Odyssey to Economic Super Power - Part I

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Every one dreams. One such dreamer was Minoo R. Masani who wrote a book entitled Our India, a blueprint for India's economic development without what we today call foreign aid. All this was much before Ardeshir Dalal 's Bombay plan and Jawaharlal Nehru's tryst with destiny vision. It is necessary to dream not only because dreams are a precursor to a futuristic vision but also because they have a chance of coming true. However, dreaming is not a collective activity. The farmer's dreams are different from those of the factory worker. The bureaucrat has different dreams. But there are always men and women who dream for the whole country and not for a privileged few. The dreams of such dedicated men and women do not come up for a national debate because they strive to democratise the gains of development. What we need is a national dream first.

The heady fizz of globalisation and liberalisation induces some people to see a new dream: India as an economic super power (ESP). The country has immense potential to become an ESP: land, water, natural and human resources whose optimal use should guarantee the generation and equitable (not in a mathematical sense) distribution of wealth. Well-known columnist S. Gurumurthy says, "Yes, India has all the potentialities and also the compulsion to become a global economic power in the 21st century, and early enough in the coming millennium." Very surprisingly, when the question of what route we should take to realise our dreams, our great economists unthinkingly cite two alternatives: capitalism or socialism or the several versions of these two schools.

Ask the people who are building their own small dams or laying feeder roads or the man, who used hillstream water to build a tiny powerhouse for himself, if they have ever heard of Keynes or Marx or their Indian clones. They are building India bit by bit without knowing what economic model their development fits into. The more we involve all such people at the grassroots level to identify their problems and offer solutions, the closer we will be to translating the ESP dream into a reality. We need to make gains in two areas to be able to reach our goal; the first concerns public life and does not call for any investment in terms of money and the second calls for investments but a totally original and indigenous approach to identifying and implementing priorities and programmes. Let us first discuss what we can do without investment: strengthen democracy, democratise planning, reform bureaucracy, and eliminate corruption.

Democracy

Economic power can be attained only in a democracy where people determine what they need and also decide on what measures to be taken to realise their goals. Foreign dignitaries certify us as the world's largest democracy and that it is the country's greatest strength. True, a democracy facilitates nation-wide debates on issues affecting the people and in the great churning that follows, a truly representative consensus emerges. Since a babel results if everyone speaks up, people elect their representatives every five years or more frequently to articulate their demands and aspirations. Thus, ideally Parliament or any other legislative body (having been elected by the people) ought to be devising the economic models that suit the needs of the people. We suffer from shortcomings in this area. Unfortunately, Parliament has weakened. Life and death issues rarely come up before the great circular structure Lutyens built.

We surely have a democracy but without stability. With the regional parties capturing power in the states and with the erosion of political morality, the fortunes of the ruling party or alliance at the centre depend heavily on opportunistic compromises lubricated by promises of office and exoneration of economic and even criminal offences in return for support. We saw Narasimha Rao saving a Congress government by buying support from Jharkhand Mukti Morcha MPs. Later, the Congress defeated a BJP-led government by smuggling Girdhar Gomang into the house, thus pioneering a constitutional impropriety which permitted Gomang to be simultaneously a member of both Parliament and the Orissa Legislature. At the state level too, governments have become vulnerable to legislative horse-trading. When there is a crisis, defections and desertions are common. It is necessary for our dreams that Parliament and state legislatures resurrect their original personalities and get busy with the people's agenda.

Planning

Granted we have a stable democracy, the very first requisite to journey ahead on the ESP path is a mechanism that truly provides form and content to what the people need first. This will happen only when the planning process is democratised to involve common people in the formulation of the plans and identification of development priorities. It calls for fundamental policy changes to reorient the mechanisms for decision-making and for formulating and implementing the plans. This depends on a rediscovery of the federal principle and spirit, abjuring the present practice of ivory-tower bureaucrats and starry-eyed economists prescribing imported and uniform remedies for the millions of people inhabiting different terrains, practising different cultures and nursing varied urges and expectations. We have to unearth the concept of area planning and re-impart life to it. Top-down planning must go.

In our context, planning for prosperity means planning for the eradication of poverty. ESP does not make sense with poverty around. The primary target of planning should be the elimination of poverty through empowering the most vulnerable sections of the people at the lowest rungs of the society. The principal task of the Ninth Plan will be to usher in a new era of people-oriented planning, in which not only the federal government and the states but also the people at large, particularly the poor, can participate. The truth, however, is the entire planning process is dominated by the federal babudom to the exclusion not only of the local self-governing bodies but also state administrations.

Bureaucracy

When decisions are taken and plans formulated, it is the turn of the bureaucrats to implement them. They play hide and seek with weak federal and state governments, and masters of the rulebook as they are, they find an explanation for every failure to implement. Our bureaucracy is not only corrupt but bloated. The number of IAS officers rose from 957 in 1951 to 4,943 today. The number of secretary-level officers increased from 724 in 1979 to 1,222 today. The Indian Administrative Service has refined a tradition of weaving an intricate and complex administrative maze which helps it to yeild real power and yet not be accountable. While the elected representatives are busy fist-fighting, increasing their salaries, allowances, concessions, privileges, security cover and, of course, public works contracts, civil servants have begun to exercise effective power.

The increasing clout of the bureaucracy has become a major stumbling block in restructuring the social edifice. There is no doubt that Yashwant Sinha's proposal to axe 66,000 government jobs every year will remain forever a proposal. Year after year, there is a talk of downsizing this oversized workforce. Last year, the government appointed an Expenditure Reforms Commission headed by K. P. Geethakrishnan. Nothing will come out of it if past record is any indication. The government personnel are so well organised that they constitute an electoral monolith which no party aspiring to capture office can overlook. At the level of officers, the civil service club can thwart any attempt at downsizing its strength.