Columns: Fifth Column

Columns

India Today, January 11, 1999
Jan 11, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
New Focus in New Year

In 1999 India needs a leader who will move away from past policies.

By Tavleen Singh

So a new year begins. The last one of the 20th century and India, 50 years of supposedly glorious independence later, looks almost as bad as it did when the British left. nearly half our people live on less than a dollar a day, more than half are completely illiterate, have no access to sanitation, clean drinking water or healthcare. Things are so bad in "the real India" that hundreds of thousands of people pour into our four metropolitan cities every day because life on the pavements of Mumbai and Delhi is better than it is in those villages that Gandhiji so admired. And our real tragedy continues to be the fact that it is in the name of those villages we have remained a poor country.

Technically, you see, there is no reason on earth why we should not be a rich country. We have enormous mineral resources, extraordinarily large numbers of talented and skilled people and forests, beaches, mountains and a countryside so beautiful that tourism alone could bring in the dollars. But the world has changed a great deal in the century that is now dying. One of the things which has changed is that countries are no longer made rich by resources and natural talent. They are made rich by sound policies and good governance.

This we have not had for the past 50 years and ironically it is in the interest of protecting the "poorest of the poor" that we have not had it, in their interests that our policies have gone awry. it was, you see, ostensibly to protect the poor from the rich we set up a state machinery so vast and unwieldy that we now spend more on the salaries of officials than we do on hospitals, schools or sanitation. This should be considered outrageous even by the poor but they have learnt over 50 years of mai-baap sarkarism to expect only two things from the government: jobs and sops. Free electricity, free water, no taxes and government jobs for the children.

Take just the absurdity of our policy on government jobs. They are so sacrosanct no political leader has so far had the courage to publicly admit that it's time to start cutting them down. Nor has anyone been able to do anything about the fact that the whole country can sometimes be held to ransom by a handful of government employees. Take, for instance, the latest agitation by our air-traffic controllers.

These worthy gentlemen want five times the money they currently earn because they believe that they should be earning as much as airline pilots. Why? Judging by the terrifying number of "near misses" we hear about, judging by the fact that they still haven't learnt to use the sophisticated equipment which is wasting away at some of our airports, you would think they don't deserve to earn one rupee more. But they can bully us because they cannot be sacked or replaced.

Since we were planning for "the poorest of the poor" airlines fell into our list of luxury items. the poor do not use airlines, you see, so we needed only a handful of air-traffic controllers and a handful of pilots. We refused to train any more because their training, like the training of doctors and engineers, is heavily subsidised and we did not want the poor to think we were wasting money on training people who were never going to be of any use to them directly. Is it any wonder that they can hold us to ransom?

The luxury list is another example of the kind of wrong policies we have followed. In our "poorest of the poor" approach to economics everything became a luxury. roads, electricity, transport systems, computers, everything. Unfortunately for our planners, the poor themselves started to break out of their prism of poverty and become middle class.

This came as such a shock to our officials that we now routinely see articles by retired (and serving) officials on the insensitivity of the middle classes. Some have even written books on the subject without bothering to notice it is the middle classes which have kept this country going and that if anyone can be charged with insensitivity it is they themselves.

If the Indian is to break out of her own prism of terrifying poverty then we must have governments that can give us governance and good policies. We also need at least one prime minister who will have the courage to tell us, as Deng Xiaoping told China, that being rich is glorious. Our leaders continue to tell us that being rich is evil and that making money is some kind of contemptible activity. Our intellectuals, steeped as they are in 50 years of leftist propaganda, back this point of view. So the smallest attempt by a political leader to cut government spending is met with howls of anger from our intellectuals who proceed instantly to write reams of rubbish on how we cannot have policies that are anti-poor.

They never tell us why if we have followed such pro-poor policies in the past we continue to think of poverty as the biggest battle we are going to fight in the 21st century. Our real difficulty is that to move away from the misconceived policies of the past 50 years we are going to need a leader of substance and in this particular area the horizon looks about as bleak as it possibly can. so since it is a New year let me end with a New year wish: may we in this last year of the 20th century find ourselves a leader with a mind untrammelled by the mistakes of the past 50 years. Ah, if only New Year's Day wishes could come true.

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