Rollback Rajasekhara

Union Power Minister P.M. Sayeed has just rained on Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy8217;s parade. He let it be known on Wednesday that those state governments that wanted to give free power to farmers must do so out of their own budgets. It is an unequivocal signal that the Centre is not planning to compromise on its book-keeping in order to subsidise the expensive and unfocused populism of state governments. As these columns have argued, for the AP government to provide free power to 23 lakh farmers is a hugely profligate measure, with the negatives far outweighing the positives.

The consequences of rushing to change established policy, without well-considered assessments and a careful scrutiny of alternative approaches in delivering on election promises, can be seriously impairing. Y.S. Rajasekhera Reddy will most assuredly discover this somewhere down the line but, by then, the damage may have already been done. In the exuberance of the victory moment, pragmatism is usually at a discount, yet it is the very quality that is required in the sometimes unpopular, often difficult, project of delivering governance that can actually transform a state and people.

The impetuosity that saw the Andhra chief minister go ahead on the free-power-for-farmers front may well prove the hallmark of his style. His government now vouches to review some of the decisions taken by the previous Chandrababu Naidu regime. If this means ending programmes and approaches associated with the old order for reasons of political expediency, it would be most unfortunate. Naidu may have ended up being taken to the cleaners by the voter, but that does not mean that all the initiatives his government undertook are beneath contempt. Indeed, if every successor government undid the gains of the earlier dispensation, there would be very little consolidation of the benefits of policy and investment. Therefore we can only urge Rollback Rajasekhara to find his feet and gain some much needed balance.