Opinion Jasmine Shah writes: Why the debate around revdi culture is crucial for India

Over the last seven years of its rule in Delhi, the AAP government has given birth to a distinct welfare model that prioritises investment in Delhi’s citizens. Transforming public education and public healthcare is at the heart of the AAP’s welfare model. Delhi government schools have seen an unprecedented transformation, be it in terms of their physical infrastructure, provision of world-class training for principals and teachers at reputed institutions such as IIMs in India and abroad, and innovative curriculum that has transformed the quality of learning in classrooms.

As a result, government schools in Delhi are now consistently performing better than their private peers and close to four lakh children have moved from private to government schools. The transformation has caught the attention of the world with the former US First Lady Melania Trump choosing to visit a “happiness class” in a Delhi government school in 2020 and The New York Times doing a front-page feature on the transformation of lives of millions of poor families in Delhi due to the AAP government’s education model.

The establishment of a universal healthcare system under the AAP government in Delhi presents a unique model too. Over 500 mohalla clinics provide free diagnosis, medicines and tests to around 65,000 people every day, while 38 government hospitals provide free and quality treatment to lakhs of patients every year, irrespective of their income levels or cost of treatment. A large-scale expansion is underway that will see the capacity of clinics, as well as hospitals, double by 2025. None of this comes cheap. The AAP government spends 40 per cent of its budget on education and health — the highest by any government in India.

The AAP government in Delhi also gives free electricity and water subsidy up to a certain level of consumption, spending close to 5 per cent of its budget on these two schemes. These targeted subsidies serve to boost the productivity of the most vulnerable citizens of Delhi besides allowing them to live a life of dignity. Yet, as per the CAG, the AAP government is the only government in India that has been running a revenue surplus budget each year for the last five years, doubling its budget from Rs 30,000 crore to Rs 60,000 crore during this period.

Contrast this with the expenditure by BJP governments in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — the three most prominent examples of BJP’s welfare model — which have been spending only 18 to 20 per cent of their budgets on education and health sectors for the past decade. None of them even claim to offer free and quality education or public healthcare system for all. Each of these states, much like the rest of India, is seeing a continuous migration of students from government to private schools, with Gujarat alone shutting down many government schools in the past decade. Accessing government schools and hospitals in these states is a mark of deprivation, not choice.

Nationally, too, the BJP government has fallen consistently short of its own targets of investing in education and health sectors. The Ayushman Bharat Yojana (PMJAY), touted as the silver bullet for meeting public healthcare needs for the masses, provides coverage for only a fraction of the population through the private sector-led insurance model, without ensuring accessible and quality health infrastructure across India. The pandemic exposed the shortcomings of this approach. India ranked 94 out of 107 nations in the Global Hunger Index in 2020, and 131 on the UN’s Human Development Index.

Has skimping on education and health meant that BJP-ruled states and the Centre are doing well fiscally? Not if you look at their budgets. The UP government has declared a fiscal deficit of Rs 81,000 crore for 2022-23, whereas Gujarat and MP have declared a fiscal deficit of Rs 36,000 crore and Rs 52,000 crore, respectively. The CAG has even called out Gujarat being at the risk of falling into a debt trap.

But it is the finances of the central government that should worry all of us. Since 2015, its total debt has ballooned from Rs 53 lakh crore to Rs 136 lakh crore. A series of corporate tax cuts have resulted in huge forgone revenues, during a period that also saw unemployment in India rise to the highest in 45 years. Around Rs 10 lakh crore of bad loans of rich corporates have been written off, largely from the books of public sector banks that operate under the close supervision of the government with seemingly little consequences for the 12,265 wilful defaulters.

So this is what the freebie politics debate boils down to. At one end is PM Modi and the BJP’s welfare model that consistently skimps on investing in the people of India and has no model of human development to showcase anywhere in India but regards giving runaway tax cuts and loan write-offs to corporates as an article of faith. At the other end is CM Kejriwal and the AAP’s welfare model that regards investing in education, health and basic services of the people of India as an article of faith and has done it successfully in Delhi while at the same time being prudent in managing public finances.

The ongoing debate on revdi politics puts forth these two very contrasting visions of what will make India great. And that is why it is the most important debate of our times.

The writer is Vice Chairperson, Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi