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Aam Or Khas?

Aam aadmi was to do what India Shining couldn't. It is still an empty slogan.

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Aam Or Khas?
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If disinvestment, a subject on which the government is now working to produce a white paper, remains contentious, the status of the government's ambitious Bharat Nirman programme—the centrepiece of its concern for the poor and which spans the ministries of power, telecom, panchayati raj, water resources, finance and most importantly, agriculture and rural development—continues to be ambivalent. On June 22, when a meeting of the ministries concerned took place under the chairmanship of the prime minister, a spat ensued between Chidambaram and Union rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh (of the RJD) on the question of funding. When the FM pointed out the problems in increasing the current funding, Singh is believed to have said that the government appeared to have money for everyone except the poor.HRD minister Arjun Singh, too, is believed to be having a hard time ensuring that the money from the education cess goes back into the Prathmik Shiksha Kosh and not into the Consolidated Fund of India.

If funding is a problem, so is the implementation. All the schemes in the Bharat Nirman programme are yet to be implemented by the panchayats. Says Union water resources minister Priyaranjan Das Munshi: "Many of the state governments are lagging behind in implementing schemes such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or Food for Work programme—in some states, even the BPL (below poverty line) lists are not ready."

And even though the Congress in August 2004, a few months after it had come to power—reiterated its commitment to the poor at its AICC session at the Talkatora Stadium in New Delhi, nothing much has happened. Even the diluted National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is yet to get off the ground. As Dwivedi puts it, "Our effort must be to generate jobs in rural areas locally and this NREGS is one step in that direction. Of course, there are many constraints, but we are moving in the right direction. It is not just rhetoric, we are well-intentioned."

Even within the government, there is acknowledgement of the gaps between intent and implementation. Admitting as much, a PMO official says the current economic growth is generating largely high-valuejobs. "While India was modernising, the urban-rural disconnect widened," he says, adding that Bharat Nirman is expected "to unlock the potential of agriculture".

There are reservations on other schemes as well. The Delhi government's plans to privatise water, for instance. Voicing his concern, party general secretary and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh said, "An element of subsidy is necessary in essential services and commodities. I don't know the details of the Delhi Jal Board scheme but the concerns of the poor have to be factored in."

Summing up the Congress' dilemma, Digvijay Singh, referring to the proposal to divest BHEL of 10 per cent more of its shares, says: "We have made all these commitments in the social sector—where is the money to come from? It will come from the money we get by offloading these shares which will go back to a dedicated Investment Fund for the social sector. We will make sure that the public sector character of the navaratnas is not changed—51 per cent will remain with the government."

Summing it up, Das Munshi says, "The key problem is that if we want to pump in more money into the social sector and for infrastructure, we need to raise resources without imposing higher taxes, hiking petrol prices too much or increasing customs tariff. It's a tough call, since politically there are strong reservations on touching the navaratnas." Clearly, on the issue of reforms, introspection can only heighten as gaps between performance and intention widen.

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