The 2014 general election, it seems, is becoming a referendum on the so-called Gujarat model and the something-United Progressive Alliance (UPA) model. Very broadly, the Gujarat model is seen to be corporate-friendly, with emphasis on economic growth at any cost and little focus on social indicators of development. The UPA model, on the other hand, is seen to promote distributive justice and inclusive growth. And our conclusion could well be that the UPA model has not worked. The reason is that when we compare the two - superficially - then even in the model that promised social development we see high inflation, poverty, malnutrition and crony capitalism.
In this way, the referendum on May 16, when the counting is done, could well be seen as a go-ahead to rampant growth without a human face, or the Gujarat model. But this, I believe, will be missing the key point.
If there is a referendum, it must be on the lack of delivery of programmes for social justice and inclusive growth. It cannot be a decision against the idea of rights-based development for inclusive growth. That would be disastrous for India.
Thus, what we need to do is think about what went wrong. And the next government's agenda must be to fix it, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The fact is that the UPA government has invested too much political capital, bureaucratic time and energy of its countless advisory committees to dream up and launch new schemes. It has done little - appallingly little - to ensure that the programmes are implemented on the ground. As a result, when you reflect on the past 10 years, there is a desolate graveyard of good intentions - the million flowers that never bloomed.
Take the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, which was launched in the early years of UPA-I with the promise of providing employment to reduce poverty. Ironically, in the first few years, when there was commitment to the scheme, the Congress party was not even in charge. Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, member of Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal and rural development minister at the time, spearheaded the programme and pushed for its implementation.
In mid-2008, when the Centre for Science and Environment reviewed the first two years of the scheme, we pointed to the need to focus on the quality of work that was being undertaken. We showed that even though this programme invested much-needed funds in water augmentation and soil conservation works, the focus was only on "work" and not its completion. The scheme provided for a village infrastructure plan to be the basis of the work's execution. But this was not implemented. As a result, the crucial water harvesting structures, which would have become the basis of economic growth by providing water for irrigation, were being wasted. Either ponds were half complete or their catchment was not protected. We said this could change if the right to work was converted into the right to development.
But this message, even if heeded, was never implemented. Instead, in 2007, the UPA government decided to scale up the scheme nationwide. The rural employment guarantee programme spread from 200 drought-affected poor districts to more than 600 districts, where such work was not even needed. It went from being the promise of a new tomorrow to being a victim of a populist today.
By 2014, eight years later, after Rs 2 lakh crore has been spent, the government admits that only 20 per cent of the 7.5 million works started have been completed. No doubt the scheme has made a crucial difference for rural India's purchasing and bargaining power. However, it has not put a floor on poverty, because the managers of the programme did not believe it could. They never worked obsessively to improve delivery and to evolve the largest human development experiment to become the change itself.
The experience is no different when it comes to the UPA's other flagship programmes, whether it is the Forest Rights Act or the Right to Education Act. The 12th Five-Year Plan document, perhaps for the first time, has a separate chapter on social inclusion; it enumerates the many programmes for distributive justice and poverty eradication. But, sadly, the UPA will be best remembered not for removing poverty from our midst, but for mocking the income figures that defined the people below poverty line. It is a sad legacy for a government with so many potential game-changer programmes.
Our demand from the new government cannot be to reinvent the model of development; our demand should be that development that is socially just and economically inclusive must be delivered.
sunita@cseindia.org
Twitter: @sunitanar
Twitter: @sunitanar
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