The Hindu Business Line : Some more promises from Red Fort

Dr Manmohan Singh, when he was Finance Minister under P. V. Narasimha Rao, led the break-away from the Nehruvian era of the licence-permit-quota Raj and began the process of economic reforms, liberalisation and globalisation in India.

The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who spoke from the ramparts of the Red Fort on August 15, 2007, appeared, however, to be retracing his steps back to Nehruvian precepts:

Industry as the vanguard of development,

Priority to urban development,

Priority to institutions of higher education.

In times of crisis, the media often refers to ‘damage containment action’. The Prime Minister’s address from the Red Fort was preceded by conjecture that, having put the Left in its place on the India-US Nuclear Deal, was going to turn his attention to sectors where the UPA performance was lacklustre. The Prime Minister, it was predicted, would deliver a historic package to resolve the agricultural stalemate once for all.

Had it not been for these high expectations, the Prime Minister’s address from the ramparts of the Red Fort would have passed fairly unnoticed. Of course, there was a reference to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the “Bharat Nirman” facelift exercise, the doubling of agricultural credit and the package of Rs 25,000 crore announced two months ago.

A committee of the Congress party as also a working group of the Prime Minister’s Office has studied the impact of various agricultural packages announced and found they have just disappeared into thin air.

It is conjectured by the farmers who were to be the beneficiaries that the money went where it was designed to go — the bureaucratic, cooperative and political pipelines being refurbished in preparation for the General Elections 2009.

The Prime Minister offered concrete sops to the weaker sections, the handicapped and even the invalid, but had nothing to offer the able-bodied hard-working farmers who make India self-sufficient in food.

Comparison with Nehru

It is remarkable that one of the more prominent Marathi dailies has editorially compared Dr Manmohan Singh with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as scoring on clean image, integrity and mannerisms that represent the best combination of Indian tradition and Western upbringing.

But there was none of the lyrical and poetic quality of either Nehru’s speeches or the spirit with which he used to energise the people. The Prime Minister’s address was quite like a bureaucrat’s report. On the other hand, it was dotted with some of the ideas for which the Nehruvian era was infamous.

Mahatma Gandhi, who anointed Nehru as his political heir, was, essentially, an anarchist who was sceptical about the worthwhileness of the institution of government and attached the highest importance to the freedom of an individual to decide his own destiny.

Agriculture, for Gandhiji, was the centre-piece of all development. For Nehru, agriculture was an unfortunate reality he could not ignore. It was the source of manpower, wage-goods and raw-materials necessary for the industrial development that was so dear to his heart. It was industrial development that was to drag behind it agricultural prosperity.

For Gandhiji, again, the village was the centre-point in his economic plans, not the towns and cities. The education of the children from villages was so dear to him that he designed a whole system of “basic education” for the purpose; Nehruvians had a penchant for the institutions of higher education, leaving village primary schools without blackboards, teachers, even students.

Cart before horse

Dr Manmohan Singh, in his present incarnation as a Prime Minister, is putting the cart before the horse. For him, industrial development is the main factor that will provide employment to the surplus population on agriculture; that is the solution to the problem of farmers’ penury that drives them to suicides; that the farmers should have a supplementary income, not from land but from non-agricultural jobs and occupations. Again, for Dr Singh, industrial development is mainly an urban phenomenon and not something that takes place in the countryside on the basis of the agricultural surplus generated there. It is worthwhile considering, for a moment, the Japanese model. The Japanese government followed policies of deliberately hiked agricultural prices that generated the primary capital that gave birth to small-scale industries that blossomed into the giant industrial houses of today.

In Nehruvian economics, the surplus from agriculture has to be taken away to urban centres, which are seen as the cradle of industry. Farmers will benefit from the secondary effects of industrial prosperity. The villagers cannot sustain any worthwhile lifestyle. The entire infrastructure of roads, power, electricity, education and health had to be provided to them by the government. Improving rural infrastructure is a good hobbyhorse; on the other hand, providing modern infrastructure to cities is an instrument of industrial development as also accommodating displaced farmers coming to the cities.

Dr Manmohan Singh also reeled off impressive figures of new IITs, ITIs, IIMs, and Universities that the government plans to establish.

Ends and means

The Prime Minister did give the farmers who are displaced by various projects of industrial development the promise of satisfactory rehabilitation, though he did not spell out any scheme for the purpose. Obviously, in the minds of the powers-that-be, industrial development must necessarily result in displacement of the agricultural population, not only from the vocation but also from their traditional habitats.

Political support was only the means for the academician Dr Manmohan Singh to put his ideas into effect. But, somewhere along the line, there seems to have arisen a certain confusion between the Ends and the Means. It is sad that Dr Singh, the reformer, has started mouthing populist phrases rather than radical reformist idiom.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana and Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. He can be contacted at sharad.mah@nic.in)

More Stories on : Economy | Down to Earth

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Chimera of food security

Selection patent and its discontents

Some more promises from Red Fort

Stronger rupee — What it means for FDI growth

Madras High Court: The Novartis Judgment
A review of the after-effects

The economic cost

Safeguarding civil public discourse

Next energy source

Corporate forests