NEW DELHI, May 12: For many of our lawmakers, a debate on the next five year plan did not seem to be a priority. And for those who did attend, sleep was a better option.

This afternoon's debate in the Lok Sabha on the Approach Paper to the Ninth Five Year Plan was a fair reflection of the irrelevance our lawmakers attach to the subject. At the best of times, attendance in the Lok Sabha barely crossed the forty-something mark. Within an hour, their numbers fell to less than 35. (The strength of the Lok Sabha is 534)

Of the five BJP MPs present in the House, Vaidhya Dau Dayal Joshi, the BJP member from Rajasthan, spent his afternoon profitably catching up on his correspondence. By the end of the afternoon, he had a whole stack of inland letters all ready for posting.

Even among the few MPs present in the House, it was a matter of a few yawns. As the Congress MP from Cuttack, Anadi Charan Sahu regaled the House with a long yarn about goddesses, wives and wrestlers, members could be seen nodding off. Kalpnath Rai was seen snatching forty winks even while occupying pride of place in the front row.

Planning Minister Y K Alagh's brave attempts to arouse MPs attention by switching from English to Hindi and back, to explain the finer points of the plan document, proved futile.

The Ninth Plan would have a bifocal approach, said Alagh, which he quaintly described as ``walking on two legs'' with equal importance given to providing basic minimum services in the remotests districts as well as paring down revenue expenditure and improving capital productivity.

The government came under attack from the Opposition for presenting a five year plan which they dismissed as largely an ``exercise in wishful thinking.''

The entire focus of the plan document was skewed, said Jagmohan, since globalisation and the market were the forces driving the global economy.His accusation that the Planning Commission had attempted to fudge poverty figures, cut Alagh to the quick and he was on his feet, defending the methodology used by the Commission to calculate the actual numbers of people falling below the poverty line.

But ultimately it was a losing battle of numbers. The debate remained inconclusive, even as the number of members in the House dwindled further. For a country that has prided itself on long drawn debates on its centralised planning, Monday's Lok Sabha debate was a sorry commentary of the times.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.