A Bihar in your frontyard

Given that, on an average, installing one phone line costs the DTS in the region of Rs 25,000, this will actually cost the exchequer a whopping Rs 80 crore. And since the average earnings from one phone are in the region of Rs 10,000 a year, that8217;s an additional cost of Rs 320 crore a year. Add another Rs 80 crore for the free phone calls these employees will get, and you8217;re talking of a total largesse of Rs 1,200 crore. Not bad for a single day8217;s work, even going by Paswan8217;s earlier records.

Oh yes, according to sources in the communication mi-nistry, all this mo-ney is to be taken from the reserves of the DTS. So when the department needs to spend more money to set up networks, it will either have to borrow more, or beg for more budgetary support. Of course, if this is not forthcoming, it just won8217;t set up any more networks or maintain the existing ones.

Not only is Paswan8217;s decision quite appalling and high-handed shouldn8217;t a decision costing so much have gone to the Cabinet?, he could have curried the same favour at a fraction of the current cost. Senior bureaucrats in his ministry pointed out that if he was hell-bent on giving them this largesse, he could have just given these employees what are called virtual calling cards8217;. These cards, essentially allow users to go to a public phone booth or to a neighbour8217;s phone, and dial-in the identification number on their card all phone ch-arges then get debited to this card, and not to the phone being used. That way, all that this would have cost was the Rs 80 crore for the free phone calls.

This, unfortunately, is not the first time that Paswan has managed to derail government finances, either in this government or in other ones. Three or four months ago, the same Paswan ensured that the Union Cabinet shot down a proposal to begin cutting down on the size of the government by offering attractive severance packages.

Paswan8217;s opposition to this proposal, piloted by the planning minister Arun Shourie, of course, goes back a long way, and from his point of view does appear to make sense. You see, when the United Front was in power, it was the likes of Paswan, for instance, that ensured that the government did not accept the Fifth Pay Commission8217;s recommendation that the size of government be cut by a third over 10 years so, if he didn8217;t accept it then, why should he accept it now?

Having got the government to bow to his demands then, along with some of his communist friends, Paswan then got the government to sharply hike salaries of all government employees. So, the size of government went up from 38.3 lakh persons in 1996 to 39.5 lakh today, and their wage bill rose from 17.4 per cent of government revenue to around 21 per cent. I8217;d say three cheers for Mr Paswan right here, but his story isn8217;t over yet.

You see, apart from the damage this huge hike in salaries did to the central government8217;s fiscal deficit, it virtually wrecked the economies of most state governments which then had to hike salaries of their own employees by roughly similar am-ounts. In the period of around a year, wh-en all the states implemented the salary hikes, their combined fiscal deficits went up from a sustainable 2.7 per cent of the state GDP to a crippling 4.2 per cent. All these states then saw a rapid fall in their economic growth, and in the case of many like Punjab, this higher outgo hastened the process of the state going bankrupt.

A bitter critic of the BJP for many years, and someone who kept harping on the view that anything was better than aligning with communal forces8217;, why did Paswan join the BJP? Clearly, no one can really tell. But in strategic terms, it appears that since he couldn8217;t defeat them from outside, Paswan has decided to do it from within. Three cheers for you, Mr Paswan.