Opinion We cannot have two governments

There are other problems. The most important of these is that once you get people used to virtually free food grain,you cannot ever cut supplies without risking unpopularity at election time. In states where electricity and water is free for farmers,you cannot change the system even when you know that in states like Punjab the land is being degraded for good because of falling levels of groundwater.

Sonia’s jholawala povertarians have already inflicted upon us a rural employment guarantee scheme which beguiles the poor into believing it is for their good but which is much more beneficial for the officials who manage it. A hundred days of annual employment at Rs 100 a day serves mostly to keep poor people in perpetual poverty but the thousands of crore rupees that oil the functioning of the scheme usually end up lining the pockets of a lot of unworthy officials. In the words of a political worker who shall remain nameless,‘Everyone gets a cut right from top to bottom so the vested interests are huge. The corruption will only be revealed if some of those getting their cut are suddenly excluded.’

My personal problem with Soniaji’s leftist advisors is that their economic ideas are stale and unworkable. They reek of those ghareebi hatao years when removing poverty became just an election slogan. Analyse the schemes suggested by the advisory council and you will see that they pay no attention to problems of implementation. Soniaji’s advisors,in my humble opinion,are a bunch of well-meaning goofs with a lot of goofy ideas in their jholas. What is more worrying is that they appear to have a vested interest in poverty. Their jobs depend on it.

If they really wanted to solve India’s horrific problems of food insecurity,they would find workable solutions. Allow me an example from a field trip in Nandurbar when children were dying of starvation. I have used it before to illustrate how ludicrous a scheme like the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) is,but it cannot be repeated enough. Under this scheme children,whose parents could prove that they were starving,would be brought to Akalkowa hospital and fed Rs 40 worth of food a day. When they showed signs of recovery,they would be sent home to starve again because their parents could afford no more than Rs 10 a day to feed the whole family. If the vast sums spent on ICDS were used instead to open free kitchens in the villages where the starvation deaths were happening,it would have cost less and children would not have starved. The only people who worked this out ran an Islamic seminary on the edge of Akalkowa. They used village women to distribute hot meals in the few villages they could reach.

Since Soniaji’s advisors are all urban povertarians who have little knowledge of rural realities,they never come up with workable ideas. So,into a broken public distribution system,they pour more food grain. Do they not know that nearly seventy percent of the food grain already in the public distribution system ends up in the open market? The National Advisory Council has become an expensive,irresponsible public nuisance. As long as Soniaji was happy being just the power behind the throne,her arrangement with the Prime Minister worked reasonably well. Now that she has developed a taste for policy making and governance,she must be made accountable. Let her become prime minister and take personal responsibility for her silly ideas.