Blame it on the government

This article is supposed to a critique of the government and its abysmal failure in delivering basic services to the citizen, especially to the rural folks. In this article, I argue that the government is solely responsible for the declining standard of l

 

India is an exotic nation and its exoticism gets manifested, on several occasions, in the glaring economic and social inequalities among different constituents of its population. A college excursion to a village in Bankura, one of the poorest districts of West Bengal, five years ago opened my eyes to this fact, taught me a lesson in humility and changed the way I looked at the world around me completely. That day, as we travelled on the kuccha village road, we came across a school, which was in an utterly dilapidated state with crumbling walls and without a roof. Inside, a middle-aged man was sitting lazily while around 50 small children struggled to comprehend certain Bengali alphabets written on a small blackboard in the scorching heat. We were told that that was the only school in the village and the teacher himself had studied till the eighth standard. As we travelled further, large tracts of barren agricultural land stared at our face. At a distance, an emaciated man was vainly trying to farm his small piece of land with a pair of oxen. It then dawned on me that Bankura was one of the least irrigated districts in West Bengal and vulnerable to severe droughts. Lack of irrigational facilities and proper roads had predictably crippled the agricultural sector, which was the only source of employment and livelihood for several impoverished agriculturists. Moreover, food intake of the population had declined dramatically due to successive droughts, the malfunctioning public distribution system (PDS) and rampant corruption. The village tehsildar informed us that the successive hikes in minimum support prices (MSP) of food grains by the central government have largely benefited the large farmers. However, the subsequent increases in the issue prices of food grains at the ‘fair price shops’, aimed at compensating for the higher MSPs and transportation and distribution costs of the Food Corporation of India (FCI), had slashed consumption levels of the poorest. In recent years, controversies surrounding starvation deaths in the Bankura and Murshidabad districts and violence over massive corruption in the PDS in the form of diversion of foodgrains to the black market have been all too predictable.

 

I, for one, returned from that excursion with vital lessons in the growing urban-rural divide, which my privileged upbringing in the bustling metropolis Kolkata, had not provided me with. It taught me to be humble, respect and help the underprivileged or the so-called ‘subalterns’ and not to take my privileged economic and social position for granted. It also provoked me to analyze the glaring shortcomings of the government, which abysmally fails to provide food security and education to the subalterns of the country. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has criticized the pathetic failure of the government to equip children in rural areas with linguistic and mathematical abilities and curbing rampant teacher absenteeism, not least in West Bengal. Certain constituencies have chosen to blame economic reforms as the essential evil that has widened economic and social inequalities and have advocated a return to the state-controlled model of development. However, India’s history since independence bears out the fact that the state-centric growth model is a far more inefficient than what we are following now. The state continues to disappoint its citizens by the abysmal quality of governance and conspicuous lack of accountability.

 

Prof Sen has made the point that economic growth and social development are mutually complementary, one is incomplete without the other. Economic reforms of the last one and a half decades have been a crucial agent of change and reversing it would be suicidal. Pursuing reforms on a larger scale with additional incentives to domestic and foreign private operators would therefore remain essential. For instance, liberalizing the restrictive regulations in the banking and insurance sectors would enhance competition in these sectors and enhance credit delivery and insurance penetration respectively. The scorching growth of various telecommunications enterprises, who are lining up to invest in the hitherto unexplored rural markets, is there for all to see. Within the banking sector in particular, certain private and foreign players have already ventured into the microfinance segment and are helping to transform several lives. The effort ofa consumer goods major in setting up an IT-supported rural development platform to enhance better price realization and income accrual for farmers bears testimony to the progressive social engagements of the private sector. Also, delivery of quality education, a prerogative of the public sector, has been taken up by the private sector. For instance, a large steel producer has established educational institutions for tribals in a backward north Indian state. The government would do well to support these initiatives through increased public investment in education and rural infrastructure and enabling legislation to free up the labor markets to absorb a large section of the rural workforce in labor intensive manufacturing. Unfortunately, the policy landscape remains mired by executive inaction and the ultimate sufferer is the poor farmer in districts such as Bankura.