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FIFTH
COLUMN
Poverty
of Ideas
Corruption
and wasteful charity masquerading as rural development schemes must end
By
Tavleen
Singh
However
bad things may seem, much has changed for the better since we abandoned
our attempts to emulate the country whose leader we welcomed last week,
when Russia was still the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin was only a spy.
Two ugly legacies remain from the old days: tokenism and the destruction
of an Indian sense of community, replaced by the nanny state or what we
call maibaap sarkar. If they do not change quickly we could find
that no amount of economic liberalisation will change anything for the
average Indian.
 As
an example of tokenism I can think of nothing better than our poverty
alleviation programmes on which the Central Government spends around Rs
35,000 crore a year. The beneficiaries of these grandiose attempts at
ending poverty know they do not work but the government continues to pour
money into them because nobody has the courage to admit openly that they
have not worked. So, the Planning Commission deserves praise for acknowledging
in its mid-term review of the economy that these schemes have failed because
of corruption, uncaring officials and a decrepit system that does nothing
but waste public money. The report is still a closely guarded secret but
bits of it have managed to find their way into the press. The
Indian Express reported recently that only 15 per cent of the beneficiaries
of the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), which costs us Rs
13,700 crore a year, have managed to rise above the poverty line. And
that despite food subsidies having gone up four times in the past 10 years,
a third of the PDS wheat and rice get diverted to the market at the national
level. This figure goes up to 69 per cent in Punjab and 100 per cent in
Nagaland. Those who have seen the report say it admits that the IRDP has
in several instances served mainly to push its beneficiaries into a spiral
of indebtedness that makes them poorer because they become easy prey for
loan sharks. They borrow money to repay IRDP loans to avoid going to jail.
The Planning
Commission report, from all accounts, is a courageous attempt to warn
the Government that it should change its strategy if it is genuinely interested
in alleviating poverty. Will the Prime Minister please read it carefully
and recognise that the Rs 35,000 crore we waste annually on subsidies
and on various rural employment schemes can be much better spent?
Charity
Isn't The Answer: Sadly, this money could be better spent simply by
sending Indians below the poverty line a cheque, which, according to some
estimates, would give each person more than Rs 8,000 a year. This is if
we want to continue with the approach that the only way to help the poor
is by giving them charity, which has been the unfortunate leitmotif of
all our attempts at poverty alleviation.
There is
a better approach and it is empowerment. This is a fashionable buzzword
these days but it could have real meaning if we start to think of poverty
alleviation programmes as a means of enabling the poor to lift themselves
above the poverty line. To do this, the Rs 35,000 crore the Central Government
spends on such schemes needs to be diverted towards building roads, schools,
hospitals and all the other things rural India so desperately needs. We
have a new minister for rural development, M. Venkaiah Naidu. If he wants
to make a difference he could begin by setting up a scheme to build rural
roads. If it is properly administered it would provide jobs to the desperately
poor. He should then think in terms of schemes that would encourage rural
services to develop. Money should go to villages that come up with schemes
to provide cleaning and sanitation services. In the days before the maibaap
sarkar took over, most villages handled this sort of thing themselves.
Now they wait for someone from Lucknow or Bhopal to come and do the job
for them. The result is that the average Indian village is so filthy,
so shamefully unsanitary that it should be considered unfit for human
habitation. This can be changed through the right kind of "poverty
alleviation" schemes.
The right
kind of projects would involve village communities in issues not just
of sanitation but of improving the environment. How about using some of
the funds for rural development on tree planting, maintaining parks and
building playing fields for village children? We whine endlessly about
our abysmal performance in the Olympics without realising that athletes
do not usually come from the middle class but from the peasantry. They
are the brick and mortar of any society and, thanks to the maibaap
sarkar in India, live in such misery that the question of sports fields
does not enter their lives. All this and much else could change if the
money wasted on the tokenism of anti-poverty programmes was better spent.
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