The FM is in denial

This would have been a piece in praise of P Chidambaram, but before I could write it he denied what he said. A shame because had he said wha...

This would have been a piece in praise of P Chidambaram, but before I could write it he denied what he said. A shame because had he said what he denies he said, it could have been 8212; in the humble view of your humble columnist 8212; the most significant economic statement by a major Indian politician since Dr Manmohan Singh once courageously admitted before he became Prime Minister that the socialist dream had failed. If the Finance Minister had dared admit to what he now denies he said, he would have taken India a step forward by not just accepting the failure of the socialist dream but suggesting how we should go forward from there.

The Finance Minister8217;s comments came in Chennai at the release of a book called India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty. According to the account I read of this event, in The Asian Age, Chidambaram blamed the 8216;8216;governance model adopted during the first 30 years after Independence8217;8217; for India8217;s poverty. Heavy-handed State intervention, the Minister reportedly said, killed initiative and enterprise to such an extent that a sarpanch recently wrote to the President of India asking him to sanction funds from the District Collector to clean the village tank. The Minister was then quoted as saying, 8216;8216;Fifty years ago, the villagers would have done the job themselves simply out of a sense of survival, sense of responsibility, sense of pride, but now they want the collector to get it done.8217;8217; Chidambaram reportedly added that the price we paid for this surrendering of individual responsibility to the State was the 3.5 GDP growth that translated to our 1 per cent per capita growth that was mocked as the Hindu rate of growth. 8216;8216;It will take 200 years to wipe out poverty,8217;8217; he added.

The Minister then said, and mercifully he does not deny this, the only way forward was through the devolution of power and resources to the 8216;8216;lowest levels of the administration.8217;8217; The problem is that you cannot have part two of the idea without first admitting that part one was wrong. You can only dismantle the huge, useless, corrupt infrastructure of controls set up in the first thirty years of Independence if you have the courage to admit that they were wrongly created.

As someone who spends more time traveling in remote and rural parts than most ministers do, may I give you two examples of how important the admission of mistakes is for change to happen. Last week, while the Finance Minister was making the speech he never made, I was traveling in remote villages in Nandurbar in search of why children were dying of hunger despite the country8217;s godowns bursting at the seams and despite the more than Rs 40,000 crores that the Central Government alone spends on anti-poverty schemes. Here is what I found.

Like the Finance Minister, the vast network of officials set up to take care of the interests of the poor was in denial. In the vicinity of Akalkuwa, where many of the deaths have occurred, there were villages in which families of six and seven children were living on Rs 10 a day. This meant that no member of the family was allowed to eat more than a rupee worth of food a day, so small children were being given one meal a day of watery khichdi. The officials I met refused to describe this as starvation and chose instead to call it 8216;8216;malnutrition8217;8217;. Their contribution to doing their bit for these desperately hungry children was to give the family Rs 40 a day if a child was admitted to hospital suffering from 8216;8216;malnutrition8217;8217;. The only people doing what should have been done to help these children was a local madrasa, which was sending bags of grain and gur to needy families. This is all that needed to be done but when I tried to have a discussion with the Collector, who sat in a brand new, pink stone palazzo of an office in faraway Nandurbar, he said he knew my views from my writings in this column and did not wish to discuss anything with me. This is just as well, I told him, because I take a very poor view of Collectors who do not even visit villages in which children are starving.

The Collector8217;s job is irrelevant in modern India. He has to go. But, before I get to this let me give you my second example. In Rajasthan, some months ago, I came across NGOs who were helping villagers rebuild the old water channels and tanks that had fallen into disuse. Chidambaram mentioned them in his Budget speech and offered support. Through the Collector?

When I asked why they had been allowed to fall into disuse I was told by villagers that it was because after Independence 8212; in those crucial first thirty years 8212; they were given to understand that all of them would now get piped water out of taps. Now that they know this water is not coming they are trying to go back to the old systems.

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Undoubtedly, if Collectors and their minions hear of this they will intervene on the grounds that the government has a scheme. The Collector heads a system that has been irrelevant for years but no Prime Minister has dared admit this. Devolution of power to the village level cannot happen as long as the Collector remains in place. Only when he goes will funds meant for village development go to the people they are meant for.

If this happens India could become a rich country in twenty years. If not, the Finance Minister is right when he says it will take another 200 years for us to win the fight against poverty. Meanwhile, we will continue to live with the terrible shame of small babies living on one meal a day and the worse shame of our officials calling this 8216;8216;malnutrition8217;8217; and not starvation. If only the Finance Minister had said what he says he did not say.

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