Paved with good intentions

The Constitution specifies that the prime responsibility of the panchayats is the “planning and implementation” of programmes relating to the economic and social development of rural India. It is precisely because the bureaucratic delivery of development has been the biggest disaster of independent India that Parliament enacted this, the longest and most detailed amendment. Yet, Naidu’s guidelines (para 3.2) says “the programme will be planned, co-ordinated and implemented” through the executing agencies identified and so designated by the “State Government/ UT Administration”. Monitoring will be by a state-level standing committee “ideally headed by the chief secretary” — since when has this been the `ideal’ arrangement? At the centre, an empowered committee, chaired (ideally?) by the secretary, rural development, and comprising six other babus will bless or damn Rs-2500 crore worth of proposals every year! The best the panchayats can hope for is that “suitable linkages” will be established “inthis behalf with the district rural development agencies (DRDAs)”. DRDAs are an anachronism from the pre-constitution amendment of a distant past. They are institutions designed to be dominated by the collector/district magistrate and his army of bureaucrats and technocrats. Only the most muscle-bound of the local politicians gets a look-in. The ordinary panch or sarpanch is nowhere to be found in DRDA meetings. Worst of all, Venkaiah Naidu’s eight pages of guidelines entirely exclude from the planning and implementation of this the most significant exercise ever in rural development the district planning committees, elected by and from amongst the members of the panchayats and nagarpalikas, which is a constitutional obligation under Part IX A of the Constitution. Naidu deserves to be impeached for this breach of constitutional propriety. Except that the poor fellow is probably still trying to read and understand the babu-speak of the guidelines for which he is nominally responsible: it is his officers whohave taken him for this ride.

Paragraph 3.4 of the guidelines specifies that it is the project implementing unit which will “formulate a master plan for each block”. The master plan will, of course, go to the governing body of the DRDA, dominated by MPs and MLAs but from which is excluded for all practical purposes the poor villagers, or their grassroots representatives, for whom the master plan is allegedly designed. Contempt for the ordinary people is for Venkaiah Naidu the preferred way. In my childish naivete, I did not for a moment think that eight years after Parliament enacted the constitution amendments, Naidu would be so negligent of his constitutional responsibilities. Immediately after the Budget announcement, therefore, I toured as many panchayats of my constituency as I could informing people of this wonderful new scheme. I arranged for lakhs of handbills to be printed and circulated through my party workers to virtually every household in the constituency. I also had prepared a compendium of all the rural roads asked forduring my regular rural tours.

By July last year, I had submitted to the collector, the state government and the union government (in both Tamil and English) lists of the hundreds of roads, with a rough estimate of length and breadth that the people themselves desired. The entire exercise has been a colossal waste of time. The collector and his staff, with the patronage doubtless of the state government powers-that-be, has decided of his own sweet will which roads are to be built, which prioritised, of what length, what breadth and what quality. Three of the nine blocks of my constituency have been left out altogether and the others are to be graced with some two to three kilometres of road length each — that’s it. By sheer coincidence, at least one of these roads is one of the highest priorities urged on me by my constituents. For which small mercy may the Lord be praised!

I said a while earlier that Venkaiah Naidu’s minions had spent 10 whole months manufacturing these tedious guidelines. They have done one more thing: divide the loot between different states. Unsurprisingly, the two biggest beneficiary states are those of Venkaiah Naidu and Yashwant Sinha. They will protest that their states are among the least developed. So, it is the condition of their states, not the incidental fact of their being the ministers in charge, which accounts for the bonanza. But it is because they themselves know that the allocations they have made will not stand up to public scrutiny that they ensured the repeated postponement of meetings of the parliamentary standing committee which might have asked some awkward questions. Fortunately, democracy has a way of over-turning fascist decision-making. The standing committee’s report will be before Parliament this Budget session. Then the can of worms will be well and truly opened.

The entire programme is conceived for the bureaucrats by the technocrats for the greater glory of Naidu. The people for whom it is conceived hardly get a peek.