Where is the human face? Where are the reforms?

Instead of investing our hard-earned taxes on roads and airports the money would go towards staving off farmers’ suicides and starvation deaths. I am all for the human factor. Of course I think roads are vital and commend the Vajpayee Government for building eleven kilometers a day compared to Congress standards of eleven kilometers a year but I think the roads will only be worthwhile if more and more Indians can afford cars. Here, I think the Vajpayee Government blinded by hubris, failed to understand that the roads would lead nowhere if in the villages children continued to die of starvation and farmers continued to kill themselves in one of our most progressive states.

Even as an admirer of Chandrababu Naidu, I believe he deserved to lose if after fifteen years of rule he was unable to do anything about the rural indebtedness that was driving farmers to kill themselves over relatively small amounts of money. When his successor, Rajashekhar Reddy, whose 29 Lok Sabha seats are the main reason for Congress going from 114 to 143, began his tenure as Chief Minister by addressing the issue of farmers suicides I thought I saw the ‘‘human face’’. He announced free electricity for farmers and set up a cell to monitor suicides.

But, more than a hundred Andhra farmers have killed themselves in the past hundred days and the new government seems paralysed and speechless. Even the Prime Minister who personally went to show solidarity with Andhra’s farmers no longer seems to notice what is going on. Where is the ‘‘human face’’?

Where is the ‘‘human face’’ in Maharashtra where more than 9000 children are believed to have died of starvation over the past year? For even one child to die of starvation in our richest state should be an outrage if we have any regard for the human face of economic reform but the Congress Chief Minister began with the shameful argument that the media was ‘‘exaggerating’’. Then came the even more shameful excuse that most of the children died of disease not hunger and it was only when Sonia Gandhi herself announced plans to visit the affected districts that the Chief Minister admitted that there had been mistakes on the part of some of his officials. Soniaji, ‘‘inner voice’’ and conscience keeper of Dr Manmohan Singh’s Government, got as far as Nasik then bad weather prevented her travelling deeper into the depths of rural Maharashtra. What I cannot understand is what she hoped to achieve by going to the afflicted districts.

If this is what the Prime Minister meant by the ‘‘human face’’ then, dear readers, we have seen it before. The only humans who benefit from this kind of expedition are the politicians who make the trek with TV cameras in hot pursuit. There is the usual fifteen minutes of media attention and then the starving children go back to starving to death.

From the Maharashtra Chief Minister, who faces elections in a couple of months, we see another ‘‘human face’’ we have seen too often before. He has announced an ‘‘action plan’’ of Rs 222 crores to ‘‘counter malnutrition in Nandurbar’’. The money will go towards providing employment, drinking water, health services, education and roads in the talukas of Dhadgaon and Akkaluva where the infant mortality rate is double the Maharashtra average.

Aha, you say, at last the ‘‘human face’’ and I say to you, alas, no. This kind of package is an ancient Congress Party practice at election time and it will make no difference to the people it is meant for because everyone knows that there is no way in which the money can be delivered to those its meant for because the delivery system leaks like a sieve and is corrupt and rotten to the core. It has been rotten for more than twenty years, so rotten that Rajiv Gandhi when he was Prime Minister publicly admitted that less than twenty percent of the money meant for the poor actually reached them.

So nobody knows this better than the Congress Party. Nobody knows better than the Prime Minister that these are empty promises as long as nothing is done to rebuild the delivery system from scratch. It needs to be dismantled and discarded. And then rebuilt from the bottom up so that the rotten, corrupt officials who ruined it are made irrelevant by allowing villages to have more control over their own resources. When village governments control hospitals and emergency relief measures like feeding and food-for-work programmes we will get our first glimpse of economic reforms with a human face.

Will the good Doctor dare to make such drastic changes? My problem is that I am an optimist. Besides, at some point somebody will have to so why not the man who brought the ‘‘human face’’ back into the idea of reform.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com