indians continue to live
in absolute poverty and nearly half of our children are malnourished, the
roots of the malaise can be found in our villages. As long as the Indian farmer
remains on the verge of starvation and suicide, India will remain a poor country.
It is not that our farmers cannot farm; it is that they lack access to markets.
Remember that nearly half of the fruit and
vegetables that the Indian farmer produces rot because he cannot get them
to market on time. If successive governments in the past 60 years had not
failed to build those promised roads this situation would not exist. Whose
fault is it that the roads have not been built?
Wherever possible, people find alternative
ways of making up for the failures of government. It is hard to find a village
these days where the cellphone has not reached, making decades of governmental
failure in telecommunications irrelevant. And unforgivable failures in public
health and education have been made up by private schools and clinics.
People living on the pavements of our metropolises
often pay for bottled water because the municipality fails them. But there
is only so much that can happen without government playing its role. If the
prime minister analyses his own speech, he will find that all the flaws in
India on her 60th birthday are to do with the failure of governance.
Showing a sad inability to paint the bigger
picture of India's achievements at 60, he dwelt at dreary length on the "new
deal" to rural India that his government has bequeathed us in the form
of expensive, centrally planned schemes like Bharat Nirman and the National
Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
As an economist he knows that the schemes
are palliatives and not the solution. The real tools of empowerment are roads,
electricity, clean water, schools, decent hospitals and sanitary living conditions.
In rural India government has failed on all these fronts because in 60 years
we have not produced a prime minister who has dared admit that the delivery
systems are rotten and corrupt. The best planned schemes fail because implementation
is in the hands of officials who know only to milk the system for personal
aggrandisement.
The prime minister noticed that "the
problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame" and said his government
was trying to address it by making the midday scheme universal. But again
he blamed us: "We need the active involvement of the community and panchayats
to see that what we spend reaches our children. I appeal to the nation to
resolve and work hard to eradicate malnutrition within five years."
It is not the job of the nation, but the job
of government to do this, but may I suggest, as I have done before in this
column, that if he hands the implementation of the scheme to Akshay Patra
of Bangalore, we could eradicate malnutrition before his next address from
the Red Fort.
The problem is not money but a delivery system
so sick that officials steal from the mouths of starving children and governments
continue to devise schemes whose structure has corruption inbuilt at every
stage. In the three years that he has ruled India, Dr Manmohan Singh has done
no more than throw good money after bad. This, under the guidance of Marxist
allies who in 30 years of ruling West Bengal have failed to win the war against
poverty.