UPA model has slowed down both growth and inclusiveness

http://www.firstpost.com/economy/upa-model-has-slowed-down-both-growth-and-inclusiveness-751561.html

In his speech at the 46th annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at Greater Noida, Finance Minister P Chidambaram declared, “India’s potential growth rate is 8 percent plus and we cannot afford to become complacent and sit back”.
Sure, one can’t. But will the solution he offers – ‘focus on inclusive growth’ – get India back to the 8 percent plus levels that it once reached (and crossed briefly)?
This is not to argue that India must pursue an economic model that benefits only a small elite (as it had been doing in the years before 1991). Growth needs to be, as he puts it in the same speech, ‘broad-based’.
Unfortunately, the ‘inclusive growth’ model that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has been following has all the potential of depressing growth and, only the most fanatical leftist will argue that inclusion can be achieved without growth. Employment guarantee and food security legislations may be inclusive in the short run but have the potential of harming growth in the long run.
If Chidambaram is looking for clues to solve the growth-inclusion challenge, he should perhaps go through a background paper that ADB prepared for the annual meeting – Beyond Factory Asia: Fuelling Growth in a Changing World.
Factory Asia is a model that ADB describes as one of “regional production networks connecting factories in different Asian economies, producing parts and components that are then assembled, with the final product shipped largely to advanced economies”. This model, adopted by China and the southeast Asian countries, helped put these economies on a high growth path.
There’s an Asian Century on the horizon, the monograph says, based on the rapid rise of its manufacturing sector. India isn’t a part of Factory Asia – since its manufacturing is more focused on the domestic market – but is on its periphery and would perhaps do well to follow that path, the paper suggests.
Circumstances, however, have changed. The Factory Asia model faces new challenges: the weak outlook for the advanced economies which provided much of the markets for the Factory Asia countries; growing protectionism in these markets; rising production costs (supply chain disruptions, wage increases, volatile exchange rates, skill shortages) are eating into the price advantage Asian manufacturing enjoyed.
But these issues and challenges can be addressed and India (which the paper puts among the developing Asian economies) could adopt and be part of a New Factory Asia model.
With consumer demand shifting from developed to emerging markets, developing Asian economies should tap into their own domestic demand as well as regional markets, fostering free trade and pulling in manufacturing investment by improving the investment climate. They need to build strong, competitive brands by ensuring globally compatible labour and safety standards. The private sector should be encouraged and helped to move up the manufacturing value chain, to make up for the narrowing wage differential.
Focusing on skill development is also important and necessary, given the increasing sophistication of manufacturing processes and the shrinking of the labour pool in some countries. Moreover, it is also important to encourage small and medium enterprises, which can help produce intermediate goods and provide supporting services.
Chidambaram’s speech had the usual laundry list of steps the government is taking to put the economy on track – the focus on infrastructure, investments in manufacturing, fiscal consolidation, the Cabinet Committee on Investment, easing foreign direct investment in hitherto taboo sectors, skill development programme, among a host of other things which we all know are happening only on paper.
There will be some who argue that the prescriptions in the monograph may not be entirely suitable to India. Sure, there is no cookie cutter model for development.
Recent census reports have shown that the number of farmers has declined in 10 years, while that of agricultural labour has increased. But with pressure on land growing, there won’t be enough employment for all of them. The service sector will require skills that farm labourers may not have. NREGA is not the solution. The answer, then, is to give manufacturing a huge fillip.
That’s why it would be good for this government and for any other government in the future to take these recommendations seriously.

Delhi child rape: Who cares for these Nowhere People?

http://www.firstpost.com/breaking%20views/delhi-child-rape-who-cares-for-these-nowhere-people-717302.html

As the father of the six-year-old rape victim was relating his woes with the police to television cameras, my maid didn’t share my shocked reaction. She merely shrugged: “Hamari baat kahan sunte hain? Hame bhaga dete hain (where do they listen to us, they shoo us away).”
Bhaga dete hain is a constant refrain in the joyless song that is the life of the nowhere people at the bottom of the pyramid. It isn’t just apathy alone. Maybe they can live with that. It’s the dehumanising contempt with which they are dismissed.
This refrain played for the family of another rape victim, a 13-year-old. The girl had been abducted and had returned home after nine days in captivity. The police did not act on the missing person complaint and, on her return, did not file a case of rape. It took a court order to get them to do so.
This refrain played for the parents of the children who disappeared from Nithari years ago. When the parents went to complain, they were turned away by the police who brusquely told them that the children may have run away because of poverty. In one case, where the girl was a teenager, the accusation was worse – she must have run away with someone. All this came to light only when their skeletons were later found.
It isn’t the police alone. When you are at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, nothing, absolutely nothing, works for you. Not a single government department. Not a single welfare scheme supposedly designed for you.
That’s what my maid found when she wanted to apply for a BPL card which will enable her to access the Delhi government’s much-hyped Annashree scheme (where BPL families get Rs 600 a month for foodgrain). Application forms were not available. I tried getting one online but the link to the form was a dead one. She finally found out that forms were available in one corporation office. She went there, only to be told that forms were available but it would cost her Rs 3,500 to get the BPL card made.
For politicians and bureaucrats, their work is over once they have designed and launched a scheme for “the poor”. How it is working on the ground is an irritating detail they don’t want to bother with.
Are politicians above the bhaga dete hain attitude? Sadly, no. Their populism will be directed at these nowhere people but basic courtesy is something they will deny to them.
I asked my maid to approach the local councillor of her area for help with the BPL card. She got short shrift there. Things were no different at the local MLA’s office. The councillor was from the BJP; the MLA from the Congress. “Jaao, time kharab mat karo. (Go, don’t waste our time),” she was told at both places.
If the politicians don’t want to waste time on them, the media too doesn’t want to waste column-inches and airtime on them. Unless there’s some sensation involved, as in the latest case. Think back to Nithari. A month before the skeletons were found, the child of a multinational company executive had been kidnapped in Noida. That captured media attention. Around that time, there was a small news item about children going missing in a Noida village. No one followed it up.
Take also the Aarushi Talwar case. The media outrage that erupted when Dr Rajesh Talwar was kept in custody initially for 50-and-odd days on what the media decided was an unsubstantiated charge was completely absent when three servants were detained for a longer period. Their relatives were not called into television studios to present their case. No follow up stories have been done on how their lives have been affected.
Is the outrage over the police attitude in the two recent rape cases going to bring about lasting change to time kharab mat karo attitude? It could, if political activists go beyond trying to capitalise on individual incidents and actually help this underclass, if People Like Us went beyond hyperventilating in our drawing rooms and actually listened and tried to help People Like Them deal with officialdom.
But the chances are that this outrage will peter out, just like the fury after the 16 December 2012 rape case did. Other rape cases kept hitting the headlines, instances of official apathy in earlier cases came to light, but didn’t cause a ripple. Activists didn’t lend a helping hand; people didn’t gather at India Gate; and the media didn’t follow up.
We all shoo-ed them away. And we will continue to do so.

Ambani is more deserving of VIP security than others

My initial reaction to the news that Mukesh Ambani would get Z-plus category security was one of absolute outrage.  For the usual reasons – why should a few Indians move around in armoured cocoons while the rest of us live in absolute insecurity; why should the taxpayer bankroll the security of a man who, as a friend pointed out on Facebook, lives in the world’s costliest home; this will start a trend of other businessmen seeking the same level of security.
Just 20 minutes earlier, my heart had been gladdened by a report in the Newsline section of the Indian Express (devoted to city news). That said the Delhi government had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court saying that visiting VIPs from other states could bring their own security only if they were staying in the Capital for less than 72 hours and, in any case, they could not use sirens and flashers nor could the armed personnel accompanying them brandish their guns at or intimidate the public to clear traffic on the roads. That is a common sight on Delhi roads, where Black Cat commandos bully others driving on roads to give way to VIP cavalcades. (Read this report here.) 

When I read the report about Ambani’s security in the main paper after this, I was angry once again.
My mind went back some years ago, when P Chidambaram had just been shifted to the home ministry after 26/11. I was stuck in a traffic jam and suddenly noticed that the car next to me had a red beacon on top. Other cars were honking and trying to manoeuvre in whatever little space they got (as only people stuck in Delhi traffic can do) but this car remained where it was (I don’t recall if the beacon was flashing) and didn’t use the siren (as Delhi VIPs are wont to do to get ahead in traffic or to jump traffic lights). Then I found that the person who was sitting in the back seat, rubbing his eyes tiredly, was none other than Home Minister Chidambaram, entitled to Z plus security. There were no escort vehicles surrounding his car.
I asked a friend to tweet about this contrast – between Ambani and Chidambaram. The latter had refused to take any security though his predecessor, Shivraj Patil, continued with his full complement even after demitting office. Chidambaram had also initiated a review of VIP security and struck 130 people off the list, generating a lot of heartburn.
By late afternoon came reports that Ambani would pay the government for the cost of his security, but that didn’t mollify me. Trained people would still be diverted for his use and even if he pays, replacing them won’t be easy.
But by evening my opinion had changed. By then I had read about how Chidambaram’s successor, Sushil Kumar Shinde, had reversed his approach and been pretty generous about granting security cover to a host of politicians as well as a petrol pump owner in Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s constituency. Read about that in this report.
That’s when it struck me. What is the contribution of these worthies to the country? In what way are they enriching our lives? At least Ambani is contributing to the GDP, generating wealth and employment. Even his obscenely humungous Antilla would have had tremendous trickle down on other industries – cement, steel, construction, to name just three. Whatever else you may call him, you can’t call him a parasite.

He, perhaps, is more deserving of security than they are. Yet they will demand it as an entitlement. While he is paying for it.

Best tribute to Ambedkar: don’t treat Dalits with condescension

This was published in Firstpost on 14 April 2013, B. R. Ambedkar's birth anniversary.

Today is Ambedkar Jayanti and to observe it, the Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has arranged for a ‘mass meal’ where party workers of all communities will eat together. All top leaders of the party will attend the mass meal.
The president of the Delhi state unit, Vijay Goel, has promised that party will also do all of the following:
• organise medical camps for Dalits
• provide books to Dalit students from “Class 1 to IAS-level”
• tell every party worker to employ at least one Dalit
• ensure that Dalit auto rickshaw drivers who have not been issued badges get one so that they can have their own auto rickshaws
• Goel will go to Dalit colonies “on foot” to understand the problems they face.
It’s silly season in Delhi, with assembly elections due towards the end of the year, and the BJP has been out of power for 15 years, so that explains why it has suddenly realised, as Goel puts it, the low literacy and graduation rates of Dalits and the lack of medical facilities for the community in the Capital. Make no mistake, if the roles had been reversed and the Congress had been in the BJP’s place, it would have done much the same thing.
But it’s not just poll-bound Delhi. Across the country, there will be similar examples of tokenism. None of them will make any difference to the lives of the Dalits. Worse, all of them smack of a patronising attitude towards Dalits and reinforce the perception that their upliftment is dependent on the munificence of the upper castes.
What is both laughable and extremely unfortunate is that this betrays a complete misreading of how much the target group has moved away from such handout-driven progress. Does Goel really expect Dalits to feel honoured that every BJP worker in Delhi (there are a couple of lakhs of them) will employ one person from their community? Doesn’t this only reinforce the jajmani system of yore, where Dalits served the upper castes and were, in turn, taken care of by them? Doesn’t this send out a message that Dalits are only meant to serve others?
And this at a time when there’s a growing sentiment that Dalits should not just be job-seekers, but job-givers as well. The Dalit entrepreneurship movement has been gaining ground slowly but steadily, buoyed by first-generation entrepreneurs who may have studied with the help of reservations but want to shape their future without that prop. There is a significant Dalit middle class that is taking its place in the world with a self-confidence that does not come from job quotas. The bechara image of Dalits is also being challenged – aggressively in Punjab and quietly elsewhere.
In Punjab, rap and pop albums celebrating the Dalit identity are all the rage and people are proudly sporting the chamar tag. A research study, Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era by Devesh Kapur, Chandrabhan Prasad, Lant Pritchett, D Shyam Babu shows how, in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, between 1990 and 2007 there has been a very significant change in the eating, grooming and consumption habits of Dalits. More importantly, the relationship between Dalits and non-Dalits is also changing. Dalit attendance at non-Dalit weddings had decreased as had instances of separate seating for Dalits. As the study notes: “Poverty and dependence might explain why more dalits attended nondalit weddings in 1990, even though separate seating was more a norm then. By 2007, though such humiliation had become rare, fewer dalits were keen on attending non-dalit weddings. It is a mark of dalits’ new-found independence – both from upper castes and the food in their feasts. (emphasis mine)”
Given this, are Dalits supposed to feel honoured that upper caste people will break bread with them at a mass meal on Ambedkar Jayanti? And is it not more a reflection of those who come up with such ideas that they do not normally interact with Dalits socially?
Dalit intellectual Chandrabhan Prasad often makes the point that the nature of violence against Dalits is changing. Earlier, he says, the violence was one-sided with Dalits being the passive victims. Now, it is more in the nature of clashes because Dalits are challenging social, economic and political equations in the village and the upper castes are not able to deal with that. Whether it is in Gohana in Haryana or Dharmapuri in Tamil Nadu, the target of attacks, Prasad points out, were two-wheelers, television sets and books of Dalits. It is the upper castes that are feeling insecure in the face of Dalit advancement.
This is not in any way meant to advance a mitigating argument for Khairlanji, Dharmapuri, Gohana and umpteen other incidents of caste-based violence. Nor am I suggesting that Dalits are now living in a discrimination-free paradise. Search for Dalit music or chamar music on Youtube and see the kind of filthy abuses that the videos invite. Caste prejudice lurks beneath the surface of the most suave and sophisticated veneers. The heartening findings in two districts of Uttar Pradesh are not indicative of even the entire state, let alone the country. Remember, below poverty line school-children refuse to eat the free mid-day meals cooked by Dalit women. In our villages, poverty and hunger take second place to caste.
In a 2010 study, Dalits in Business: Self-employed Scheduled Castes in North-West India by Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, SS Jodhka, had 42 percent respondents admitting that they faced discrimination in business and 63 percent saying they faced it in their personal lives. In blue-collar jobs, there is a perceptible discrimination against Dalits.
A few hundred Dalit entrepreneurs do not indicate that Dalits are now an economically strong community. In villages, they are perhaps the most wretched of families. The fact that Dalit entrepreneurs had to set up a separate chamber of commerce – the Dalit Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Dicci) – itself testifies to the fact that they are not part of the mainstream. Dicci, its founder-chairman had told this writer once, was formed because mainstream chambers could not understand the problems Dalits faced.
There are Dalit intellectuals, activists, politicians and others who insist that this mind-numbing oppression is the only Dalit narrative and dismiss the strides the community has made. But the Dalit story is a far more complex and multi-layered one. And, on Ambedkar Jayanti, it would be best for our tokenism-loving politicians across parties to keep that in mind. Or else, far from wooing the Dalits, they may well end up alienating them.

Rooting for a Minimal State

This piece first appeared in Firstpost. Unfortunately, the heading was not quite in tune with the article. Apart form the fact that it won't endear me to either Narendra Modi or Digivijay Singh, and got me a lot of abusive comments from Modi-bhakts who seem to rule cyberspace.

Was Modi's governance speech inspired by Digvijay Singh?

Seetha
As I listened to Narendra Modi hold forth on the theme for which he is being feted all around – maximum governance, minimum government – my mind could not help but go back 11 years. On 27 May 2002, a then-celebrated chief minister and now Modi’s arch baiter, Digvijaya Singh, delivered the first Minoo Masani Memorial Lecture. The topic: More Governance with Less Government.

Singh had used this phrase when I had interviewed him for the business magazine I then worked for. That was so much in line with the philosophy of the Swatantra Party that Masani had co-founded that I got him to deliver the lecture.
There is no text of Modi’s address at the ThinkIndia dialogue series for readers to judge for themselves, but as speeches go, I rate Singh’s lecture higher. It put the issue in a historical context and provided a perspective that Modi’s chatty-jokey sermon did not. 
Singh had wowed the audience at the India International Centre then, much the way Modi captured everyone’s imagination when he first articulated his now pet phrase while addressing students at the Sri Ram College of Commerce earlier this year. But there was no social media then to hype up the speech and the speech-giver.
But, just look at the irony. The Congress had a headstart over the Bharatiya Janata Party, with a chief minister who was probably the first to articulate this idea and, dare I say, attempt to implement it as well. And it is the Congress that is heading a government whose actions are designed to perpetuate the mai-baap orientation of the government, thus increasing its size, even as governance suffers.
Take education. As chief minister, Singh experimented with government financing of education and leaving provisioning and supervision to the community. The jholawala brigade castigated him for initiatives like para teachers – part-time teachers drawn from within the community who were paid less than government teachers but were more accountable than them – but it was a commendable experiment. In contrast, his party first pushed through and is now implementing a law – the Right to Education – that insists all schools must pay government salaries to teachers and hence shuts all community and low-cost private initiatives for the poor, even as the government schools are unable to meet the demand for education.
M. R. Madhavan of PRS Legislative Research, an independent research initiative, had once pointed out how some of the new Bills that the United Progressive Alliance had either introduced or mulling – the National Food Security Bill, the draft Communal Violence Bill (the National Advisory Council’s version), the Lokpal Bill and the Right of Citizens for Time-bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their Grievances Bill – would result in a large number of new posts being created. The Food Security Bill, for example, requires the appointment of a grievance redressal officer in each district and for every state to have a State Food Commission, comprising a chairperson and five members. The Grievance Redressal Bill stipulates 11-member grievance redressal commissions at the centre and the states. The Communal Violence Bill talks about an Authority for Communal Harmony, Justice and Reparation, at the centre and in the states, each with a chair, a vice-chair and five members.
Meanwhile, the state’s primary responsibility – law and order and rule of law – suffers because of shortage of police personnel and judges. Clearly, Singh hasn’t managed to get his own party to buy into his model of governance. Its motto, on the other hand, appears to be More Government with Little Governance.
Both Singh and Modi would bristle at this, but there are many similarities between the two lectures, despite their contrasting world-views.
# Both spoke about the need to right-size the government as against the more reviled concept of downsizing, with examples to show that rationalising the workforce need not affect the quality of government services. Singh got jan swastha rakshaks (educated village youth trained in primary health care) to provide basic health services in villages; Modi got students from engineering colleges to do internships with departments that needed technical help.
# Both spoke of the need for effective decentralisation and devolution of power to the grassroots and how the country cannot be governed from Delhi or state capitals.
# Both drew attention to how people’s involvement in governance leads to better outcomes. Singh’s experiments included rogi kalyan samiti (government-run hospitals being managed by people’s committees), joint forest management and water users’ associations. Modi’s P4 formula (people-public-private-partnership) is somewhat similar.
# Both also highlighted the fact that people are willing to pay user charges if they see a clear benefit for themselves. The rogi kalyan samitis, for example, managed to raise finances through such user charges which were then used by hospitals to buy equipment. In Gujarat, people are willingly paying a fee at 200-odd One Day Governance centres where paperwork related to 160 services is completed in one day, with the help of technology.
Singh’s lecture has some tips for Modi, who lamented that politicians often delayed unpopular decisions – retrenchment of excess government staff being one of them – whenever there was an election around the corner. Singh’s government abolished thousands of vacant posts and retrenched 28,000 daily wage employees in municipalities, despite criticism from within his party, just before elections to local bodies in 1994. The Congress won those elections.
Does his speech indicate that Modi really wants a small but effective state in the classical liberal mould, one which will confine itself to national security, internal law and order, upholding the rule of law and protecting individual liberties and the provision of public goods?
It’s difficult to decide on the basis of one speech. Such a concept of a state will mean doing far more than allowing self-certification of boilers and lifts or electronic delivery of services that Modi boasted about. These, in any case, are not initiatives he or Gujarat pioneered or invented. Besides, this is just tinkering. A minimal state will require a complete change in the way both politicians and the people view the role of government.
A strong but effective state will leave little scope for patronage by politicians and will definitely not have any room for the state to be in business. Modi is not an unconventional politician so it is unlikely that he will willingly give up the heady power of patronage (ditto for Singh). And when quizzed about privatisation of state public sector enterprises after the lecture, he very clearly waffled.
In any case, even if Modi does subscribe to the minimal state idea, it’s not certain if he can carry the rest of the BJP with him, just like Singh couldn’t influence the Congress.
But what I found encouraging about the two speeches – 11 years apart though they may be – is that the two mainstream parties have people who appear to be thinking alike on issues of basic governance.
May their tribe increase.

The Sanju Baba Touchstone

Why are we all getting so uptight about the rush of support for dear Sanju Baba, with film stars, politicians, former lawyers and former judges pleading that he be not sent to jail? Why can’t we blinkered Middle Class Morons (as one journalist friend described us) realise that these people are showing us the way to end the problem of overcrowded jails once and for all?
There are so many extenuating circumstances in his case:
# he has already spent 18 months in jail, it’s unfair to expect him to spend the remaining 42 months behind bars
# he has already gone through so much mental trauma, he couldn’t even get bank loans and had to get court permission to travel
# he is a good human being
# his parents were patriots
# he has a wife and three children, think of them
# he only got the weapons because he was feeling insecure about his family
# oh come on, he was just a immature kid when it all happened
After all, it’s not as if courts have never been influenced by the context of a crime when handing out a sentence. In December 2009, two Supreme Court judges reduced the death sentence pronounced on a brother who killed his sister's lower caste husband, and his father and brothers in 2004 in Bombay. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. The judges rationale:
. . .Caste is a concept which grips a person before his birth and does not leave him even after his death. The vicious grip of the caste, community, religion, though totally unjustified, is a stark reality. The psyche of the offender in the background of a social issue like an inter-caste-community marriage, though wholly unjustified, would have to be considered on the peculiar circumstances.
So if a sentence in an honour killing (shudder, shudder) could be reduced on grounds of that shameful factor called caste, why can’t poor Sanju be let off for all of the above reasons?
And why can’t the same logic apply to a whole lot of others?
# Manu Sharma, who shot dead Jessica Lal. The poor boy only wanted a drink. So what if it was after bar closing hours? Hadn’t that model heard of Indian Standard Time? Manu comes from a larger social milieu in which boys are pampered and given whatever they asked for. If not, they throw tantrums. It was perfectly normal behaviour on his part. He was pampered more as a child because he suffers from asthma. How can someone who suffers from asthma be allowed to stay in jail? What if his condition aggravates?
In any case, Manu is from a family that had served the Congress Party selflessly. His father was a minister and his uncle’s father-in-law a former President of India. Doesn’t this all show he came from a family of patriots? And if he is in jail, who is going to manage the discotheque he owns in Chandigarh. His earnings will be affected.
# Vikas Yadav, who killed Nitish Katara, his sister’s boyfriend. Please remember the social milieu from which he came. Daughters are not supposed to choose their own husbands. They can wear jean-pant and tops, study in management institutes but have a boyfriend and then want to marry him? That is terrible. Look at the trauma the young man must have gone through. It is perfectly understandable for him to want to kill that chota-mota afsar ka beta whom his sister fancied. He wanted his sister to marry right into a thaat-baat vala family. He didn’t kill her, did he? That shows he is a good and loving brother – upholding family values. Should a person be in jail for upholding family values?
# Santosh Singh, who raped and killed Priyadarshini Matoo, whom he had been stalking. Really, he was only stalking her because he loved her. Hasn’t Sharad Yadav said there is nothing wrong with that? Priyadarshini Matoo should have reciprocated his advances and then she would have been alive. After all, didn’t that girl in that TV serial, Pratigya, do the same? She finally fell in love with her husband. What trauma Santosh Singh must have gone through when Priyadarshini, a mere ladki, rejected him. And then on top of that she complained about him to the police. His father was in the force; imagine the humiliation the family must have gone through when a girl – A GIRL – complained about their son to his father’s colleagues. Bechare ka sar ghum gaya hoga. Please understand his mental condition when he committed the crime. And he is also a family man. After his acquittal by the lower court, he got married and had a child. What about his wife and child? He also had a good lawyer’s practice.
It was only because Enlightened Elite held candle-light vigils and vented their outrage on television channels (much like we Middle Class Morons are doing today) after Manu baba was acquitted that his case was also reopened and he was sent to jail.
Hell, if Sanju Baba was a kid at 34 years, all these people were twenty-something toddlers when they committed these crimes. How could they have known what they were doing? Didn’t Lord Jesus himself say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?
Why should the alleged rapists of the December 16 gang rape victim be in jail? Look at the environment in which they grew up – one marked by poverty and lack of access to basic facilities, let alone proper education and employment. How are they to know that a young woman wearing jeans and a top and out with a young man at 9.30 pm is not ready to have sex with just about anyone? You expect them to know about things like consensual sex? Or a woman's right to her body? It is their mental conditioning caused by their social environment that made them commit the crime. So set them free.
Heck, there is a larger issue behind every crime. Why should taxpayer’s money be spent on jails to keep people who couldn’t help commit the crimes they did?
India’s jails are chock-a-block with over 2 lakh under-trials, a large number of whom are there for longer periods than the prescribed jail term for their offences. Get them out immediately.
Thank you Bollywood, Markandeya Katju, Digvijaya Singh, Amar Singh, Jayaprada and Shanti Bhushan. Now the money I pay in taxes won’t be wasted.

After Roti, Now Makaan

UPA’s next folly: right to housing,without a land bank

(this was published in Firstpost last week) 

So, after roti, it’s going to be makaan.

There has been talk for some time now that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is working on a right to housing legislation. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh had made a commitment to this effect to the Ekta Parishad – a network of activist groups – last year, as it led a Jan Satyagraha march to Delhi in October last year.

One had hoped that saner voices in the government would nip this in the bud. But with elections looming in the horizon, sanity obviously goes out of the window. So Ramesh’s ministry has finalised a draft National Right to Homestead Bill, 2013, the details of which have been published in The Indian Express.

The highlights of the housing scheme are the following

1: Every landless and homeless poor family in rural areas will be entitled to a `homestead’ of not less than 10 cents” (0.1 acre, or 4,356 sq ft).

2: Homestead is a dwelling with adequate housing facilities. The definition of ‘adequate’ includes access to basic services (drinking water, electricity, roads and public transport), appropriate location, accessibility and cultural adequacy.

3: This right has to be enforced within five years of the enactment of the law.

When Finance Minister P Chidambaram unveiled a budget shorn of election-driven populist announcements, there were cynical predictions that this was merely to please rating agencies by providing a semblance of an effort at fiscal consolidation. And that pork barrel giveaways would resurface as we got closer to 2014. The cynics are being proven right. The Indian Express report says the Bill could be tabled in the monsoon session of Parliament.

Sure, it’s unfortunate that India has close to 8 million homeless rural families. The Twelfth Plan working group on rural housing estimates the shortage in the Plan period (2012-17) at around 40 million. But is giving such families a right to housing the answer? There’s reason to believe it isn’t.

It’s not as if the problem of homelessness has been ignored completely by policy makers. The Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) was started in 1985 to help below poverty line rural families build houses or upgrade existing kutcha houses. The central and state governments share the costs on a 75:25 formula.

In 2005 the UPA government brought it under the umbrella of its flagship Bharat Nirman scheme to give it extra support and thrust. Implementation of the scheme may have improved – achievement of targets has increased from 66 percent in 2007-08 to above 80 percent – but it has also been dogged by scams, with stories coming from as far as Assam and Kashmir, apart from Bihar and Odisha. There are irregularities in the selection of beneficiaries and the quality of construction has also been found to be extremely poor.

The IAY also has a provision for the government to provide land for families on its waiting list who don’t have land. That’s easier said than done. Where is the government going to get the land from? No doubt, from all the surplus land that state governments have acquired under various land reform legislations or donated under the Bhoodan movement started by Acharya Vinobha Bhave. But what is the record of such land being redistributed (which was the rationale behind the land ceiling laws and Bhoodan)?

Let me quote Ramesh’s words back to him. “Five million acres has been pledged as part of the Bhoodan movement over the last 60 years but only 50 percent has actually been distributed…This is a land scam beyond everything, without any parallel,” Ramesh said last year. (See the report here.) A Land Reform Commission that Nitish Kumar appointed in Bihar also came to a similar conclusion.

Even in West Bengal, which is supposed to be a benchmark for implementation of land reforms, the iconic Operation Barga has not been as successful as it has been claimed to be. For every registered bargadar (sharecroppers who were given redistributed land) there are several unregistered ones. Land sharks and other goons have taken away land from people who got titles. Can Ramesh ensure that people who get land under his proposed law will not have it taken away, either forcibly or by subterfuge? Many of the landless have been allotted land, they have not got titles. It would be better for Ramesh to focus on that first, even though it is a state subject.

Forget land grabbers. The proposed law says it will give land to the landless. But the government can also take away land for public purposes. And its record of  compensating those whose land is taken away (especially those with small patches of land) is abysmal, at best. There’s an inherent contradiction here. Would it not be better to restore the right to property (abolished by the 44th Constitution Amendment in 1978) and enforce it?

These are reasons enough to conclude that a right to housing will be meaningless at best and a scam at the worst.

There’s no point arguing that a scheme or an idea is good and that it is the implementation problem that needs fixing. Grand ideas, which are not practical to implement, are nothing more than empty dreams. So long as they remain dreams, there’s no problem. But when they become the basis of pushing through laws with huge financial implications for a country with a faltering economy, there’s a very serious problem, indeed.

This whole rights-based entitlement approach of the UPA is hugely problematic.

There is ample evidence that each of the rights that it is championing – education, work, food and now housing – can be better achieved by means other than legislated guarantees. Ending the licence raj in education can ensure better access to schools, even for the poor. Unshackling agriculture and small rural and urban enterprises could generate more and productive jobs than NREGA. Ending distortions in the food economy can ensure that food stocks are managed more efficiently so that people don’t go hungry.

But the record of the UPA in listening to voices of reason when it is set on reviving the mai-baap state is poor.

So what’s the next right it will confer, as we move closer to 2014? Kapda?