Helping hand?

One of the most puzzling questions, for both those who practice and observe politics, is how many votes are welfare schemes worth? Clearly, there8217;s no simple, linear relationship. One reason could be that money is mostly badly spent. Main beneficiaries are crooked middlemen. And there aren8217;t enough of them to swing an election, assuming crooked middlemen feel such a thing as gratitude. But there8217;s also a question of political signals. Signalling works differently in different contexts of India8217;s complex electoral narrative. So even if a welfare scheme is well-designed and reaches a fair number of intended beneficiaries, the political party that thought up the project has no guarantee that voters will remember whom to thank. When the scheme is Central and implementation is by the states, signalling becomes more complicated. And that is one of the dilemmas the Congress is facing as it seems to prepare for elections by upping welfare spending.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA is the Congress8217;s showpiece social welfare plan that8217;s now getting extended countrywide. By Indian project implementation standards NREGA, as we have argued, has delivered a fair bit, and there8217;s a system in place for enforcing better performance. Congress spin doctors have credited newly-promoted Rahul Gandhi with the idea of increasing the scope of NREGA. This is an attempt to firmly claim political ownership of the programme by associating its expansion with, as the Congress sees it, the party8217;s most saleable face. But will that work at the ground level, even assuming Rahul campaigns extensively and makes NREGA his calling card? The Congress8217;s problem is that the best-performing NREGA states are not ruled by the party. And Maharashtra, that has arguably seen the most determined attempt at subverting NREGA, is ruled by the Congress strong vested interests which have fattened themselves on the state8217;s earlier Employment Guarantee Scheme loathe NREGA8217;s transparency-inducing rules.

It is perfectly legitimate for non-Congress parties doing a good job of implementing NREGA to claim credit. What8217;s more, as state-level incumbents they probably have a better chance of linking party to policy. This disadvantage can be battled if the ruling party at the Centre has good ground level party organisations that can take the message to voters. However, as commentators on these pages have observed, the scope for improvement in Congress organisation is vast. There8217;s a lesson to be learnt from the Left here, as Vasundhara Raje, CM of Rajasthan 8212; probably the best performing NREGA state 8212; had once observed. Marxists are ruthlessly effective in marrying public fund to political goals. Many, including independent Left intellectuals, have observed that the state of public services and infrastructure in rural Bengal is quite poor. But Marxists get disproportionately large benefits from what little they have built. The Congress, unless it thinks and acts fast, may get disproportionately little benefits from the big idea it had.