The Hindu Business Line : UPA’s new agenda: Can it deliver?

Forward-thinking reforms covering prudent fiscal management, getting back illegal money stashed abroad, encouragement to FDI , governance reforms, drawing a roadmap for listing of PSUs and administrative reforms remain mostly “talk about talks” with no set goals in sight or fast-forwarding them to set markets on fire to sustain the growth impulses, policy analysts contend.

G. Srinivasan

New Delhi, June 4 There are few instances where a new Government desisted from declaring itself a champion of all causes in a bid to please all. Predictably, the address of the President of India, Ms Pratibha Patil, to the joint session of Parliament outlining the UPA government’s broad policy contours, in its second innings at the Centre, chimes with this tested convention to a fault.

Describing the verdict of the 2009 Elections as “a mandate for inclusive growth, equitable development and a secular and plural India”, the Manmohan Singh Government has dedicated the next 10 years as a “Decade of Innovation”. The Government promises to ensure that its policies for education and science and technology are imbued with a spirit of innovation, so that the creativity of a billion people is unleashed.

As the UPA government, in its second coming, claims to “carry the weight of dreams” of the country’s young population, it has not refrained from stating its ability to accelerate economic growth substantially to a record five-year average of 8.5 per cent. Even as the current fiscal year’s economic growth would be a pale shadow of this average, in view of the global slowdown and its attendant ill-effect on domestic economy, the authors of the UPA address could not resist from tom-toming their previous showing — many-splendoured hues in agriculture, access to social infrastructure including health, education through its various missions and assistance to States and pay revision to legion of its employees.

Claiming that these initiatives were possible because high growth generated more resources, the address avers the need to resume the growth momentum “to provide the government the capacity to expand opportunities for employment, provide more resources to increase outlays in education, health care and infrastructure and to meet the needs of all regions and all people”.

Unique ID card

Considering the fact the new dispensation sets store by public investments in key areas for ensuring development and distribution of benefits in an egalitarian manner, the assurance in the President’s address that the Unique Identity Card scheme for each citizen would be implemented in three years overseen by an Empowered Group is a step in the right direction. With inclusive growth being the main mantra, the scheme would definitely serve the purpose of identification for a plethora of development programmes and security, if the Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, demonstrates élan and involvement in implementing this much-needed initiative of a national database of solid information on citizenry.

As the address speaks of a public data policy within the next 100 days to place all information covering non-strategic areas in the public domain, it is bound to help citizens to challenge the data and engage directly in governance reform, provided this gets translated into the ground.

Ensuring food security

The enactment of a new law — the National Food Security Act — entitling every family below poverty line in rural as well as urban areas to 25 kg of rice or wheat a month at Rs 3/kg and the assurance that this legislation would be used to bring about broader systemic reform in the much-reviled public distribution system would go a long way in assuaging the concerns of millions of people.

The focus on national skill development initiative with an ambitious target of creation of 500 million skilled people by 2022 to reap the benefits of demographic dividend cannot be feasible merely by making massive investments in education but also in informal and non-formal education where roping in private institutions with sufficient spurs ought to engage the authorities even as they have commenced the operation of the scheme.

Other forward-thinking reforms covering prudent fiscal management, getting back illegal money stashed abroad, encouragement to foreign direct investment through ‘an appropriate policy’ regime, governance reforms, drawing a roadmap for listing of public sector undertakings for eventual sale to retail investors from Indian public even as the Government retains 51 per cent in them and administrative reforms remain mostly “talk about talks” with no set goals in sight or fast-forwarding them to set markets on fire to sustain the growth impulses, policy analysts contend.

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