The monsoon is on the brink of failure. Even an unlikely surplus of rain in August will not help farmers since they have mistimed their sowing due to the late onset. Karnataka is among the worse-affected states. The state government has responded with commendable alacrity to the fear of drought by announcing a key relief measure.
The state proposes to spend about Rs 17.5 crore in a series of 34,000-odd pujas to propitiate the Vedic rain god, Varuna. Each puja would cost about Rs 5,000 and each is to be performed at a different temple. Presumably the administration hopes the rain will also be well-distributed.
Unfortunately, Mr H S Neelakantappa of Chikmagalur district has filed a PIL in the Karnataka High Court asking for a stay on the scheme. He appears to suffer from a regrettable lack of faith, or perhaps, he worships different gods.
Setting prejudices aside, examine the proposed “prayer scheme” from an economic, specifically a Keynesian perspective, with a dollop of Sen thrown in. In the interest of full disclosure, one may as well point out that Sen is an atheist and so was Keynes.
The prayer scheme is a drought relief measure, pure and simple. No alternative measure could affect the actual quanta of rain that falls in August so it cannot be criticised on those grounds. Droughts cause local food shortages and dampen rural economic activity and effective drought relief measures target these areas.
One of Keynes’ insights was that it is often possible to revive a depressed economy by just giving poor people money. You set one gang of unemployed labourers to dig holes, and another gang to fill the holes. The work may serve no purpose whatsoever. So long as you put money in pockets and that money is spent, an economic revival may result.
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By that yardstick, prayers are no more or less useful than digging random holes. So there is little to cavil at. However, for the prayer scheme to work optimally, the money should ideally go to the badly affected and they must spend that money.
Though Keynes saw food shortages in Austria and Germany after World War I, Sen delved more directly into causes and effects. Famines often occur despite food sufficiency. People starve because they lack the cash to buy food. Again, if you give people money, they take care of their calorific needs. There is certainly enough food in Karnataka (and India) at the moment. So, routing some cash to the worst-hit segments can certainly help.
Therefore, there is a kernel of rationality to prayer relief: Give some money away and hope the recipients will do the rest. However, as with most government schemes, the details are ill-conceived. Prayer relief uses a network of temples to disburse the cash. Instead, it may just be more efficient to use a network of banks, or mobile telecom service providers.
The temples will spread the moolah up and down their own value chains by paying priests, buying ghee, sandalwood, and so on. This disproportionately benefits one specific caste and that caste is not particularly badly-affected by drought. Banks and telecom service providers have broader and more inclusive networks and they will distribute cash with less “leakages”.
Karnataka has a population of about 53 million, of whom about 14 million are below the poverty line (PL). The state per capita income is about Rs 60,000, with the PL at Rs 7,548 (rural) and Rs 10,896 (urban). Assuming it’s the rural BPL segment that’s hardest-hit, why not spread the Rs 17.5 crore more evenly? Give Rs 2,000 each to 88,000 families in the worst-affected districts. The recipients can be selected by lottery based on their horoscopes. That should satisfy the superstitious among us, as well as the rational.