June 8, 1998

The nuclear party's over, now focus on making Indians literate and healthy.

Tavleen Singh

All right, the Government has had its moment of nuclear glory. Now it's time for work. In this past week, I have spent much time wandering about Delhi's corridors of power, meeting ministers, chatting with bureaucrats, looking for signs of change. Alas, all that anyone has talked about are the Pokhran tests.

What did I think of the fact that 90 per cent of Indians have supported the Government? Wasn't I proud as an Indian? How did I react to the news that important American politicians like Jimmy Carter and Newt Gingrich had attacked Bill Clinton's sanctions? Wasn't I delighted to see Pakistan squirm and splutter? Whether I talked to lowly officials or to ministers, this was the mood. If I tried to change the subject to something like literacy, healthcare or the economy, I failed.

The time, though, has come to start talking about these other things. Otherwise, the Government could find its support vanishing as suddenly as it appeared. Already the mutterings have started. Sonia Gandhi and her many spokesmen -- does she have so many because she finds it so hard to speak herself? -- have started making their disapproval clear. Madam herself, at a recent event where she did in fact speak, informed us in her charming, Italian-accented Hindi that from her vast understanding of political issues she had concluded sanyam (restraint) was better than an open display of shakti (power).

The leftist parties made their position clear within hours of the explosions. They objected to India trying to go nuclear because it might annoy China. It is only a matter of time before the 90 per cent of ordinary Indians who allegedly favour the bomb also get less euphoric -- unless Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government can show us it is capable of the kind of governance India desperately needs if it is ever to become a real superpower.

A country that has nearly half its population living in absolute poverty, that has an illiterate population more than 2.5 times that of sub-Saharan Africa, that has more than half its children over the age of four living in malnourishment can never be a superpower.

As the above figures indicate, our biggest failures have been in the human development area. We rank a shameful 135th out of 174 countries in the human development index, a point that Lal Krishna Advani eloquently made during his swaran jayanti yatra in 1997. "When I looked at the report," he said, "I knew India couldn't be in the first 20. So I started looking in the first 50. But we weren't even there. Then I started looking in the last 50 and was shamed to discover we were 135, behind even Sri Lanka."

Of course, at that time it was easy to blame everything on Congress misgovernance. It no longer is. The Government now needs to tell us what it can do. If it really means business, it may find that it will need to begin by abolishing the ministries that deal with things like literacy, healthcare, population control and sanitation -- and start again from scratch. Otherwise, it could find -- as it must have done in the states it has ruled, such as Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh -- that the armies of officials who run these ministries will strangle even the best schemes with red tape.

Vajpayee needs to seriously consider putting these ministries under people like Mahbub ul Haq, who brings out the annual "Human Development Report". He is a Pakistani and I am not suggesting we employ him. But there are people like him in India who will be able to make a serious contribution. Haq believes our worst mistake in the past 50 years was the failure to invest in health and education. He also believes we can rectify this mistake by investing liberally in basic education in the next 5 to 10 years.

Writing about south Asia as a whole in a recent article, Haq says, "If all children are to be put in primary schools in the next five years, this means creating school facilities for 65 million children and training about two million additional teachers, preferably three-fourths of them female. The recurrent cost is modest: only $1 billion a year in the next five years, or a mere one-third of 1 per cent of the combined income of the region. Even if capital expenditure is included, the total additional cost will be less than 1 per cent of the combined GNP of south Asia."

If we can afford nuclear weapons, then we can certainly afford this kind of investment. But first we have got to change the mindset of the ministries given the job of providing India healthcare and literacy. Unless this is done, Vajpayee could find himself immobilised by officials who have perfected, over the years, the art of appearing to be very busy while doing nothing.

During my wanderings in the corridors of power this past week I ran into many ministers -- formerly bursting with dynamism and new ideas -- who had already been felled by the bureaucracy. When I reminded them of changes they had earlier talked about, they unfailingly answered, "We suggested it but they tell us that it can't be done that way for a variety of reasons."

Actually, it can be done, it has been done elsewhere. But the bulk of our bureaucrats react badly to change. This is why most of them will be happy as larks if the Congress comes back to power. It will too, unless Vajpayee realises euphoria is ephemeral, real work is not. 

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