Opinion Its not about the Budget
Not only do our politicians not get it,we in the media seem not to understand either that governance has become the single most important political issue in India....
Not only do our politicians not get it,we in the media seem not to understand either that governance has become the single most important political issue in India. At Budget time,the cacophony of our 24-hour news channels reaches levels of hysteria so high that even God might be able to hear them but mostly they talk about little budgetary technicalities that matter only to those who pay taxes or those who are very rich. To the vast majority of Indians what matter are other things.
Why do we take so long to build a road? Why are there no regular supplies of electricity in most of rural India? Why is clean water so scarce that in Mumbais slums these days they are forced to buy bottled water? Why are government hospitals so bad? Why are there not enough schools and colleges for a country that likes to boast of having the youngest population in the world? Why do our cities look like slums? Why do we continue to waste taxpayers money on armies of clerks? Why do we squander it on government factories that are a bottomless pit?
These are Indias real questions and ordinary Indians who rarely get a chance to speak on 24-hour news channels express them whenever they can. Just look at the fact that the biggest hit from Bollywood ever,3 Idiots,deals with education reform and you begin to understand the tremors under the surface. At election time the cry of bijli,sadak,pani has been around for decades and rises high above concerns of caste and creed despite the best efforts of our politicians to drown it out. Personally,I believe that the reason why we are seeing the Bharatiya Janata Party disappear slowly and pathetically into historys garbage bin is because its leaders never understood how important it was for them to show that they could govern better than the Congress. They copied Congress methods diligently when they came to power in Delhi and they do the same in the provinces.
Nobody likes cheap duplicates so we are stuck for the foreseeable future with Congress type governance that has changed almost not at all since the British left. Look just at the importance of the Collector in Indian governance and think about why there are no Collectors in Britain and possibly never were any. It was a colonial post created to govern a colony. We have not bothered to change it so in our villages the Collector continues to have the last word on such small things as whether a school should build a wall or not. How bizarre is that?
Every Finance Minister every year details for us in a dreary drone how much more money will be spent on roads,schools,hospitals and blah,blah,blah. Every year mighty captains of industry and serious,beetle-browed analysts appear on our TV screens to tell us how amazed they are by the brilliance of the Budget. In a day or two the excitement fades and India goes back to trundling along towards the 22nd century without being able to provide its citizens with their most basic needs. If we carry on this way then we can be sure that all we will achieve by the middle of this century is that we will become the largest pool of cheap,unskilled labour in the world. We will be a new kind of East India Company exporting people instead of resources.
It does not have to be this way. Nor can we blame our shabby standards on being a poor country as we did in the past. India has more than enough money to invest in the best schools,hospitals and roads. What we lack are policies that use our money wisely. Allow me a small example. There is nothing more important in my humble opinion than education and in this space I have said that Kapil Sibal is the best Human Resource Development Minister we have seen in two decades. But,instead of addressing the fundamental problem of ensuring that India builds the millions of schools and colleges we so obviously need he has spent the past year tinkering with irrelevancies like regulation and standardised exams. It is like interior designing a house that is about to collapse.
It has to be sadly said that this kind of tinkering with reform is all that we have got from Dr Manmohan Singhs other ministers. Surely we should be able to expect more from a Prime Minister whose reputation was built on the economic reforms he initiated in the early Nineties. We were forced to dump socialism then because India was nearly bankrupt. Are we going to wait for another crisis before things change? Forgive me if I say that the Budget will make no difference.
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