After the euphoria

After the euphoria

With all the applause that has come his way over a ‘dream budget’, Union finance minister Yashwant Sinha must feel like a crorepati, after having sat on the hot seat for almost two hours without flinching on Wednesday. As for his lifelines, there are some who cavil over his exercise of the ‘phone-a-friend’ option, rather than the ‘janata ki rai’ and ‘fifty-fifty’ ones, but that after all is his prerogative. However, the two sharply contradictory responses to the budget one praising it for the reform-oriented edge it exhibited, the other ruing its lack of social concern merit a response.

Budget 2001: Full Coverage

In many ways this is a false dichotomy. Being pro-reform does not mean being anti-social welfare. On the contrary, the two can actually complement each other. Economic reform, if it is to be effective and sustainable, is crucially dependent on a healthy, educated and prosperous populace. It also has enormous transformative potential because it brings new opportunities, new choices for people to alter the seemingly immutable circumstances of their lives. Take the case of China. Its 10-11 per cent growth rate could not have been possible without an estimated 97 per cent literacy and near-universal healthcare.

Similarly, Bangladesh is a good example of how the enlightened deployment of microcredit facilities has, in turn, provided a great fillip to education and health awareness. The liberalising state, then, cannot afford to shut its eyes to issues of health, education and general welfare. So how does Sinha’s latest budget fare on this score? Extremely poorly, it seems, and not for want of the rightlanguage. As he has reiterated in the budget document, there is a ‘‘need to increase investments in social sectors’’. Yet, in actual terms, there’s very little that has been forthcoming. For instance, the investment in social services, including education, health, broadcasting, and so on, has been increased from last year’s Rs 6187 crore to Rs 6,474 crore this time. This doesn’t even keep pace with the increase in population, forget inflation.

But it isn’t just this. The whole issue of administering to the social sector is treated in a piecemeal, even disjointed, manner and is, therefore, not integral to the underlying vision of the budget. The penchant of the Vajpayee government to unleash numerous schemes in an utterly purposeless manner has already been commented upon in these columns. This budget is, unfortunately, no exception to the trend. Apart from old chestnuts like the Annapurna scheme, which is meant to provide food security to old people not covered by the National Old Age pension scheme, we have the tongue-twister of a Swaranjayanthi Gram Swarozgar Yojana that purports to engender ‘‘holistic self-employment programmes with the objective of establishing a large number of micro-enterprises in rural areas’’. While there is a welcome emphasis on women and the disabled here, it ultimately doesn’t amount to much given the fact that only Rs 500 crore has been set aside for this lofty purpose. Similarly, while the finance minister has playedthe kindly uncle by providing cheap loans to students pursuing higher education in India and abroad, the benighted primary education sector continues to be treated shabbily. Again, only Rs 500 crore has been provided for the much-trumpeted Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Even by Sinha’s own standards, this is plain dismal. In 1999, he had spoken of an education guarantee scheme. Today, that guarantee seems a mockery.