~Mani Shankar Aiyar
To make ours a truly just society, we should ally economic reforms to governance reforms through the panchayats so as to translate accelerated growth into ‘inclusive growth.’
The Arjun Sengupta Committee on the Unorganised Sector has just informed us that 83.6 crore (836 million) Indians live on less than Rs.20 a day, that is less than 50 cents a day, which is half way below the somewhat arbitrary ‘poverty line’ of a dollar a day drawn by the World Bank and other international institutions. Yet, as P. Sainath, The Hindu’s Magsaysay Award-winning Rural Affairs Editor, has informed us in his brilliant articles and outstanding speeches, this is the same India which has the world’s fourth largest number of dollar billionaires, whose combined wealth makes the India of today (forget tomorrow!) the second major economic superpower in the global economy of billionaires. According to Sainath, we fare rather worse when it comes to dollar millionaires, our global ranking falling to eighth. But when we drop below arabpatis, crorepatis and lakhpatis to the aam admi, Sainath finds that the phenomenal spurt in GDP growth rates in recent years, which will see us breaking the magic 10 per cent barrier this year, has raised the aam admi on the UN Human Development Index from 127th position all the way to the 126th position. So, around 20 crore (200 million) Indians go to bed hungry every night. This is injustice indeed.
More disturbing still, Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, in his May 2007 lecture to the Bureau of Parliamentary Studies, pointed out that over the period of the first six Five-Year Plans — a stretch of about 35 years, given Plan holidays (as they were somewhat archly called) — the rate of growth of agricultural production consistently exceeded the rate of growth of GDP. Of course, we are talking here of the ‘Hindu rate of growth.’ Indeed, when during the 1980s the country first jumped from the ‘Hindu’ rate of growth to the new trajectory of 5.6 per cent annual average, agriculture still beat GDP by growing at 5.7 per cent. Thus, in the first 45 years or so of Independence, the first beneficiary of growth — high and low — was the kisan and the khet mazdoor. How significant this was for them might be gauged from the fact that they constituted between two-thirds and four-fifths of our population. The iconic status of Jawaharlal Nehru, now sneered at by our middle class and their spokespersons in the media, is fundamentally explained by the aam admi in Nehru’s era having shot up from near stagnation to at least the ‘Hindu’ rate of growth. (For remember, the annual average rate of growth of India under the British in the first half of the 20th century was a mere 0.72 per cent). And the major governance reforms of the Nehru era — the integration of the princely states, land reforms (however halting and partial), tenurial reforms, the A.D. Gorwalla Committee on reforms in the cooperative sector, and S.K. Dey’s Community Development, but, above all, the Balwantrai Mehta Study Group on Panchayati Raj — all were aimed directly at the poorest and most needy. In consequence, the growth of that abstraction called ‘the economy’ might have been sluggish but the exponential rise in the welfare of the poor was spectacular.
State, the only hope
The other spectacular consequence of Nehruvian socialism was the burgeoning of the middle class. The middle class has now outstripped its requirement of socialism (hence the vulgar kicking of the ladder up which it rose). But for those 836 million Indians surviving on under Rs.20 a day even six decades after Independence, the only hope of survival is the state. But not — above all, NOT — the state intervening through an indifferent bureaucracy but a state reaching the people through the intermediation of elected panchayats. Rajiv Gandhi’s constitutional amendments have given us 2.5 lakh elected institutions of local government at the grassroots in both rural and urban India. To these, We the People of India (the rural people, not the beautiful people managing the Commonwealth Games) have elected 32 lakh democratic representatives, responsive and responsible to those underprivileged 836 million Indians in their gram sabhas. Meanwhile, accelerated growth through economic reforms has given the Finance Ministry the wherewithal to channel the stupendous sum of Rs.81,000 crore to rural development and rural welfare. But if even that gigantic sum of money has raised us only from 127th to 126th position on the U.N. Human Development Index, it is because the state still relies too heavily on the bureaucracy and, almost everywhere, is yet to genuinely empower the panchayats and nagarpalikas through the effective devolution of functions, finances, and functionaries. The 2000-page, three-volume report on The State of the Panchayats — A Midterm Review and Appraisal which I tabled in Parliament last November is proof of both the enormous strides we have made in the last three years towards meaningful Panchayati Raj and of the long road we are yet to traverse.
Therefore, to make ours a truly just society, my plea is that we ally economic reforms to governance reforms through the panchayats so as to translate accelerated growth into ‘inclusive growth’ — the overarching objective of the Eleventh Five Year Plan. Let us, therefore, dedicate ourselves, at this commencement of the seventh decade of our Independence, to the greatest dream of the greatest Indian — the Mahatma’s dream of Panchayati Raj — for that would be the true symbol of our having accepted his talisman of summoning to our minds when in doubt the poorest man we know and asking ourselves whether the step we propose to take will be of benefit to him for then, as Gandhiji said, our doubts will vanish and we will know the right path to take.
(The writer is Union Minister of Panchayati Raj.)
SOURCE: THE HINDU | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2007
