The question is of 145;implementability146;

Do you speak English, own a colour television set and watch the BBC?

Do you speak English, own a colour television set and watch the BBC? If you answer yes to even two of those questions, trot off instantly to your village headman and demand that he give you a hundred days of employment under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Don8217;t believe me? You think I speak in jest? That I mock your intelligence? Switch on your TV, my disbelieving friend, and watch a news bulletin on the BBC, NDTV or any other channel of your choice and you will come upon a series of colourful skits by the Union Ministry of Rural Development that will assure you of the truth of what I am saying.

When I saw the first one in English on the BBC, I thought I had stumbled accidentally upon one of those badly acted dramatic efforts that Doordarshan was famous for until competition from private channels came along. In this skit, a group of young men run into the village mukhiyaji, who asks them where they are going. They tell him that they are off to the city to look for work and he orders them to go instead and register for a hundred days of work under the employment guarantee scheme. The next skit I saw was of a group of well-fed, relatively well-dressed women who berate mukhiyaji for not providing them with decent working conditions. They know their rights, they tell him, and he looks suitably chastened.

Slow though I am at understanding the mysterious ways in which government works in our Bharat 8216;mahaan8217; it became clear to me by the third skit that taxpayers8217; money was being squandered on what is possibly the most nonsensical advertising campaign ever. Who is the Ministry of Rural Development targeting? If it is the supposed beneficiaries of the employment guarantee scheme, then we need to ask why someone who owns a colour television set and watches the BBC needs a hundred days of employment a year. If it is not the beneficiaries, then we need to ask who exactly the Government of India is trying to convince. Most importantly, we need to ask why crores of rupees are being wasted on such a meaningless campaign.

Television advertising is not cheap, and judging by the frequency of the advertising skits, my estimate is that the ministry is spending no less than Rs 50 lakh a day on promoting its employment guarantee scheme.

If the Government of India has money to spare it could spend it in better ways. What about a campaign that urges poor, illiterate mothers to spend ten paise a day on buying an iron tablet for their children and themselves? The idea came from Swati Piramal, whom I interviewed recently for a television series I am doing for NDTV on economic reforms. I asked her why public healthcare in India was such an appalling mess and she answered that it was because our policymakers had concentrated on keeping drug prices low without understanding the importance of creating health awareness. What is the point of an iron pill for ten paise if mothers do not know that it could save their children from anaemia?

Public hygiene is another thing that the average rural Indian is oblivious of, so a campaign that extolled the virtues of not defecating on beaches, railway tracks and other public places would transform our villages. In villages that have put an end to public defecation, disease rates have halved and environmental cleanliness has doubled. Should government not tell other villages of these benefits?

Another campaign that could transform rural life would be a campaign to promote rainwater harvesting. The ancient practice of keeping village tanks in good repair needs to be revived urgently if we want to find solutions to our water problems. If the urgency is missing, it is mostly because in more remote less-literate villages they have allowed the village tank to rot in the hope that they will soon be getting municipal water. An intelligent television campaign would make a huge difference.

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If proof were needed that the Employment Guarantee Scheme is nothing more than expensive tokenism in the name of poverty alleviation, it comes in this ludicrous advertising campaign. The reason why people like me had doubts about the scheme from day one was because grandiose centrally planned schemes of this kind have never worked in the past. The problem with centrally planned poverty alleviation in a country the size of a continent is that it is that they fail the implementability test. Nobody knows this better than the prime minister and the finance minister, but they have been forced by their boss to entertain the views of barefoot economists and sundry other leftists. It8217;s time this gang of well-meaning 8216;povertarians8217; was booted out.