Subir Roy: Roller coaster year sends mixed signals

VALUE FOR MONEY

By all accounts 2004 has been a remarkable year for India. Many a year either begins or ends on a high note. Few do both, and fewer still go through a trough in between.

The remarkable changes in sentiment""India first shining, then not shining, and finally shining again""undoubtedly underline the resilience of the system.

But a significant lesson is also being read into it. Namely, that for a party or combination to return to power, a sufficient number of people, mostly rural and poor, must be swayed by the feel-good factor.

The conventional wisdom is that the feel-good factor bypassed most of the countryside, though in the case of Chandrababu Naidu, even Hyderabad was unimpressed by his attempts to take it forward in every possible way and introduce e-governance extensively.

Conversely, only Bangalore and not the entire Karnataka gave full marks to S M Krishna, underlining the urban-rural divide.

It is necessary to revisit this, because the cardinal political shift of 2004 is the rediscovery by the country's political rulers of both the countryside and its poor.

This has prompted the UPA government to come up with its promise and impending delivery of the employment guarantee programme, even as its own economic arbiters look askance at what it can do to the fiscal balance.

But the votes of the countryside and the poor are not delivered on a platter. It is doubtful if the UPA constituents will be able to return to power simply by throwing money at job-creating rural work.

Many who are otherwise quite comfortable with the idea of creating jobs and income for the rural poor are nevertheless worried that the money may go down the drain instead of going to the poor and creating assets which last at least a few years.

Here, it is important to note Krishna's somewhat bitter reactions to the election results. He is full of statistics and details of what his government did for Karnataka outside Bangalore and most interestingly blames many of his own MLAs for not delivering this message and not ensuring that the schemes actually benefit those for whom they are intended.

The UPA constituents will be safeguarding their future only if programmes like those for rural jobs are delivered with a modicum of efficiency and without large-scale corruption.

That is, ruling elements will have to do considerably better than the Karnataka MLAs did. Most in Bangalore feel Krishna was able to deliver in the city only with the help of good corporate citizens like those behind BATF and a group of handpicked officers who ran key institutions like the municipal corporation, water board, and Bangalore Development Authority.

Post-election Karnataka presents a striking contrast. Bangalore is being run to the ground supposedly because the new rulers are concentrating on the countryside.

Political observers in the city though have a different theory, which holds that the father figure of the new coalition, former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) leader H D Deve Gowda, is a bearer of ancient grudges and cannot forget the fact that his party came a cropper in the city.

Karnataka's countryside then ought to be shining but there is a huge gap between intention and execution. The government has taken a decision to transfer a large array of schemes involving spending Rs 1,800 crore to the gram panchayats for their administering.

This will rewrite the story of the countryside and lead to a structural shift of power from MLAs, ministers and the senior bureaucracy to the panchayats. No other state has gone so far with devolution, affirm senior bureaucrats.

The feedback from the district level is the opposite. First, nothing has happened so far (it is really too early to judge) and life goes on as before. Second, some expect nothing much to happen ever.

A competent district official sounds deeply sceptical. Venality, ignorance, and incompetence stretch right down to the elected panchayat leaders, he says. Besides, the MLAs will eventually not let go, he is confident.

The senior bureaucracy, for its part, has been trying to do some fool proofing. In the interregnum between the announcing of elections and the effective assumption of power by a coalition after long haggling, they kept MLAs and the like away from deciding where public works projects will be taken up and let the panchayats decide for themselves. Their one hope is they will be able to hang on to this gain. A lot depends on it.

Governance at the panchayat level , more than anything else, will determine who comes to power after the next elections. The price of real estate and the state of the share market, dancing to the tune of foreign investors, will matter far less in determining electoral outcomes than the business media imagines.

If the good news from 2004 is that politicians have realised the importance of effectively delivering to the rural poor, the bad news is that there is no serious sign yet of a different kind of politicians coming to the fore.

The new Karnataka ministry was about to collapse as its expansion was being unduly delayed. Those who had invested heavily to get elected needed to recoup their investment.

The political grapevine predicts that the constantly bickering coalition partners, Congress and JD(S), will hang together for only as long as it takes to build the kitty for the next elections.

It is obvious that the quality of governance will not change unless a different kind of politicians come to power. For that, the key agenda is electoral reform to slowly reduce the role of criminal and money power. There is no sign as yet that Manmohan Singh is heeding the chief election commissioner's suggestions in this regard.

sub@business-standard.com