Battered and bankrupt

The deficit is because of a menacing increase in non-developmental expenditure — administration and establishment etc. — at the cost of developmental works.

But the Government does not look really bothered. For almost immediately after the White Paper and Chief Minister Kalyan Singh’s avowed resolve to cut Government expenses, most members of his jumbo cabinet and a large number of State legislators were off to cooler climes in India and abroad to beat UP’s scorching summer. Of course, at the Government’s expense.

Speaker K. N. Tripathiwent on a 15-day study tour of Switzerland and other Western countries with five ministers and a dozen legislators. Members of another half a dozen committees of the State legislature, including the Public Accounts Committee, found urgent business to do in the pilgrim towns of UP hills like Badrinath and Kedarnath.

However, it would be unfair to single out the Kalyan Singh Government for squandering away the State’s limited resources. Since the exit of UP’s last Congress Chief Minister N.D. Tiwari in 1989, the State has witnessed governments headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav (JD/SP), Kalyan Singh (BJP) and Mayawati (BSP) coming and going.

Each of them had to keep their shifty followers happy and pander to casteist vote banks. Their preoccupation with the politics of survival left little room for considerations of economic development of the State.

The CAG investigations into disbursements from the Chief Minister’s discretionary fund from 1991-92 to 1996-97 found each of the short-term chief ministersMulayam (21 months), Kalyan Singh (17 months) and Mayawati (five months) guilty of gross irregularities. This continued during frequent stints of President’s Rule lasting 29 months.

The profligacy of politicians has landed Uttar Pradesh in a no-win situation. Today UP has the second lowest per capita income in India after Bihar. It was above the national per capita income before the Independence. Its per capita plan outlay is also the second lowest in the country — again, after Bihar.

The State’s revenue deficit has gone up from Rs 1,149 crore in 1993-94 to Rs 7,696 crore in 1997-98. While revenue receipts increased by only Rs 5,901 crore during this period, the revenue expenditure went up by a whopping Rs 12,448 crore.

This was bound to result in more and more borrowing, till a stage when the State government had to withdraw large sums from public accounts –employees provident fund etc. — to make good the shortfall.

As the Government’s White Paper puts it: "So grave is the situation that a largechunk of funds given to government departments for creating capital assets is, instead, utilised for establishment costs and for paying salaries and wages."

What the White Paper does not say is that if UP has to fulfill the objectives of the Ninth Five-Year-Plan, it must generate an additional Rs 8,000 crore on its own to generate a growth rate of 8 per cent and come up to the national average.

This seems next to impossible. During the first four years of the Eighth Plan, the State could raise only Rs 2,400 crore against a target of Rs 4,700 crore. And its growth rate was a poor 2.9 per cent against the target of 6 per cent.

The ill-effects of political instability — which has been accompanied by administrative anomie as a result of frequent transfers and politicisation of civil servants — has been compounded by a near total breakdown of the system of checks and balances in the financial management of the State.

The State legislature, to whom the political executive is supposed to be accountable,have stopped performing the functions of supervision and control. It has not even reacted to the incidents of gross irregularities pointed out by the CAG in time.

A `high-powered’ committee appointed by the CAG in 1993, for instance, reported "scandalous delays" in preparation, printing and discussion by PAC of State audit reports. To prove the point, when the State PAC met in UP’s hill resorts this summer, it was yet to dispose of the CAG reports submitted 10 years back.

Then, the figures compiled by the State Government departments and the accounts compiled by the CAG vary. In 1995-96, for example, there is a difference of Rs 6,700 crore — nearly one-third of the total expenditure — between the CAG and UP Government figures.