Modelling ambitions

Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi wants Bhilwara to be a developmental model for the rest of the country. The ministry has poured nearly Rs 300 crore into the area,making sure it receives a concentrated dose of all the government schemes on offer,fine-tuning their application and ensuring that they work perfectly in sync from NREGA to the rural livelihoods mission,the backward region grant fund and more. In short,Bhilwara will be a petri dish of government largesse. All fringe benefits to Joshi,whose constituency it is,are purely coincidental.

The electoral fray is Joshis natural element he is widely credited with the Congresss surprising and satisfying win of 19 out of 25 Lok Sabha seats across Rajasthan. Though he stewarded the partys state unit to victory,Joshi gave one-man,one-vote a whole new meaning when he lost out on chief ministership by a single vote. That psychological blow probably explains why Joshi is leaving nothing to chance this time,lavishing attention on his capricious constituency and keeping his own interests paramount even as rural development minister. And indeed,rural development is a grab-bag of patronage opportunities,theres something for everyone. The rest of India should be so lucky.

While Joshi is certainly not the first politician in power to tend his constituency like a fragile plant,whats particularly dissembling is the way he claims Bhilwara could show the rest of the country how its done. In fact,it would be misleading and inaccurate if these interventions feed into larger conclusions about the schemes themselves. Pilot projects must necessarily be randomly assigned,for any meaningful evaluation. So lets just call it what it is: an exercise in favour-mongering,narrow politics-as-usual.