Opinion Urgent reform needed

Wherever I went on my travels in Uttar Pradesh,I met ordinary,very poor Indians who demanded more reforms. They want roads,electricity,clean water,schools,healthcare and jobs. These are all things that can only come when public services are reformed and they would have been reformed had the Prime Minister not stopped the process of economic reforms when he ended the licence raj for big business. It still exists for poorer entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately,Dr Manmohan Singh got so intimidated by the leftists who sit in Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council that he did not dare tell them that reforming public delivery systems was more important than supposedly magical welfare schemes. There is no point in trying to guarantee food security if you do this with a leaky,broken public distribution system. There is no point in enforcing a right to education if government schools remain hopelessly unable to deliver education. And,there is no point in announcing a Rural Health Mission when rural hospitals and health centres are in terminal decay.

The vaunted rural employment guarantee scheme that has eaten up thousands of crore rupees has made so little impact in the areas where it operates that unemployment remains the biggest problem in rural India. Why should this be so? Had the money been spent on ‘bijli,pani,sadak’,on sanitation,schools and hospitals,we may by now have seen a very different India.

Since this has not happened,we have a situation in which the only real change that is visible has been brought about by the spread of technology. Rural Indians are no longer cut off from the 21st century because they can plug into it through their television sets and their cell phones. This makes them even more aware of the need for their living standards to improve. They want schools for their children in which there is the possibility of at least learning to read and count properly.

When they do not get this in government schools,they are willing to spend their scarce resources on private schools that are now ubiquitous in villages. When they get sick,they know that government hospitals will not cure them so they are willing to spend on private healthcare. When they do not get electricity,they use batteries to charge their cell phones and watch their favourite television programmes. In rural Uttar Pradesh,televisions can now be rented for an evening and the entrepreneurs who rent out the televisions also supply the necessary batteries.

When Dr Manmohan Singh,as Finance Minister in 1991,started to dismantle the economic dictatorship created by four decades of ‘socialism’,the aim was for India to become prosperous. Sadly,he did not dare say this openly. And,now that there have been no attempts to take the economic reforms forward for nearly a decade,it has become easy to spread the lie that economic reforms benefited only rich Indians. People who believe this admit that politicians and bureaucrats shared in the ‘loot’ of natural resources but the inexplicable solution they offer is more government controls on the economy. Like leftists of yore,they believe with naïve certainty that officials are best suited to running the economy because they are supposedly benign creatures who have the welfare of the ‘masses’ at heart. Conversely,they believe that anything to do with the private sector is evil and against the interests of ‘the people’.

How ironic it is that the very people that they seek to serve are demanding the sort of reforms that would deliver better public services to them. They do this without noticing that social sector and administrative reforms are part of the economic reform process. And,‘socialist’ political leaders,who dominate every political party,are too scared to tell them the truth about India’s failures.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh