June 15, 1998

Sinha's budget is a damp squib, skirting genuine rightwing economics.

Tavleen Singh

Maybe I'm a dreamer, a hopeless optimist. But I had expected more from our first BJP budget. I expected our finance minister to stand up in the Lok Sabha and tell us why a country that is potentially among the richest is still shamefully poor, tell us what went wrong and what he plans to do about it. I had expected him to give us a new kind of budget speech, instead of the same tedious collection of clich s and tacky couplets.

We should be among the richest countries, he could have said, and if nearly half our people still live in conditions unfit for animals, it is because we followed the wrong policies. Something like that, instead of the usual piffle about building a new India. Doesn't Yashwant Sinha know this is an old, discredited promise?

This is, please remember, the first government in Delhi that can disown all the mistakes of the past 50 years. It can totally distance itself from the economic police state we lived under. So, had Sinha been more imaginative and more of a leader than a babu, he could have made his budget a truly defining moment in history. It will probably end up as a very small footnote in very small print -- that is, if it makes the history books at all.

I am not going to bore you with long lists of which taxes he should have cut and where he should have spent more money. The financial papers have already done that in abundance -- and, typically, in a language that only economists and industrialists can understand. So you and I look suitably perplexed, dazzled and humbled when such big shot industrialists as Rahul Bajaj and Sanjiv Goenka give the finance minister nine out of 10 for his budget.

They sound so confident, so omniscient, these captains of industry, that we mere mortals hesitate to question their judgement. We choose instead to puzzle privately over why the BJP Government could not have made more dramatic changes.

For instance, why couldn't banks have been privatised? They were nationalised by Indira Gandhi 30 years ago on the ostensible grounds that this was the only way to make loans available to ordinary Indians. In fact, the average Indian farmer still can't dream of getting a loan unless he has sufficient land to mortgage. Even Indian industrialists are handicapped compared to foreign competitors who find it much easier to raise money abroad. But guess who has really benefited from bank nationalistion? The Government.

Our banks are stuck with huge bad debts. They find themselves virtually immobilised by these debts. This is because they have been forced to lend their money to governments, Central and state, who take their time paying back. Bad loans reach such gargantuan proportions that the banks find it hard to spare any money for anyone else. The public sector is another area that needs dramatic action. It eats up more than Rs 1,50,000 crore of our money every year producing goods and providing services that can almost entirely be supplied by private companies at a profit. Our public sector companies rarely make profits. If by mistake they do, then it usually gets diverted into the pockets of you know who.

So Jet Airways gives us terrific service as well as makes money whereas Indian Airlines continues to provide lousy service at no visible profit to anyone. Airlines, airports, hotels and factories producing consumer goods. If they are in government hands, they are usually wasting the taxpayers' money instead of making any.

The problem is so serious that instead of a little tinkering, what we should have had from the finance minister was some acknowledgement that we can no longer afford to waste our money on commercial enterprises which could and should be run by businessmen instead of bureaucrats.

We also needed a budget which would have indicated the finance minister had fully understood that lack of infrastructure causes not just problems for businessmen but also most of India's poverty. If there were roads to our villages instead of dirt tracks, motorways linking our cities instead of strips of gutted tarmac, our people would themselves find ways and means of becoming rich and prosperous.

The finance minister has made the right noises on infrastructure. He's even raised the price of petrol to set up a highway fund. But the element of urgency is missing. Just as it is missing in other areas like education, healthcare and sanitation. Nothing will change unless there are new ideas and completely new policies. These, alas, the BJP is showing itself to be so utterly devoid of that if I had closed my eyes during Sinha's speech, I would have said I was listening to a Congress finance minister.

Afterwards, when I watched Prannoy Roy's perennial budget special, the sense of deja vu became almost disturbing. There was Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Shankar Acharya and N.K. Singh. Saying pretty much the same things they had said after conceiving the past three budgets. Or is it four?

Perhaps it is silly to dream that the BJP can give us a government that will rid us, once and for all, of the economic dictatorship, the vicious inspector raj that has nearly destroyed us over 50 years. To do that, you need real leadership, something we have seen little of in the BJP so far.

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