Opinion Budgets without real budgeting
Before writing this,I spent a moment wondering why I find the Budget session of Parliament so depressing.
Before writing this,I spent a moment wondering why I find the Budget session of Parliament so depressing. My deadline happened to be on the day that Mamata Banerjee presented her Railway Budget and as I watched her announce her little gifts for West Bengal,the common man and even us hacks,the answer came quicker than I expected. Visions of Tianjin railway station floated before my eyes with its spotless platforms and fine shops and cafes. And the fast train I took from there to Beijing that travelled at more than 300 kilometres an hour. I realised instantly that what depresses me about the Budget session of Parliament is that it is a grim reminder of how little our political class has changed and how little they understand the new India.
There was a time when most Indians reveled in our poverty and shabby infrastructure because we believed in the socialist vision. It was possible then to fool all the people nearly all the time. Indians were ready to accept that although the railways did not work so well and roads took decades to build,this was our socialist lot. Most Indians at that time did not have access to private television channels and only the very rich could afford to travel abroad,so the average Indian had no idea what the rest of the world looked like. In rural India,there were millions of Indians who did not know what the nearest towns name was and there was a general contentment with life as it was. This is no longer the case but our political leaders appear not to have noticed.
So the railway minister was praised by the Prime Minister for giving us a Budget for the common man because she did not raise the price of tickets. Has he not noticed that the common man is sick and tired of crowded trains and filthy railway stations? Has he not noticed that the commonest Indian can now see what Chinas railway stations look like on his television screen? Has he not noticed that the commonest Indian wants modern,clean and efficient railway services even if he has to pay a little more for his tickets? The railways can afford to give us better services by making commercial use of its vast urban properties but for this,we need a minister with new ideas.
By the time we get to the national Budget,deep gloom usually descends upon me and my laptop because I know exactly what is going to happen. The Budget will be read at length by the Finance Minister in language too complicated for the common man to understand. Our TV studio experts will then analyse it ad nauseum. The Opposition parties will say it is a terrible Budget but will pass it happily without even a pretence of debate. This is the reason why most of our money gets wasted every year on government undertakings that are bottomless pits (like Air India and the railways) and on schemes like the MGNREGA that are bottomless pits of corruption. As Surjit Bhalla pointed out on this page recently (February 17),our national welfare schemes lose us every year what we allegedly lost in the 2G scandal. Ask any honest chief minister and he will confirm that this scheme is the cause of massive corruption that has a trickle down effect.
The same money spent to build rural roads,health centres,schools and nutrition services for the very poor could have transformed India. Similarly,if the vast and vastly expensive ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) were decentralised and the money spent on that most important ingredient of child welfarenutritionwe would not have 45 per cent of Indian children officially declared malnourished.
There are other things we should be discussing in the Budget session like the amount of money we lose on delayed infrastructure projects. It runs into figures on such a scale as to make the 2G scandal look like no more than a minor offence. And why is it we do not discuss the amount of taxpayers money that is being wasted on the constituency funds we allow our MPs? Why should the Finance Minister not follow the example of Nitish Kumar and abolish the scheme on the grounds that it leaks like a sieve?
What depresses me most about the Budget session is that I am convinced India could easily afford to build the infrastructure we need to catch up with China as well as find the money to end poverty,if we could only improve our housekeeping. We need the government to spend less on itself and we need the government to acknowledge that we need to stop wasting money on schemes and commercial ventures that are bottomless pits. Will we ever get
a Finance Minister who admits this?
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