Year of inflexion

Compromises on privatisation have been extracted by the great patriotic Left which seems to be on the payroll of Chinese capitalists (is there a Mitrokhin Zedong lurking somewhere in the bowels of Indian communism today?). Our gorgeous navaratnas will slowly but surely be driven to irrelevance as the inevitable political and bureaucratic “interference” strangles them. After they have been bled white (as the oil majors are being right now with insane pricing that favours the middle and upper classes) in one way or another, they will then be eligible for privatisation when no one wants them! Clearly the greatest beneficiaries of this destruction in value will be the “foreign” hand, this time not of wicked American capitalists, who have anyway vacated much of the industrial space that our navaratnas occupy!

Compromises on infrastructure development are even more tragic. Mr Prime Minister, our great kings of antiquity, Ashoka and Sher Shah, believed in building roads which we still remember them by. Your satraps are unwilling and unable to build flyovers, let alone roads. They are however always willing, nay eager, to condone ugly, unsafe, illegal constructions belonging to their cronies! The saddest part of the present state of affairs is that the initiative of your predecessor in the area of highway construction has lost energy and slowed down. Sorry to revert to history. The wise Moghul, Akbar, had no hesitation in building on the efforts of the Pathan — Sher Shah — who had preceded him. Surely Akbar is a good role model for you and your deputies!

Compromises on reform in labour laws mean that even a small measure of relief to the small business establishments, which are the locomotors of job growth, has been postponed, or more likely abandoned. The erudite economist surely knows that our current laws discourage job creation, subsidise capital-intensity and penalise labour-intensity in a country where so many of our fellow citizens are without jobs. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

The jobless millions of India surely deserve more then mere rhetoric. Compromises on human capital development are the most tragic. A constitutional amendment further extending pernicious reservations specifically in order to negate an intelligent pronouncement by our judiciary is not what we need. If merit had not been the determinant, would our leader have topped the tripos at Cambridge, or got his doctorate at Oxford? Surely, what is good for him is good for other citizens of India? In that same vein, how come all Cabinet ministers of every ideological, casteist and religious persuasion send their children and grandchildren to English medium schools, while the children of the poor are condemned to go to rashtrabhasha-medium government schools? Should not the HRD minister be abolishing this class distinction by converting all government schools into English-medium ones?

The danger of falling in love with stock market indices and declaring early victory should not be the legacy of 2005. The country faces immense problems. A seven or eight per cent growth, while fantastic in terms of our past record, will not be sufficient to abolish poverty in our lifetimes. We must free up the “animal spirits” which our prime minister is so fond of, and go for the double digit bogie. “Inclusiveness” is his other theme. Surely a series of mid-sized initiatives involving a partnership of the state, private and civic sectors can be pushed through to attack both malnutrition and education? We do not need more documents from the commissars of Yojana Bhavan. We do need a visible leadership encouraging the best elements in our society to come together to abandon our religion of excuses, inertia and gridlock, and act. A healthy educated citizenry is an asset and a source of pride to all of us. During the reign of the great English sovereign, Elizabeth I, the literacy rate crossed 50 per cent. England’s achievements after that had a historic inevitability about it. Can it be Manmohan’s legacy that under him India finally had all her children in school, learning useful skills and doing so on a full stomach with a nourishing meal inside them?

The Employment Guarantee Scheme, if imaginatively implemented, can confer on millions of our citizens, the dignity of having job, not receiving a dole. If the wage rate is not set too high to attract rent-seekers, and if we simultaneously enact labour market reform, we may be able to put in place a system where people can make their entry into the workforce and then move on to a vigourous growing private sector. This is an effort definitely worth pursuing. It is not given to many leaders to lead a billion humans at an inflexion point in history, when potential and realisation can in fact meet. In 2006, we must hope that our prime minister will take “at the flood” the “tide in the affairs” of India and lead us all on to fortune. On this sanguine hopeful note, let us close the accounts of last year and open the accounts of this one.

The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com