Karat Way "Social conscience" of the UPA, driving force behind its equity agenda...but blinks on party excesses in Bengal.
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"The thrust of reforms must shift towards people’s welfare rather than the capitalist’s profit." That was senior CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury during the early days of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Today, his party which ironically is otherwise the prime ideological mover in putting the focus on the poor and agriculture, is trying to survive the fallout from the bloodbath in West Bengal’s Nandigram, where people took to the streets against the railroading of their land for a special economic zone (SEZ).
At the national level is the Congress, which keeps talking about inclusive growth, and sees the right-wing BJP as its prime rival. Yet, in a strange twist of circumstances, the two have collaborated in Chhattisgarh to create the Salwa Judum, which recruits local tribals, rather than the police, to battle the Maoists. The two parties are united not just in their common desire to cut off the Maoists’ lifeline, but also in handing over the land vacated by the tribals to private business groups like Essar and Jindal. So, is all this just bipartisan politics? Or is it that those in power increasingly think and act in similar ways?
Of course, the UPA’s public rhetoric is pro-poor, driven by the CPI(M)’s Prakash Karat, and Congressmen who haven’t forgotten the lessons of the 2004 national elections, when rural voters rejected the NDA’s ‘India Shining’ campaign. So when a GoM on the SEZ issue meets political leaders (in December ’06), issues raised by the Left find ready support from Congress leaders like Digvijay Singh and Veerappa Moily. The latter even wrote to the GoM expressing his apprehension that SEZs may end up representing "wealth in an enclave" and creating conflict situations out of "a process of dispossession and displacement".
Clearly, there is a recognition that the poor and the marginalised must be kept in focus, a fact UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has stressed—the aam aadmi as stakeholder in the development process. "The poor farmer, worker, tribal and woman (largely in the unorganised sector) were simply not on the BJP’s political agenda," preens Congress general secretary B.K. Hariprasad, adding, "That’s why Sonia Gandhi focused on welfare schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREG), Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Rural Health Mission."
In reality though, there’s a lack of political will to push such agendas. With Sonia’s exit as chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC)—which was driving the social sector agenda—the focus on the poor has been severely diluted, feel members like N.C. Saxena. Development economist Jean Dreze, who served on the NAC till early ’06 and played a significant role in making the NREG and the Right to Information Act a reality, adds, "This government is explicitly committed to the continuation of earlier economic policies. Moreover, the lobbies that drive these policies (the corporate sector, international financial institutions, and so on) remain the same, despite the change in political leadership."
Even bureaucrats acknowledge this. "At an ideological level, there is a disconnect among the decision-makers," says a joint secretary in an economic ministry. "Sonia is pushing the pro-poor agenda, but the principal policymakers—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, finance minister P. Chidambaram and the Planning Commission’s Montek Singh Ahluwalia—are committed to the ‘Washington consensus’, even though they occasionally pay lip service to the poor." And since the Left parties are not part of government, their influence is limited at the policymaking stage.
Skimming through the various policies designed to benefit the poor, it’s obvious that there is a tussle. In the case of NREG, the showpiece of the UPA’s social charter, there was an initial reluctance to legislate on it. When it finally came about, the scope was confined to 200 districts, increasing to 330 this year. But Budget allocations are still not adequate to ensure a minimum 100 days of work. The finance ministry’s take: funds aren’t being spent by the concerned ministry. Others feel there wasn’t enough pressure to ensure the creation of a shelf of projects to make the scheme a success.
There are other instances like the national common minimum programme’s promise to create a social safety net for the 37 crore people who work in the unorganised sector—representing 93 per cent of the workforce. This year’s budget announced the Aam Admi Bima Yojana, but it only covers seven crore people. Worse, Life Insurance Corporation, the lead agency for implementing the scheme, is in the dark about what it is expected to do. Recently, theLIC shot off questions to the finance ministry asking for clarifications and details on how it needs to be implemented.
Activists and academics have similar complaints about the government’s intentions to universalise the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme), which targets children under 6 years (accounting for 15 per cent of the population). Some activist-academics, including Dreze, Aruna Roy, Saxena and Kavita Srivastava, wrote to the PM on March 6, expressing concern that this year’s budget hasn’t done anything on that front. The letter said: "The allocation for ICDS (Rs 4,761 crore) has barely increased in real terms, and is virtually unchanged as a proportion of GDP." It added that comparing it with the defence outlay showed "a staggering and unacceptable imbalance in budget priorities".
Many also question the package announced for Maharashtra’s suicide-prone Vidarbha region. They feel it’s designed and structured to benefit the rich farmers, rather than the poor ones. An IAS officer pointed out that the largest chunk of money has been allocated for irrigation projects, which not only have a long gestation period, but are also unlikely to help those at the bottom of the heap. "Instead of waiving off loans up to Rs 25,000, which would have helped the small and marginal farmers (80 per cent of the total number), payments of loans of up to Rs three lakh have been rescheduled. Only the interest component has been waived off, which is targeted at the better-off farmers." This when most studies have found that debt is the single-most important reason for suicides.
If this is what the Congress is up to, imagine what happens when the UPA allies take key decisions. Take the case of agriculture, where the government is talking about a second green revolution. Last year, the Congress failed to prevent Sharad Pawar, the Union agriculture minister who heads the NCP, from importing large quantities of wheat resulting in the entry of big players in the marketplace. This, say some experts, was a key in prices spiralling upwards.
.Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh had then said that "the government should have immediately gone in for market intervention. Instead, it allowed the MNCs to corner the wheat for the international market. Now, we are importing wheat from Australia, whose landed price at the ports is Rs 1,100 per quintal while the previous market rate was Rs 900-1,100." Last year, on June 29, when the CWC discussed the price situation, defence minister Pranab Mukherjee said if the agriculture minister had been a Congressman, he and his secretary would have been sacked. Leave aside the inter-party barbs, Mukherjee was obviously worked up over the wheat imports issue.
When the UPA came to power in May 2004, it promised that the ‘India Shining’ project would be replaced by its vision of ‘Bharat Nirman’. It talked of a new blueprint for an inclusive India, which, while helping the growth story, would result in one with equity. Of course, Bharat Nirman was nothing new; it was merely a way of flagging the UPA’s priorities, meshing its new aam admi rhetoric with old economic realities by "branding and banding together"—as a PMO official phrased it—existing schemes under one umbrella. If the slogan was to be made a reality, the delivery system had to be improved. That hasn’t happened, not till now anyway.
Belatedly, the government has started focusing on "outcomes" to measure how much is being delivered, especially as most centrally-sponsored poverty alleviation schemes ( numbering over 240) are administered by the states. Saxena defends his party saying, "Often Opposition-ruled states aren’t too keen to implement central schemes...they think it will not pay them electoral dividends."
Addressing a conference of Congress chief ministers in Chandigarh in 2005, the PM had said, "If we look around, what is the happiness index of the average citizen vis-a-vis the government? My own surmise is that there is considerable dissatisfaction with governance and the agents of governance." Now, with six weeks left for the UPA’s third anniversary, the gross domestic happiness index seems to have plummeted further.
With general elections two years hence, the UPA needs to do some "out of the box thinking"—one of the PM’s own favourite phrases—and maximise its advantages. The aam admi slogan finally has to mean something. The economy is doing well, the growth story is intact; and barring a few hiccups like inflation, fundamentals are strong. And, importantly, the world is looking at India with anticipation and hope. It’s time to deliver. Can the UPA muster enough will to do so?
