Expensive cars appear, the ancestral home gets bigger, interior decorators descend, the wife starts sparkling with jewels and the children go off to foreign universities. This bothers the aam aadmi because he sees no change at all in his own life. He asks for very little. Regular supplies of electricity for which he would gladly pay, clean water, minimal public healthcare, a decent school for his children, reliable public transport and a road that does not disappear when the rains come.

It is when none of these things happen that the aam aadmi begins plotting to throw his MP and government out. As an economist does the Prime Minister not see this? Does he not see that because of his inability to effect administrative reforms his government’s wondrous schemes to provide jobs and homes to the poor continue to fail. We now here that the Public Distribution System (PDS) will include more items of food because the poor are being hit by rising prices.

What is the point if the Planning Commission itself admits that 60 per cent of the food is stolen and sold on the black market. Ila Patnaik analysed the Planning Commission study in this newspaper (May 24, 2007) and provided this scary statistic the day before the Prime Minister made his speech: “Of the estimated 45.41 million Below Poverty Line (BPL) households in India in 2001, just over half (57 per cent) are covered by the PDS.”

Why has the Prime Minister been able to do nothing to give us a less leaky PDS? What has stopped him from stepping up the pace at which roads are built? Why has it slowed down under his government? Why has he done nothing about reforms in the power sector? Why do we see no cuts in government spending on itself? Why do his ministers live in houses in Delhi that only the richest Indians can afford? Why has he done nothing to cut their fringe benefits like free travel and subsidised electricity and water?

... contd.