Seven reforms the Left cannot complain about

8226; Increase the education cess to three per cent: Now, can the Left do anything else but applaud. But do not give this money away also to Arjun Singh8217;s literacy, primary education and mid-day meal schemes. Set half of this additional amount thus collected aside under a special purpose vehicle like the National Highway Authority to double the number of Central schools and Navodaya Vidyalayas this year and then to add the same number each successive year.

The Left8217;s idea is not just to improve literacy and provide free lunches but to also enable talented young people from rural and semi-urban India to compete with their richer, more privileged, 8216;8216;convented8217;8217; or public schooled urban counterparts. Every year in the admission season, you find endless queues of people outside the HRD minister8217;s office only to beg for admission for their children to these truly excellent government schools. Their quality is underlined by their graduates8217; success in the brutally competitive tests for IAS etc, IITs, IIMs and medical colleges. Then why should their number be so small? This is an entirely unfair scarcity created by our system at the cost of the underprivileged.

8226; Break, but expand the Ministry of HRD: Arjun Singh must not be denied any of his turf though it is tempting to get him moved upstairs as His Holiness the Minister for Detoxification inspired by Iran8217;s ministry of religious guidance. But give him two young and powerful ministers of state choose out of the younger MPs, Rahul Gandhi, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot looking after university and technical education, respectively and give them the rest of the additional cess, at least another Rs 1000 crore or so. Our universities are dead in the water. Most of them spend almost all their budgets on salaries. Our technical institutions have to modernise and to also expand and increase in number. All this is far too much to handle for one minister, particularly when he sees his main job as detoxification and not reforming the sector most vital for our future and yet most moribund of all.

8226; Privatise playthings of the rich: What problem can the Left have if the government pulled out of running tourism facilities? So sell India Tourism Destruction oops, Freudian slip Corporation, take away its monopoly over our duty free shops8212;imagine the state peddling scotch to the rich flying in and out of India. Sell the five-star hotels that Arun Shourie did not have the time to sell. Yes, there is a question about AITUC8217;s trade unions at these hotels, but they could be looked after.

8226; Civil aviationise the railways: Don8217;t privatise the railways. But auction routes to any qualified bidders to run trains on selected routes at high speed and with modern facilities. This does not affect services for the poor. In fact, it brings in additional revenues to the railways and saves resources which could be used instead to take more trains to rural and backward areas, or even to the Rail minister8217;s sasural.

8226; Build self-reliance in defence production: Great idea, you8217;d say. But there is a catch. All the talk of self-reliance in defence so far has reduced our armament industry to a 8216;8216;banana republic8217;8217;. What that means is, every time the armed forces ask for a weapons system our government research and production organisations say humko yeh banana hai we must make this. And nothing gets made. So two decades after we started working on a main battle tank, we are still at least a decade mark my words from seeing the real thing. What if you had invited the private sector, our own swadeshi companies, gave them the GSQRs general staff qualitative requirements and asked them to bid? Chances are, a company like Tata Motors would give you an acceptable machine within three years. They will outsource what technologies and components they need to outsource and give you what you need. The Left can have no shame in that, given that even the current MBT under development has its engine and key components imported? This will help Indian armed forces, self-reliance and, of course, our industry. But this will challenge the totally self-serving monopoly of the Ministry of Defence Production.

8226; Limit LPG subsidy to one cylinder a month: LPG is most obscene of all our subsidies. So why not give each household 12 coupons, each valid for one specific month of the year, to buy their LPG cylinder at a subsidised price. Most needy households are unlikely to consume more gas than that in a month anyway. And how are these coupons to be delivered? Maybe a mechanism can be found to deliver the coupon to them along with the receipt for their monthly electricity bill. Richer households that consume more gas will pay a market-determined price. Who will object to that?

8226; And finally, take me out of the 9.5 per cent EPF loot: The Left has forced the government to pay 9.5 per cent tax free interest on our EPF deposits. But who benefits? Nearly 95 per cent of the depositors have corpuses of less than a lakh, so how much do they take home by way of interest. The real benefit comes to higher paid people who can park not just their statutory 12 per cent but any amount out of their salaries at 9.5 per cent interest with total government security, and no tax and then get the exchequer to subsidise them at the cost of the poor. Why not at least amend the Act to say two things: that nobody including me can contribute more than a certain maximum amount to this state-subsidised scheme and then, to tax at withdrawal any interest incomes beyond a maximum, say, Rs 50,000 per year. Now that does not sound unreasonable. You are only denying a most scandalous freebie to the creamy layer among the salaried classes.

As I said earlier, this list is merely indicative. I am sure many of our readers have other ideas that will help the cause of reform as well as answer the concerns of the Left. So please write these to us and we will publish them.