Road to nowhere

As for the minister of finance, he is so busy attending luncheon meetings with the bold and the beautiful that the 300 million Indians living below the poverty line are remembered only at Budget time. Then a few fine phrases are polished to perfection and thrown like pearls to the swine. In my speech in the debate on the Budget I listed the 15 programmes in respect of which the finance minister in his previous budget speech (March 1999) had drawn plaudits for specifically mentioning the role of the panchayats in their planning and implementation. I then pointed out that he had failed to mention even one of them in his next budget speech. So much for the sincerity of his commitment to participative development at the grassroots. He declined to explain why, contenting himself with the irrefutable argument that unlike some pretenders in the Opposition ranks he was neither a maharaja (i.e. Madhavrao Scindia) nor had studied abroad (i.e. li’l ole me). So much for the cut and thrust of repartee in NorthBlock!

This fooling all of the people some of the time is reflected in what was the single most important programme for rural development announced through this year’s Budget: the earmarking of Rs. 2500 crore for building village link roads to improve the biggest roadblock to rural development — the transport infrastructure. It is not the business of the Opposition to praise Caesar but to bury him — so in the House I made no overt reference to this excellent scheme, the most well-endowed plan for poverty alleviation we have ever seen, but back in my constituency bent my energies to getting it as successfully off the ground as possible.

I convened meetings of my workers in each of the nine blocks to unveil the pot of gold so carefully put by Yashwant Sinha at the end of every rainbow and urged them to give me a prioritised panchayat-by-panchayat list of desperately needed rural roads. I then toured the constituency extensively, singing hosannas to the scheme (if not to its creator — that’s politics, and I am sure Yashwant understands). In village after village, I collected suggestions, mostly from the poorest of the poor, easily identified by the dreadful `cheris’ (dalit colonies) in which they live. I also had some two lakh leaflets printed — at the rate of approximately one per household — inviting the general public to write in their proposals for rural roads to be proposed under the scheme. (Footnote: unlike in Yashwant Sinha’s constituency where such a step would not work because few of the poor are literate, there is not only virtually cent per cent literacy in my area, the youngsters, even in the `cheris’, have a much higher levelof written Tamil than their MP!) Hundreds of postcards making proposals have been received in my constituency office.

We have carefully tabulated all these, listed them priority-wise and block-wise, with a rough indication of width and length required, and submitted the lists in triplicate to the Collector, the state government, the Union government, and anyone else we think can push things along. I doubt that on the ground the scheme has received a higher tribute anywhere in the country. But nothing has happened, absolutely nothing. Today in mid-November, eight months after Sinha blazoned his scheme, genuflecting to the man who appointed him by lumping it under the Pradhan Mantri Gramodaya Yojana (literally, The Prime Minister’s Village Sunrise Plan — ah, what felicity of poetry!) the percentage of implementation is exactly zero. Not that there has not been much moving of files and many meetings at home and away (and, for aught I know, even a foreign consultancy or two) — but on the virgin ground not one square centimetre has been laid in not one of our 6,00,000 villages. And we are about to enter the last quarter of thefinancial year.

I thought the right place to make enquiries would be through Parliament’s Standing Committee on Rural and Urban Development, of which I am an avid member. First, I was told the subject could not be "formally" discussed. Then, it was agreed that an "informal" discussion might be held. The informal encounter was scheduled for September, cancelled at the last moment, scheduled once again for October and called off once more; and not even scheduled since. Meanwhile, we were told — "informally", as apparently MPs have no formal right of access to such state secrets! — that Atal Bihari Vajpayee, never one to miss a populist trick, would be "formally" — that word again! — launching the programme on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. Possibly his knee came in the way. More probably, it is the unseemly battle that has broken out over Sinha’s attempt to grab the lion’s share for his state, and other big-wigs what they can, before state allocations go public.

A prominent chief minister, partner in the NDA, has said — informally! (I swear to this story although I cannot name names) — that he will not be pulling out of the central government, despite his description of it as the worst his state has ever had to suffer, because Vajpayee will, in any case, be out before the end of November. Could he have been referring to the unseemly internal wrangle over so homespun a subject as rural roads?