All the right noises

Who wrote the following words in a newspaper column on Budget day? ``The government requires to considerably increase investments to incre...

Who wrote the following words in a newspaper column on Budget day? “The government requires to considerably increase investments to increase the literacy level to 95 per cent. Sizable investment in primary health is essential to reduce child and female mortality rates as well as improve access to health care”. No, it is not Dr Amartya Sen. Neither is it Jyoti Basu. It’s dotcom czar, N.R. Narayana Murthy, stating what he believes are mandatory elements in a credible budget. The old notion of looking at poverty alleviation and community development measures as social do-gooding is anachronistic in the extreme. Today they have come to be regarded as crucial elements for sustainable economic growth.

So how does Yashwant Sinha’s budget for the year 2000-2001 measure up to this new common sense? The question is partly answered by a simple statistical comparison. The monies earmarked for defence and that for the five basic needs of health, education, drinking water, housing and roads, which Sinha agrees are crucial for the well-being of the rural population, is roughly the same. Around Rs 13,000 crore. Call it the exigencies of post-Pokharan, post-Kargil India, or a lack of will to seriously address the needs of two-thirds of the Indian population, but the fact remains that Sinha has been less than fair to social welfare. There are, of course, features in this budget that need to be warmly commended. The important, even courageous decision, to deprive tax-payers of PDS sugar is one such.

According to the finance minister, the tax-paying community numbers around 20 million and efforts must now be made to extend the same rule to other prosperous groups, like traders and entrepreneurs, who may not be payingincome tax but can still afford to acquire sugar at market rates. Also the intention to declare 2001 as “women’s empowerment year” and the emphasis on rural housing, portends well for the future — but only if they are taken as seriously as they need to be.

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The biggest drawback in Sinha’s social welfare agenda, however, is its lack of synergy between the proposals in last year’s budget and those in this one. Last year, for instance, he spoke at some length on an education guarantee scheme and earmarked a sum of Rs 3035.13 crore for setting up elementary schools in every habitation which does not have one within a radius of 1 km. The nation would have liked to know what became of that brave proposal, and how much it had helped the estimated 1.8 lakh villages that do not have a school within a kilometre. This time Sinha prefers to talk about universalising elementary education but the amount he has earmarked for it is still clearly insufficient. Again, while reproductive and child health programmes have received a fairly handsome increase of Rs 695 crore, the same is not the case with primary health.

The Department of Health has been awarded a niggardly increase of Rs 137 crore. The rationale of allocating a sum of Rs 2,500 crore for yet another nebulous government scheme like the Pradhan Mantri Gramodaya Yojana, to undertake “time-bound programmes”, is difficult to grasp. Dividing resources, which are in any case meagre, in this fashion could blunt the edge of social welfare initiatives. Is it too much to expect Sinha to ensure that all his newly proposed schemes, and not just those included in the new “gramodaya yojana”, are time-bound?