Home truths for Chidambaram

The conversation that made the deepest impression on me was with a very old woman in a small village. She had sad eyes, a lined face and rough, gnarled hands that she folded before the minister as she pleaded with him in Tamil. When I asked him what she wanted, he said that all she was asking was that she get the Rs 100 monthly pension promised to her under a central government scheme for old age pensioners. She was a widow, she said, and had no means of support because her children had grown up and gone away to work in the city. The hundred rupees was all she had to live off but there was always a problem getting it because of red tape and insensitive officials, who routinely gave her a runaround before giving her the money.

It was not the sadness of the old lady8217;s story that makes me remember it so many years later but the stupidity of the pension scheme. What convoluted bureaucratic mind would have devised a scheme that disbursed crores of rupees so thinly that the end result was a hundred rupees. It was a small amount of money even then and the minister agreed that there was a great deal wrong with programmes of this kind.

Now that he is in his second incarnation as Finance Minister, can we hope that he will do something to rectify schemes of this kind or will he continue to throw good money after bad? The Government spends more than Rs 30,000 crore a year on programmes that are supposed to alleviate poverty but end up usually alleviating only the poverty of hundreds of lucky officials. This is because the schemes devised to alleviate poverty are too unwieldy to work and also because the delivery system at the village level is in almost total collapse.

Hospitals, schools, health centers, housing programmes, rural employment schemes are in such a decrepit state that if the Finance Minister does not acknowledge this and continues with the old tokenism, then all we will be doing is wasting massive amounts of taxpayers8217; money that could be much better spent. In our air-conditioned ivory towers, us political pundits and social reformers may debate the virtues of secularism and the evils of saffronisation, but what we appear not to have noticed is that the school system is too decrepit to deliver either 8216;8216;toxic saffronisation8217;8217; or virtuous secularism.

In the cities, education and healthcare may work in some decrepit sort of way. Not so in the villages. So when we demand that the Budget spend more on these areas, we actually do not know what we are talking about. It makes no difference to the poorest of the poor whether the budget size increases or not because he knows that if he really wants his sick child to be cured or his illiterate one to learn how to read, then he will have to rely on private doctors and private schools.

Will Chidambaram have the courage to admit this? Will the Prime Minister? If they do they will realise quickly that the way forward is to order a total revamp of existing programmes and rethink the whole idea on how poverty can in fact be alleviated.

If they look closely they may find that Naveen Patnaik won again in Orissa not just because he fought corruption so valiantly but because of an interesting scheme called Mission Shakti that funds the creation of self-help groups. The scheme started small when Naveen first became chief minister and today is believed to have helped set up more than 100,000 groups.

On my travels I came across one such group in a village near Bhubaneswar. The women had no idea what Mission Shakti was or that it was funded by the government. All they knew was that after setting up the group they had access to money in times of sickness and need and this had made all the difference to their lives.

The best thing about micro-credit schemes and self-help groups of the Mission Shakti kind is that to a very large degree, they eliminate the babus. This means that money that would otherwise have been spent on offices and homes for officials, salaries and administration goes directly to the people. Economists may exult over India8217;s economy having grown at its highest rate in 15 years, but nothing will really change unless we minimise the role of officials in our development schemes.

The Prime Minister, in his first address to the nation, emphasised the need to reform government urgently at 8216;8216;every level of governance8217;8217;. Let him put his money where his mouth is. Surely neither his government8217;s remote control nor its communist support system would object to this.