Given his political track record, it was probably naive of me to have thought that the finance minister would have treated the panchayats as the centre-piece of his Budget. He claims his heart is in the right place. And he was, after all, present, so to speak, at the creation. For it fell to him, as minister of state for personnel, to organise the Workshops of District Magistrates on Responsive Administration, which was the genesis of the 73rd and 74th Constitution Amendments on the panchayats and nagarpalikas. But his attention has been so distracted with looking after the corporate sector that the only reference to the panchayats in his entire presentation was one apologetic phrase: "...and, if I may say so, the local bodies. Thats it. So obsessed is Chidambaram with Lee Kwan Yew that he has forgotten Mahatma Gandhi. In essence, I think, that is what is wrong morally, politically and economically with this Budget.
In imitation of China, we are being deliberately taken by Chidambaram towards a model of economic development in which enclaves of phenomenal economic growth will co-exist with deliberately fostered regional imbalances; the State will ensure, as a matter of policy, an ever-widening gap between urban boom-centres and a lagging rural hinterland; and equity will in all conscience be sacrificed at the altar of prosperity for those who know how to work the system to prosper. That is feasible in a dictatorship. I doubt that it will succeed, or should succeed, in a democracy. Daridranarayana was Gandhijis God; Chidambarams appears to be Mammon.
I bring the charge in all seriousness because this is a Budget which, on the revenue side, gives all they ever dreamt of to that 0.8 per cent of our population rich enough to pay taxes. And next to nothing more to the 99.2 per cent of our population who are still not fattened enough to attract the taxmans net. True, some one or two per cent of these are those whom Chidambarams tax sleuths are searching for but if even all tax-evaders are brought before the stern tribunal of the countrys fiscal laws, there will still be some 98 per cent of our people wondering whats in the Budget for them.
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And if Chidambaram replies, as he doubtless will, that the poor only have to wait a while for the riches of the rich to spin their children a cloth of gold, the poor of this land would, I think, be justified in reminding him that a Budget is not a long-term promise. The finance minister has said that we are going to dole out all the goodies we can to the well-off and leave votive offerings to Daridranarayana till tomorrow. Alas, when tomorrow dawns, we will, in pursuit of Chidambarams pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, drift even further towards Nariman Point and Dalal Street and ever further from the panchayat ghar.
What the Constitution Amendments sought to usher in was a rural revolution. It was never conceived as an overnight revolution but a revolution spread over decades and sustained by the political will of the political authority. Moreover, it was not some inherent moral myopia in state governments that had resulted in the abortion of development through democracy at the grassroots, but the structure of governance that empowered a chief minister to reduced a zila parishad adhyaksha to a powerless puppet.
The immediate need is, therefore, not so much a matter of additional funds for "rural affairs and employment (the inelegant name given by Narasimha Rao to this ministry) but to ensure that such funds reach the beneficiaries for whom they are intended. Long before the Constitution Amendments were passed, Rajiv Gandhi showed how this could be done. In 1989, in celebration of the Nehru centenary, two new employment assurance programmes were started for the poor: the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana for the rural unemployed and the Nehru Rozgar Yojana for the urban unemployed. Central assistance for both programmes, amounting to some 80 per cent of the total funding, was sent directly from Delhi to the bank accounts of each panchayat and nagarpalika in the country.
A Budget with a heart would have been a Budget which matched the revolution on the revenue side of the ledger with a revolution on the expenditure side. All Chidambaram has done for the rural poor is increase the funding for rural development by some Rs 45 per head on a Budget Estimate-to- Budget Estimate basis. If we take into account the shameful shortfall in rural spending in 1996-97, then, on an Revised Estimate-to- Budget Estimate basis the increment in allocation comes to less than Rs 30 per head. Rs 45 or Rs 30, the incremental rate is much lower than even the rate of inflation (and derisory when one notes that food prices have, over the last year, risen by 30 per cent) But even that would have been acceptable had at least the Rs 9,000 crore budgeted for rural India gone straight into the bank accounts of the elected panchayats.
They have not because they cannot. And why not ? Because, as the finance minister so perceptively understands, his is not a national government but a central government run by the satraps of the states. They would never allow Chidambaram to deprive them of the Rs 9,000 crore which they receive from the Centre in the name of the poor and then divert to the financing of their own excesses. By definition, a government of 13 regional parties is incapable of empowering the panchayats and, therefore, incapable of rendering justice to the poor.
The finance minister has not only betrayed Gandhiji, Nehru and Indira Gandhi by his solicitude for the rich, he has also betrayed Rajiv Gandhi by neglect of the institutions for the poor that he had devised. The hosannas of the rich are, alas, the dirge of the poor.