Data put out by the Government as well as a perusal of successive budgets of major States indicate a gross and sustained misdirection of resources over decades that has left the country gasping for breath. A back-of-the-envelope calculation points to the frittering away of over $30 billion, at the very least, over the last 25 years by the Centre and States, in unnecessary subsidies and freebies.

A 2004 report of the finance ministry prepared with the assistance of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy shows how central subsidies, slightly more than ₹16,000 crore in 1987-88, burgeoned to nearly ₹1,16,000 crore by 2004; it is around twice that today.

Staggering corruption Rajiv Gandhi famously opined that only 16 paise of every rupee spent on the poor actually reaches them — something partially confirmed by Manmohan Singh in late 2009, and more than fully accepted immediately thereafter by the former vice-chairman of the erstwhile Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Sadly, it is no longer news that a substantial portion of the schemes to alleviate poverty, educate the young or provide food for the destitute is stolen, with a substantial percentage going into the pockets of politicians and their minions, creating and feeding a pernicious black economy of gargantuan proportions. Much of the subsidies doled out today in effect constitute unaccounted cash transfers to the powerful and the corrupt.

The 2G, AgustaWestland and Bofors scams pale into insignificance before the outright larceny practiced by India’s political class over decades. Take the example of one State — Tamilnadu. In 2015-16 alone, going by its own figures, the State had set aside over ₹20,000 crore for a bewildering mix of giveaways, from mixies and grinders to laptops and bicycles, among several other items.

The absurdity of it all is staggering when one pauses to consider what such an amount of money, multiplied by similar subsidies and freebies given away by India’s large States year after year, along with the massive subsidies doled out by the Centre, would have bought.

At the very least we would have had a metro running in every major city, while also drought-proofing most of India and simultaneously improving agricultural productivity dramatically. We could also have had in place a large number of state-of-the-art vocational training centres. Instead, today we have trainloads of young moving across the country in search of hard physical work, distressingly the only kind they are capable of doing.

Waste of money Since economic liberalisation was kicked off in 1991, India has generated, and mostly wasted, the kind of transformational money that by now would have had it running alongside China instead of lagging so far behind it.

This, then, is the uncomfortable truth that we refuse to accept, one that is rarely discussed in or out of Parliament. We now have an out-of-control, unstoppable subsidy and freebie culture that diminishes us all, while leaving us with astonishingly filthy cities, rotten infrastructure, grinding poverty, persistent functional illiteracy and gross inequality.

Unsurprisingly, the very persistence of our ‘third-worldiness’ continues to justify the even longer sop-trains on the move, now also rolling hundreds of thousands of litres of water to places that should never have required them in the first place. We make light of avoidable failures while delighting in our modest successes when spectacular achievement arising out of a liberalising economy’s continuous windfall has for long been our due.

The country is now once again sitting on the cusp of a huge realisable possibility to transform itself for the better.

As Raghuram Rajan, one of the few sane voices standing up for the creation of an enabling environment for people to work and prosper in place of unnecessary subsidies observed, “We are in a sweet spot, let’s not waste the opportunity.”

The writer is visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

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