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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Caught In The Rut
Despite the dire necessity, the road to reform is still
long and untravelled
 As
an anniversary it was probably the most important of recent times but
it went unnoticed because Phoolan Devi got killed and the prime minister
threatened to resign over the interminable UTI drama. And us print media
hacks, in our desperation to compete with the showiness and superficiality
of TV journalism, race from one sensational story to the next leaving
little time for contemplation or analysis. So it was left to a few financial
papers to remember that in July we passed the tenth anniversary of Dr
Manmohan Singh's economic reforms. They should be called P.V. Narasimha
Rao's reforms since he was the prime minister at the time, but he recently
disowned them in a series of newspaper articles whose main message was
that he had never stopped being a Nehruvian socialist. Good, now history
will only remember him as the man who allowed the Babri Masjid to be pulled
down.
 Singh,
mercifully, continues to have the courage to admit that our socialist
dream failed and if we had not changed course when we did we would have
been not just bankrupt but with our economy hanging around our neck like
a dead thing. Yet, so short is public memory that we have forgotten what
India was like before the reform process began. Forgotten those endless
queues to buy essential items of daily existence, forgotten that we had
little or no enterprise because we wanted to ensure that the state was
our only real industrialist, forgotten the outdated technology we were
forced to rely on, forgotten that Doordarshan was our only television
channel and even forgotten that the Ambassador was the main automobile
on our roads. So much have those bad old days become a thing of the past
that we still have politicians and political parties who start shrieking
every time a new attempt is made at economic reform.
This makes the government so nervous of change
that much of the economy continues to remain unreformed. The power sector,
for instance, remains much as it has always been. So electricity theft
costs taxpayers Rs 20,000 crore a year. Our state electricity boards are
bankrupt because of this and because of unaffordable supplies of free
electricity so their losses last year totalled Rs 24,000 crore or 1 per
cent of the GDP. We cannot afford this at all but you never hear a fuss
about it in Parliament or hear any of our political leaders make a noise
about it. They prefer to lend their voices to the battle against Enron
when it should be clear to even the economically illiterate that we are
unlikely to attract vast amounts of foreign investment if we renege on
our contracts.
The problem, though, is bigger still. Our infrastructure-roads,
ports, airports, railways-remains as rusty and medieval as ever. And although
we hear about dramatic changes we do not see them. As for what they call
"social infrastructure" by which is usually meant health and
education it remains disgraceful. Murli Manohar Joshi-the boss of human
resource development-boasts of how we are now approaching a literacy rate
of 70 per cent. To which we really need to ask how he is measuring this.
Usually anyone who can write his name is considered literate. But is this
all we want in an age of computer literacy? Higher education remains in
the doldrums and healthcare conditions are so abysmal that even the poorest
Indians seek out the nearest private doctor or quack rather than rely
on government medical facilities.
Economic reforms should have created a climate
of enterprise but because they have happened only to a limited degree
the average small entrepreneur in India is at the mercy of so many inspectors
and thugs that only the most enterprising survive. Here, let me tell you
the story of an enterprising, adventurous English woman who came to India
to build a small hotel in the village of Pachalloor in Kerala. The hotel
did well, particularly with foreign tourists until one morning when a
small army of policemen and municipal officials arrived without warning
and started to tear the Lagoona Davina down. Investigations exposed the
usual tale of bribery, chicanery and corruption. This kind of thing happens
too often for foreign investors to be madly enthusiastic about our wondrous
country.
If, at least, we had a criminal justice system
that was functioning properly there may still have been hope but when
it takes 20 years for a case to come to court what hope can there be?
So, although we need to be grateful to Manmohan Singh for what he did
we also need to mourn the fact that the process he started is so far from
complete. If it were on the road to completion we could at least be cheerful.
Alas, the road ahead is long and untravelled and there is no sign that
this Government is even taking its first steps along it. So we remember
you Dr Manmohan Singh but we remember you with gloom gathering around
us.
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