Opinion The benign failure

India has launched its own super duper nuclear submarine the Arihant. Well done. But then along comes Vandana Shiva to spoil the party. She has just released her report saying that one in four Indians is starving. We of course are no longer shockable by the news that 46 per cent of children are malnourished. I welcome her concern and share it. What I do not share is her diagnosis or the cure she suggests. She blames the starvation on increasing corporate-driven production model,emphasis on exports of cash crops. I agree that India has harmed her water ecology. She wants public distribution of food and much greater state control.

Let me start with a simple statement. Since independence,India has given its military security much greater importance than the level of living of her people. This is why India has nuclear weapons and can send a rocket to the moon but can’t feed her children. It is all a matter of priorities. The five-year plans which went into making machines to make machines,so proudly thought to be the core of India’s socialist economic policy,were needed to build up the military industrial complex to secure the country’s territory.

Now perfectly good virtuous patriotic leaders took these decisions and indeed had democratic support for their decisions. Even today if a referendum was to be held,the nation would vote for ten Gorshkovs rather than proper nutrition for children. That is just the facts of the case. But even leaving that aside,we know that the starvation is not because there is not enough foodgrain output. What is lacking is the income to buy it. Years of bad planning created few jobs and many shiny machine tools. The 60 per cent who live in rural India and three-quarters of the urban population have low,if any,incomes,insecure,unsafe jobs,all thanks to the dynamic public sector we have built up at great expense,which protects the few and punishes the many. What is also lacking is a moderately decent public distribution system which will not constantly cheat the poor of the meagre entitlements they have. Rajiv Gandhi’s observation that only 15 paise of the rupee reaches the poor still hangs on us like a warning. It may now be a bit better but still half of the money is frittered away.

Unlike Vandana Shiva,I think India has too little corporate presence in agriculture. A private warehousing corporation would never let food stocks go to waste as the Food Corporation of India does. If we had corporate retailing,then the entire chain from the farm to the shop would be safe and efficient and leave more money for the farmer and more food for the buyers. The water table is depleted not because the corporate sector prices water too high but because the ‘benevolent and socialist’ state prices it too low. It does this because the market would cost the landlords too much. The state steps in to subsidise them.

The politicians would rather spend two days on one sentence of the Sharm statement than a single day on the starving millions. That is because India is a Socialist Democratic Republic.