T N Ninan: Triumph as defeat

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The last week's news had all the paradoxes of India. There was, on the one hand, the announcement of 9.4 per cent GDP growth last year, an 18-year high""making for an average of 8.6 per cent for the four years of the current boom, with no one forecasting anything less than 8-8.5 per cent for this year. These are growth rates to die for""and I am reminded of how the Planning Commission's boss at the time, KC Pant, went to Prime Minister Vajpayee five years ago with the commission's plan for 7 per cent average GDP growth during the 2002-07 period. Vajpayee sent him back with a flea in his ear, demanding 8 per cent. The commission quickly re-did all its numbers and, hey presto, produced a plan that postulated 8 per cent growth. Since then, every forecaster in the government and in the private sector has under-estimated every year what the economy would actually achieve""clearly, those running macro-economic models are missing something.

Also this past week, there was the barely noticed report that the National Sample Survey Organisation has found evidence, through its surveys, of a decline in protein consumption per head over several years, and indeed a decline in total calorific intake as well. Both tell us that people are eating less well than before, though ironically their consumption of fat has gone up. These numbers in their totality bear out the critics' point that the high growth is not benefiting those at the base of the pyramid.

Then there is the violent agitation by Gurjars in Rajasthan for being moved from the "other backward caste" category to the "scheduled tribes" (ST) group""apparently because the rival Meena community in the state, benefiting from an ST grouping, is getting jobs in the government while the Gurjars are not. This provides fodder for arguments in several directions: we are seeing jobless growth as far as the private organised sector is concerned, and that is why people on the margins still hanker for relatively low-paying government jobs; that politicians created the problem in the first place when the BJP promised in the last state elections that Gurjars would be recognised as a scheduled tribe; that job reservations lead to competition for being declared more and more "backward", because the more backward you are, the better are your chances of getting a reserved government job""which discredits the whole approach to affirmative action.

The arguments about the pattern of growth and how to make it "inclusive" are not going to be settled any time soon. But it is beginning to look as though the government has scored a spectacular own-goal. Having decried the previous NDA government's "India Shining" boast as an affront to the poor, the Congress and its alliance partners (especially those on the Left) find it impossible to make the same triumphant claim""though that is the obvious thing to say and therefore what the rest of the world is saying. Instead, having staked its claim to government on the promise of delivering benefits for the "aam aadmi" or common man, it has embarked on a massive and indeed unprecedented spending programme (take a look at the numbers in those government ads released a few days ago). But this is not delivering the desired benefits precisely because the government has not addressed the issue that the critics had pointed to at the start""namely, a leaky and inefficient system's ability to use that money well and deliver real benefits, especially in the badly-administered states that have the largest numbers of the poor.

So the government has given up the one claim that it can legitimately make (of record economic performance) and at the same time laid itself open to precisely the charge that it levied at the NDA's door""that rapid economic growth is not benefiting the common man. And, irony of ironies, the people saying this most often and the loudest are none other than Congressman and Communists, including ministers. All of which reminds me of an old warning kicked around in company offices: never fall for your own propaganda!