What a poor record

The figures speak for themselves. Under the Employment Assurance Scheme, designed to provide employment at minimum wages for anyone who asks for it, the number of mandays of employment generated slumped from well over 400 million in 1998-99, a good year for agriculture, to under 200 million last year, a bad year. There are two sc-hemes which combine employment generation with asset creation. One is allegedly run by the village panchayats and its asset creation component concentrates on the individual. It is called the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana (JG-SY).

The other is allegedly run by the intermediate panchayats and is directed at asset creation for self-help groups of 10 to 20 persons voluntarily coming together. It is called the Swaranajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana(SGSY).Under JGSY, a little over 375 million mandays of employment were generated in 1998-99, a year when reviving agriculture moderated the need for the direct assault on poverty. Last year, 1999-2000, when agricultural revival ran out of steam and the poor were most in need of the state coming to their aid, JGSY performance in the first three quarters of the year collapsed to a third of what it had been earlier and is unlikely to be much more than a half of it when the final figures for the full year are in. SGSY has fared even worse.

As against 17 lakh beneficiaries assisted in 1998-99, a mere 2.46 lakh “swarozgaris” had been brought into the net of group assistance till December 1999. It is unlikely that final figures will cross a quarter of the previous year’s performance.

So with the Indira Awas Yojana, started in the eighties as a housing scheme for scheduled caste/tribe, below-the-poverty-line families but now extended to a host of other categories, including families of personnel killed in action. Notwithstanding the widening of the coverage, the number of houses actually built dropped by nearly half from over eight lakh in 1998-99 to a mere 4.5 lakh in the first nine months of 1999-2000. Officials desperately hope the final figure will go up by another lakh, no more.

Meanwhile, a comparison of financial outlays with physical achievement shows that, whereas the financial outlay has increased by nearly 50 per cent between 1995-96 and 1998-99, the physical achievement has actually declined. The Department of Rural Development is not only getting a smaller bang for its buck, it has unforgivably allowed poverty alleviation schemes to lag 25-50 per cent below the previous year’s level in a year when the poor have been kicked in the belly by stagnation in overall agricultural output and decline in such dryland crops as coarse cereals, oilseeds and pulses where the absence or inadequacy of irrigation makes poverty more intense than in areas more favoured by God or man.

What accounts for th-is pathetic performance in a time of desperate need? Bureaucratic sloth? Or the games that politicians play? It is easy to blame the babus; they cannot ta-lk back. Moreover, which of us has not suffered the knife edge of the civil servant’s uncivil contempt for those he is supposed to serve, his inefficiency, his arrogance, his corruption? All of these are present in much more than the average measure in programmes for the poor, for the poor are so little empowered to hit back. But, in the instant case, it would be reasonable to assume that the babus’ sins were much the same in 1998-99 as in 1999-2000. Why then this dramatic drop in performance?

The root-cause lies in the BJP’s approach to poverty eradication. If an absurdly rich man like Ruia or Hinduja runs into a problem, Yashwant Sinha and Pramod Mahajan rush to the aid of the afflicted, as so graphically recounted by Sinha’s hand-picked adviser, Mohan Guruswamy. But when the desperately poor are desperately afflicted, there is nothing to show that the the powers-that-be give their undivided priority attention to what is going wrong.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, there has not been a single key meeting last year involving the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister and the chief ministers aimed at ensuring that the lag in anti-poverty programmes is turned to dynamism when the poor are running out of both employment and assets in the face of declining rural real incomes. It has all been left to the department and the department is entrusted to a political lightweight.

How many meetings of the poor and their representatives has Yashwant Sinha addressed compared to the time and attention so lavishly bestowed on CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM and its members, collectively and, disgracefully, individually? But why blame Sinha alone? Where was Vajpayee? There was a time 1971 to 1989 when prime ministers spent more of their time on the poor than on any other of their myriad tasks. Indeed, I doubt that the PM knows, or has cared to ask, how anti-poverty programmes have been handled. All that the BJP has done is disrupt ongoing programmes, merge and unmerge them like amoebae and hydras, and bestow on them fancy, Sanskritised names.

No better proof of the insincerity of their attitude to poverty alleviation is available than the Finance Minister’s Budget speeches of 1999 and 2000. In the previous year, he invoked the panchayats 15 times; this time just once. In the previous year, he announced a whole slew of new or rechristened programmes for the poor; there was not a single reference to any of them in this year’s speech. Not even to the Year of the Gram Sabha proclaimed with such panache in February 1999. It did not merit a single mention this year. It does not figure at all in the department’s performance budget.

Aiyar is a Congress MP but these views are his own