Opinion The Double Negative

It happened again. In the food security debate there was prolific use of the double negative as a policy.

New DelhiJanuary 21, 2011 05:28 PM IST First published on: Jan 21, 2011 at 05:28 PM IST

It happened again. In the food security debate there was prolific use of the double negative as a policy. It was alright it was said to have a larger set of claimants with ration cards since many card holders will not go to the PDS anyway so the grain need will be less. But then why keep them there.

A lone ranger I have been saying that we should directly focus on the poor and severely malnourished and that the Tendulkar Committee has given us the tools to do so,although it didn’t do it itself. But we dont like such direct ways of reasoning. The poverty line originally went from calories to the expenditure to meet them.

That was good when it was designed by a Task Force I chaired in the mid seventies but for the last ten years I have argued for the Alagh poverty line to be junked. Tendulkar was supposed to do so but instead said that the Alagh poverty line for urban areas should be the national poverty line. Now this is strange logic because from money expenditures we go to calories and nourishment rather than the other way around which is causally direct. The Brahmanical mind John Stratton Hawley said works ex opere operata.

It has always been so. We were the first country in the world to come bouncing out of the first energy crisis in the seventies but instead of saying that prices were falling,the then Finance Minister,C Subrahmanaium said that we had a negative rate of inflation. Notice the double negative.

There are probably very deep rooted reasons for the persistent use of the double negative and the i9nability to call a spade a spade. As the great historian Kosambi showed we are a very stratified society with very formal social systems. Lessrigid and more barbarian societies had better weaponry and defeated our people with poor weapons. Making weapons is a low caste business and the upper castes philosophise. A women or a man who makes a chair or a shoe or even a good meal is not upper caste. Solving a problem directly is not our style. My senior the great economist Danrtawala after a famous series of lectures I gave said my young friend Alagh is a carpenter. Dantwala Saheb said it tongue in cheek,but I think of it as a great compliment. Its not accidental that we are global leaders in IT systems. It became our turn in history when the world reached a stage that systems solved problems.