By Santwana Bhattacharya / Delhi
Faced with multiple challenges on social and mainstream media, the Congress top brass has been allowing unprecedented moves. Setting up three separate departments headed by relatively younger party members — Ajay Maken for quick communication with media, Sandeep Dikshit for research and input supply and Deepender Hooda for Twitter/Facebook — shifting the old war-horses, was one such measure.
Another move has been to change the “internal dynamics” of the party. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has been holding meetings, two states at a time, at 24 Akbar Road every second or third day, turning the AICC headquarters into temporary fortress manned by SPG men at the gates.
By Shankkar Aiyar (Guest Writer)
India seems to produce a political paradox almost every week. Indians were told that overall poverty levels fell from 37 per cent in 2004-05 to 21.9 per cent in 2011-12. This did not trigger any review of the idea to give 67 per cent of the population subsidised grains. The chasm between statistics and political arithmetic persists.
Hidden in the reams of data on poverty reduction is an interesting fact. United Andhra Pradesh is among those states which brought down poverty the most. Since 2004, when K Chandrashekar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti was promised Telangana, poverty in united Andhra Pradesh dropped from 29.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent in 2011-12. And the absolute number of those below poverty line has come down from 235 lakh to 78 lakh. World over, poverty reduction is an accepted indicator of growth and governance. This should be an accepted precept in India too. Not among politicians facing an election! On Tuesday, the coalition members of the UPA formally approved the creation of Telangana.
This is not about the creation of Telangana. It is about debating what drives growth and good governance. Continuing with the measure of poverty reduction, consider the states along with Andhra Pradesh which have brought down poverty the most between 2004 and 2012: Tripura (25.95 per cent), poverty-ridden Odisha (by an astonishing 24.6 per cent), Bihar and Maharashtra (by 20.8 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (by 18.1 per cent). There is no obvious commonality—Bihar and Tripura (as indeed Telangana will be) are land-locked states while others have access to ports. Now consider the performance of the newly formed and land-locked states of Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Uttarakhand has outdone most states bringing down poverty by 21.44 per cent but its siblings Naxal-hit Chhattisgarh (9.4 per cent) and Jharkhand (8.3 per cent) haven’t done well.
Fact is, whether it is economics or politics, outcomes are determined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Smaller size states promise access to the citizens and easier operations but good governance also needs enlightened political leadership. When Jharkhand was carved out, Lalu Yadav had said Bihar was left with floods, droughts and poverty while Jharkhand walked away with riches. Turns out Bihar has done twice as well as resource-rich Jharkhand. Thanks to political instability, Jharkhand has been subjected to a musical chair of nine chief ministers—including three terms of Arjun Munda, two of Shibhu Soren and a term under the one-man-majority of Madhu Koda. In the beginning of the millennium, it was argued that size matters and that states which are smaller are better governed. Size may matter, but size is not all.
The elephant in the room, which no committee or commission talks about, is rampant centralisation. The operations of state governments are pretty much dictated by the writ and fancies of governments at the Centre. Under the Constitution, bulk of the taxes are collected by the Centre and allocated through the finance commission to different states. Indians paid a sum total of Rs 14.94 lakh in taxes in 2012. The Centre itself collected Rs 9.32 lakh crore of which Rs 2.67 lakh crore, or 29 paise per rupee, was shared with the states. A large chunk of the remainder is spent on the states—directed by ideas from the Planning Commission and dictated by reigning political ideology.
In the 11th Plan, the Centre spent nearly Rs 7 lakh crore on Centrally sponsored schemes. This will shoot up to over Rs 15 lakh crore in the 12th Plan (2012-2017). The states can only suggest changes but don’t have a say. For instance, since 2006, the Centre has spent over `1.6 lakh crore on MGNREGS. The states may perhaps want to spend this “dole budget” differently—put a condition for creation of assets in the rural economy—but it is the Centre which decides. Policies on every major issue—be it education, health, agriculture or approach to urbanisation—is dictated, funded and regulated from Delhi. There are at least 18 ministries at the Centre which have no business to exist. There is no real logic why the Centre must have ministries for subjects that are state administered.
And it is not just the Centre which centralises. The states are worse offenders and deny panchayats, zilla parishads and municipalities the autonomy to plan and decide. If small is always beautiful and efficient, why are India’s cities—the smallest geographical units—so badly governed? Why do the middle class urban Indians in Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore have to suffer poor services and pot-holed roads? It is because the municipal bodies are virtually run by the diktat of state governments. Former Maharashtra CM, the late Vilasrao Deshmukh, pithily told this columnist: “What the Centre does to the states, the states do to local self-governments!”
The cry for smaller states is less about representation and more about real aspirations. Size may matter. Big could be bold and beautiful too. Bigger states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu do better by leveraging the state’s output and budgets for intervention and investment. So let’s forget formulaic solutions and worry about formats. In a democracy, every vote is sacrosanct. Voters vote for change, not to be presented with fait accompli. And delivery of governance is dictated by devolution, not dialects. India turns 66 this month. Let not petty political cartography obfuscate the real reasons for failure. Let not India get lost in transmogrification.
(About the Writer: Shankkar Aiyar is the author of Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change.)
By Paagal Patrkaar / Delhi
In a move that has left all the political opponents baffled, Congress has submitted an application to the Election Commission of India requesting permission to use the left hand as a legitimate party symbol.
Congress was earlier using its right hand.
“This will silence all those who had been accusing Congress of not changing anything in the country,” party spokesperson Manish Tewari claimed, “This is a big ticket reform and will usher the nation into a new era.”Tewari further disclosed that the ground breaking idea was proposed by party Vice President and youth icon Rahul Gandhi.
“Indians are 10% left-handed,” Rahul explained, “I mean, 10% of the Indians are left-handed. Not many parties have been taking care of this minority group, so we have taken a lead.”
When this writer pointed out that it was just a token step and didn’t really mean anything, he was asked to leave the press conference. Later this reporter apologized and promised to take notes with his left hand for the rest of the presser.
Rahul Gandhi further claimed that a left hand as election symbol will also symbolize party’s left bias in policy matters, which should attract a clear and loud support from intellectuals like Amartya Sen.
“Our left hand too will be with the common man,” the young Gandhi clarified.
Party’s announcement was met with mixed reactions. While many “neutral” commentators on Twitter termed it as a historic step, leaders from the opposition termed it as another hogwash by the Congress.
“Congress should forget about the common man. Common man has is holding a broom in both the hands,” Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal said.
“You know why they changed hand? Because their right hand was so dirty with corruption that they can’t go to people asking for vote using the same hand. And I am sure if they manage to win coming election, they will get back with right hand as party symbol,” Kejriwal further claimed.
A BJP leader claimed that Congress had paid a foreign brand consulting firm a whopping 300 crore rupees to get ideas on new symbol, and all they got was a mirror image of their earlier symbol.
“This is a new scam,” the BJP leader claimed. Party however refused to comment on reports that suggested that BJP too is thinking of changing its symbol.
Sources claim that BJP is considering adding a few more petals to its election symbol lotus flower. The party hopes to add a few NDA allies through this step.
Other parties too are mulling similar actions, sources say. There is speculation that BSP, which appeared to have peaked to its maximum potential in the last elections, is planning to change its election symbol to a baby elephant so that the party can grow fast.
Samajwadi Party too is considering the tri-cycle as its new symbol. It should be noted tri-cycle is easier to drive on sandy soil than a bicycle. Party denied that sand mafia was behind this move.
By Kajol Singh / INN Bureau
Our states are bloated and this is one reason they are not manageable. If India’s states were nations, 10 of the world’s top 21 countries would come from India. Uttar Pradesh, with more people than Pakistan, would be the world’s fifth largest country. The chief minister of that state rules as many people as the Chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of France and Britain put together.We have five states each with a larger population than Europe’s largest nation, Germany, which has 80 million citizens. Maharashtra has almost twice as many people as Europe’s second largest nation, France. Rajasthan has more people than the United Kingdom. Karnataka, our ninth largest state, has more people than Italy.
Have a look at the figures of the top 10 Indian states:- Uttar Pradesh 200 million
- Maharashtra 112 million
- Bihar 104 million
- West Bengal 91 million
- Andhra Pradesh 84 million
- Madhya Pradesh 72 million
- Tamil Nadu 72 million
- Rajasthan 68 million
- Karnataka 61 million
- Gujarat 60 million
That’s not really the end of the list and even India’s 16th largest state Haryana has more people than Australia.
The average American state with a governor and a local legislature has six million people. The average Indian state with a chief minister and an assembly has 42 million citizens or seven times as many. The average number of people in a UK constituency is 97000. The average in India is 22 lakh.
India’s citizens are under-represented in Parliament and Assembly and under-administered by the civil service. Each of our states is run by an elite corps of overworked bureaucrats. There are 3,384 Indian Administrative Service officers running 28 states, an average of 120 officers per state, who have to deal with files for dozens and often hundreds of programs.
It is remarkable that there are people who say India should have smaller government. The numbers show that the problem is the opposite – not enough government because states are too big.
To the Indian citizen the administration is distant and unapproachable. It is true that he is alienated from the municipality and also from the district administration, but the source of the problem is the size of the state.
The confederating unit in India is the state and there is no argument against smaller states that trumps their unmanageability. As I said, the size of our states is only one among the reasons why they are not governable, but size is a most important factor. Even talented and hardworking managers, like Narendra Modi in Gujarat, Shivraj Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh and Nitish Kumar in Bihar have a problem managing the size of their domain.
The issue of smaller states keeps coming up episodically. It began in the 1950s when linguistics states were formed under Nehru after a protest in Madras Presidency that led to the creation of Andhra Pradesh. The redrawing of lines that followed generally led to stability because in most cases language decided borders. However, some demands remained.
In the last week, it was announced that Andhra Pradesh would now be further divided into two parts, creating another state called Telangana.
The issue was old but difficult to solve because of the asset of Hyderabad. The capital of the Nizams falls in Telangana and it is what powers the economy of the state and contributes much of its local taxes. The moth-eaten Andhra Pradesh that remains must find another city worthy of being a capital and this will not be easy in a state that has only just begun to have a modern economy.
There are other states where a break-up might create more problems than solutions. Jammu & Kashmir is particularly difficult because Ladakh is Buddhist and Jammu has a large Hindu population, while the Valley is now almost entirely Muslim. Breaking up the state will be like Partition because it will be along religious lines. It is therefore unlikely that any government will want to experiment with a smaller state there.
For most other states, for instance UP and Maharashtra, the logic of the break-up is impeccable.
By M H Ahssan / INN Bureau
We need the middle ground and multiple models. What we have is an angry and wasteful polarity. The keepers of India’s economic vision seem to have contracted a crippling disease: a propensity for polarities. Debates about the country’s economy inevitably fall into two hostile — and futile — tracks. One of these was evident in the very public spat between economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati last week.
This may have yielded entertaining heat but little else. Even to an untutored mind, the answers seem obvious. The path to India’s economic health may always be a rocky one but it can never be manichean. If we are ever to reap our “demographic dividend”, clearly we need both growth and social spend; private enterprise and government commitments; industrialisation and agriculture; the formal and the informal sector. And we need all of it to coexist.
Yet, to read the scathing edits this past week would be to imagine the single greatest challenge India faces is to choose one path exclusively over the other. This polarised debate is particularly frustrating because, in the same breath, both sides assert their goal is not different: they want India to maximise growth, yet deliver on social equity. If that is true, the only real disagreement, it seems, is over process.
The Bhagwati school of thought is opposed to the involvement of government in the delivery of public welfare because it is so visibly inefficient. For the most part, they are right. But to depend only on the dubious “trickle down” of growth or give only cash vouchers to India’s poor and leave them to access healthcare, education, food and clean water for themselves, solely from the private sector, is an equal recipe for disaster. Governments are supposed to be bound by a social contract; private enterprise is driven only by the idea of opportunity and profit. What good would money do, for instance, to tribal hamlets stranded in Odisha across a river that has no bridge? Which private entrepreneur would set up a school or health centre in their neighbourhood?
It may have been less entertaining, therefore, but much more illuminating to hear some of India’s most eminent minds debate how to free up private enterprise as much as possible, yet bring more efficiency and quality into the State’s public delivery. Debate how multiple models of delivery can coexist. And debate, most importantly, how a corporate culture of accountability can be brought into government rather than speak of replacing government entirely with corporates.
But instead of that, the week threw up yet more proof of polarity. In an interview in The Indian Express, economist Arvind Panagariya — who is the Bhagwati Professor of Economics at Columbia — was asked to list three people he believed had broken the UPA’s growth momentum. Prompt came the reply: Jairam Ramesh, Jayanthi Natarajan and Sonia Gandhi: shorthand for the facile growth-versus-environment debate.
It’s not just Panagariya. Ramesh, as environment minister, and Natarajan after him, has often been accused of busting the country’s GDP party. But the facts speak otherwise. Ramesh may have stalled the introduction of Bt Brinjal; and blocked a few high-profile projects like POSCO and Vedanta’s in Odisha; the Lavasa Lake City project near Pune; and the nuclear plant in Jaitapur. He also had a high-profile clash with his Cabinet peers over wanting to declare go and no-go areas for coal mining.
But in the balance, he only rejected six projects and cleared almost 600 in the short time he was minister. Natarajan has been even more lenient, picking up cudgels only when the prime minister wanted to set up the National Investment Board, which would enable big-ticket projects to pretty much bypass environmental clearances altogether. Other than that, their project clearance rate was no different from their predecessor — the infamous ‘ATM minister’, A Raja. (In fact, green activists ended up calling Ramesh a brown minister.)
So what exactly is the contention? Are Panagariya and his ilk suggesting the great India story came to a grinding halt because a mere six projects in this vast country were put through rigorous scrutiny?
What does that say about the essential design defect in our growth story? Growth can only happen without scrutiny, without regard for social justice, environmental depredation, and the unsustainable overuse of our national resources. Is India’s great 21st century economic idea then nothing more than a primitive idea of slash and burn? And yet we feign surprise when it begins to fall apart?
