Nistula Hebbar: Rural messiah

BACKSTAGE

It is ironic that the biggest social legislation, in independent India, the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2005, would be introduced in Parliament under the stewardship of one of Jaiprakash Narayan's closest disciples, Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh.

And while JP would have squirmed over the compromises made with the welfare Bill, Singh has become practical enough to know that in shining India, a new deal for rural India has to be ushered in on different terms.

The clearing by the Cabinet of the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, 2005, with several clauses that has the finance ministry squirming reflects more than anything else the dogged perseverance of Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh than any financial jugglery.

Armed with a trade mark pugnacious style, Singh, a PhD in mathematics, is a number cruncher with a phenomenal memory and refused to get cowed down by that very intimidating duo of Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Deputy Chairperson of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Right from striking down the imposition of a national common minimum wage for the scheme to pushing for the removal of the clause of only "poor BPL (below poverty line)" families benefiting from it, Singh matched the finance ministry nay sayers with appeals on behalf of rural India.

While it was his very publicised run-ins with Chidambaram which grabbed eye balls (he is reported to have called Chidambaram anti-poor and anti-rural during a meeting where the prime minister was present), he was also pushing his agenda with Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Three days before the Bill was to be cleared by the Cabinet he met Gandhi who gave him her unstinted support.

This is not to say that this pragmatism extends to everything. Singh does have his own particular bug bears. A socialist leader from Bihar, who catapulted Lalu Yadav to the chair of Bihar chief minister in 1990, he has an almost pathological dislike for the activist NGO sector, and who he calls general do-gooders.

Part of the reason he gave for opposing a national common minimum wage for the scheme was because the proposal was pushed by Prof Jean Dreze, Aruna Roy and several Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professors.

"This country is too big and varied for a common anything, let alone a wage rate," he is reported to have told Dreze and several others.

Raghuvansh Babu, as he is fondly referred too is at the end of the day a politician with a head for numbers. While he has learnt that unlike in mathematics there is never only one right answer, his deft footwork over such a big Bill has shown that he has learnt his lessons well.