Making a case for bankruptcy

The latest report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) provides us proof that the public sector is already a luxury we cannot afford. According to excerpts, quoted in this newspaper last week, we spent Rs 5104 crores last year on loans to public sector companies, Rs 804 crores more than we spent on primary education.

If this were not outrageous enough we also spent Rs 20,926 crores on subsidies to these same companies, five times more than the combined expenditure on the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana for rural roads and the famed Golden Quadrilateral.

If this investment in the public sector was at least bringing us huge profits it might be justifiable but the CAG points out that between April 1 and March 31, 2002 on an investment of Rs 93,755 crores in 270 public sector companies 86 paid a total dividend of Rs 8201 crores.

Had the money been left in a fixed deposit it would have made more in interest. The public sector has to go. Any further expenditure on it will amount to a criminal waste of taxpayers money.

It has to go also because as long as Indians live without the basic amenities of the 21st century — sanitation, healthcare, schools, electricity, clean water — nobody is going to consider us the economic superpower we think we are. These amenities will remain unavailable as long as money gets wasted on the wrong things. Think of the schools that could be built with the money saved from closing down even half the public sector?

Education is, in the view of this columnist, the most important investment we can make so it is particularly shocking that we spent less on it last year than on loans to companies that have long served no useful purpose. We will shortly have the largest number of 21-year-olds in the world. If these young people are educated they will be our greatest asset, if not our greatest weakness.

Unless drastic changes are made in the education policy it is the latter scenario we are looking at. Having recently toured schools in Uttar Pradesh I assure you that at the moment all that those schools are providing is basic literacy and things are not much better elsewhere in the country.

Murli Manohar Joshi’s contribution, in his role as education minister, has mostly been to create silly controversies and spout misleading literacy figures. He also needs to go. What we need is a minister capable of devising a new education policy that understands the difference between education and literacy.

This cannot happen as long as we have schools that are schools only on paper and not a single government school whose facilities match those of our better private schools. Perhaps, for this to happen we need a law that forbids politicians and bureaucrats from sending their children to private schools.

Just as if we want healthcare we need to force our leaders to only use the hellholes that pass for government hospitals. No private healthcare and no foreign healthcare especially not at taxpayers’ expense.

Perhaps, it will only be when we go bankrupt that we realise that we cannot afford the lifestyle of those who rule us. We cannot afford their vast bungalows, their fleets of cars, their free travel or any of their other freebies.

Even rural doctors and teachers, these days, earn a decent salary thanks to the Fifth Pay Commission so there is no reason why the system of additional perks should not be abolished altogether.

Even rich countries, as has been pointed out before in this column, do not provide their MPs and bureaucrats with free accommodation in the most expensive part of town. Why do we? Because we had a colonial system of government, designed to serve the rulers not the ruled, and when we added onto this socialist ideas borrowed from Soviet Russia we ended up with a system of governance that has become nearly as defunct as our public sector.

So, it is that to keep a few thousand government jobs going we spend more on subsidies to the public sector than we do on roads. Since the Congress Party created the system nobody expected that they would change anything but there was hope that a BJP Prime Minister would make a difference. This hope has now been belied.

No sooner did the various components of the Sangh Parivar discover what a cash cow the Indian government is than their ‘‘nationalism’’, their vaunted ideas of sacrifice and simple living were chucked and they started busily helping themselves to petrol pumps and other goodies.

If things are bad in Delhi they are much worse in the mofussil with the state electricity boards being only one example of reckless government spending. So, our only hope is quick, painless bankruptcy and the sooner the better because it is only then that this looting in the name of governance will stop.

Let me leave you with one last statistic. Did you know that the accumulated losses of 97 government companies comes to Rs 60,996 and that this equals the defence expenditure of India?

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com