Restructure Union Budget to reflect outcomes
One of the most significant passages in the 90-minute Union budget 2005-06 speech of finance minister P. Chidambaram in Parliament on February 28 has not attracted sufficient comment in the mainstream press — the pink papers and business magazines who went to town with masterly analyses which spread confusion rather than clarity, included. While presenting the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s proposal to spend a massive Rs.514,344 crore in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2006 to sustain a 6.9 percent GDP growth next year, for the first time ever a Union or state government finance minister acknowledged the reality that "outlays do not necessarily mean outcomes".
Stating that together with the Planning Commission "we shall put in place a mechanism to measure the development outcomes of all major programmes", the finance minister accepted a suggestion often made by EducationWorld (though the Rt. Hon’ble minister who receives a complimentary copy every month has yet to acknowledge the existence of this modest publication). "Civil society should also engage government in a healthy debate on the efficiency of the delivery mechanism," said Chidambaram in overdue acknowledgement that tax-and-spend policies of the past have hardly changed the bleak lives of the majority at the base of the social pyramid of a high-potential nation. This constructive criticism of budget 2005-06 has been written in the solicited spirit of engagement.
The major flaw in the design and presentation of the Union budget which no finance minister in post-independence India has bothered to correct, is that it is characterised by almost total lack of accountability. Under every head of expenditure the finance minister informed Parliament and the public how much was spent last year and how much he proposes to spend this year. But scarcely a word about targets and achievements.
PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW
For instance, the finance minister states that under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme last fiscal "in overall terms" the expenditure was Rs.4,020 crore and that this year it will almost triple to Rs.11,000 crore including 5 million tonnes of foodgrain. But isn’t the public entitled to know what was the outcome of the Rs.4,020 crore spent last year? How much of it was spent in administering the programme? How many mandays of employment were created? How many permanent assets — road kilometres, tanks, wells etc — were built? Likewise the allocation for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education For All) programme will rise to Rs.7,156 crore this fiscal (2005-06) from Rs.4,754 crore last year. But right now the public would like — and is entitled — to know the outcome of the Rs.4,754 crore spent. How many new classrooms were built? How many additional children and teachers enrolled? How many labs and libraries constructed? The finance minister’ budget speech is silent about these vital outcomes.
A classic example of throwing public money at problems with- out public accountability is the Indira Awaz Yojana, "the flagship rural housing programme for weaker sections". Last year a sum of Rs.2,500 crore was expended under this scheme which has been allocated Rs.2,750 crore this year. "About 15 lakh (1.5 million) houses will be constructed during the next year," says the finance minister. Please note not a word about how many were constructed last year.
It’s astonishing that half a century after the nation attained its independence from foreign rule, the presentation format of the Union budget remains essentially the same as it was in the heydey of the British raj when the imperial government wilfully taxed the populace and converted tax revenues to its own anti-social uses. It could be argued that the Viceroy had cause to withold information and befuddle the public with high sounding rhetoric. But it’s equally incontrovertible that a democratically elected government should be more accountable and provide full disclosure. It’s ironic that the Companies Act and the Company Law Board demand exhaustive data in corporate annual reports while the Union and state governments which have a higher duty of care seem exempt from similar obligations. A corporate chairman who fails to detail production and output and confines his annual report to expenditure and income data would be hauled over the coals and may well be liable to criminal prosecution.
Quite obviously there is method behind the over-hyped annual presentation of the budget madness. Because the prime purpose of the budget is to mobilise resources for payment of the enviable salaries and perquisites (‘establishment expenses’) of ministers and bureaucrats and the people who serve and protect them — civil servants, the police, and armed forces. The bald truth is that the first objective of post-independence India’s politicians cutting across all party lines, is to secure fine homes, luxurious offices, cars, retinues of servants and assistants and foreign and domestic travel for themselves at public expense. Moreover they have to create business and rent-seeking opportunites for themselves. This is done by investing government servants with discretionary powers (e.g the fringe benefit tax in the 2005-06 budget) and continuously rising defence and armaments expenditure (Rs. 83,000 crore in 2005-06). Discretionary powers enable government (i.e politicians’) servants to shakedown and bully businessmen, and the routine 10 percent commission paid by arms manufacturers creates huge income streams for the nation’s official establishment.
DANGEROUS FISCAL DEFICIT
But to get a lot the establishment has to give a little to the public. Therefore grudging social sector and education spending and assuaging the rights-conscious middle class with blanket non-merit subsidies which reportedly costs the economy the equivalent of a massive 14 percent of GDP. For infrastructure (or plan) spending, the Central and state governments borrow massively as a result of which the combined fiscal deficit of the Union and state governments has crossed the danger mark of 10 percent of GDP.
All this would be acceptable if government delivered minimal performance. But as is well known government servants and departments do hardly any work. Hence the opacity of the budget and the finance ministry’s reluctance to divulge performance and production data. Wiseacres say that government performance data can be mined from each ministry’s annual report or from the Economic Survey of the Reserve Bank of India which precedes the presentation of the Union budget. Yet the reality that departmental reports are difficult to access and interpret apart, there’s no reason why the Union budget presented to Parliament and the people, cannot make full disclosure of the performance data of government and the economy.
In sum, in the cause of open democratic governance it is vitally important that the people must be enabled to judge if the huge outlays which succeeding finance ministers liberally scatter across several sectors of the economy translate into outcomes, and to what extent.
Remembering the message of the Mahatma
Seventy-five years ago on this day (March 12) under the inspired leadership of Mahatma Gandhi the people of the disaggregated conglomeration of princely states and principalities which was India in 1930, took the first purposive step towards national unity and against the most cruel of the many unjust laws imposed upon the people of the subcontinent by imperial Great Britain. On this day three score and fifteen years ago the Mahatma began a long 380 km march from Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad to the coastal town of Dandi with the stated purpose of breaching the Salt Act 1882, which created a government monopoly and prohibited unauthorised production or marketing of salt.
In a March 2, 1930 letter to British viceroy Lord Irwin, the Mahatma sharply condemned the "ruinous expensive military and civil administration" of the imperial government which prompted taxation of even basic commodities, and singled out the Salt Act as a levy designed to "crush the life" out of India’s poor peasantry. "Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed to make the burden fall heaviest on him," wrote the Mahatma forewarning the viceroy of his intent to breach this inequitous law. The Mahatma’s 23-day journey on foot to the coast united the disparate people of the subcontinent in an unprecedented protest against foreign rule and unjust taxation.
Seventy five years later the Congress party nurtured by the Mahatma and which led India to independence a mere 17 years after the completion of the Dandi salt march, has re-enacted the event with party leaders from all over the country participating. But it’s patently clear that they have been unable to generate even an approximation of the excitement and public enthusiasm that the Mahatma was able to inspire. This is because after several decades in power at the Centre and in the states, the Congress party has patently lost the idealism and concern for the poorest of the poor — the peasantry struggling in the neglected hinterlands of rural India — which was the preoccupation of the Mahatma.
The "ruinous expensive military and civil administration" of the imperial government which had beggared the people and the peasantry in particular, has been re-imposed with a vengeance during several decades of Congress rule in New Delhi following the assassination of the Mahatma in 1948. Currently the nation’s 1,000,000 strong defence services demand Rs.83,000 crore per year from the Central government’s tax receipts and civil administration (Centre plus states) costs the exchequer an equivalent sum. The consequence: over 300,000,000 Indians — a number greater than the entire population of newly independent India on the day the Mahatma fell to an assassin’s bullet — scratches out a living on $1 per day — the rock-bottom plimsol line drawn by the United Nations for the poorest of the poor.
The Mahatma had devised a thumb rule for the formulation of socio-economic policies. He advised the new rulers of independent India to forsee the impact of their plethora of socialist policies upon the poorest of the poor prior to enacting them into legislation. And even though on his birth (October 2) and death (January 30) anniversaries the rulers of post-independence India continue to pay lip service to his ideals, this touchstone advice was ignored with disastrous consequences for the population groaning under unjust laws in a republic of ubiquitous injustice. What this nation requires is not a ritual re-enactment of the Dandi salt march but acceptance of the commonsense advice of the extraordinary individual who led it.
Common cause for Inclusive Education
The week long North South Dialogue III on Inclusive Education convened in Delhi which attracted educationists from over a dozen countries and concluded on March 4, brought the problems of providing education to children with disabilities in third world countries into sharp focus. While the larger education budgets of the developed nations of the northern hemisphere (i.e the North) have spared funds for researching the subject and providing quality education which is incrementally accepting of inclusion, in third world nations children with disabilities are a neglected and forgotten embarrassment routinely denied their fundamental right to education and usually put out to beg for a living.
Fortunately the Mumbai-based Spastics Society of India and the National Resource Centre for Inclusion, India (NRCII) have emerged as strong intellect and research-driven organisations which make a sound case for the early inclusion of children with disabilities into mainstream education institutions. The case they advance in favour of this proposition is that classrooms should be representative of society and since people with disabilities are omnipresent in all societies, mainstream schools should reflect this reality. Moreover inclusive education enables all children to learn vitally important life skills such as patience, compassion and empathy, especially needed in plural societies such as India.
The case for inclusive education needs to be made because the scale of neglect and abuse of children with disabilities is unbearably huge. In contemporary India the number of the disabled is estimated at 4 percent of the population which translates into 40 million people — equivalent to the entire populations of most European nation states. According to NRCII only 3-4 percent of them receive education of any type at all.
This situation is unacceptable to all right-thinking people because it represents unwarranted waste of human resources on a massive scale. There is no shortage of data or real life examples which conclusively prove that given access to quality education, children with disabilities can mature into highly productive, tax-paying and contributing members of society.
Thus far official government response to the plight of people with disabilities has been to establish segregated special schools for them. But given the reality that perpetually cash-strapped Central and state governments are unable to make sufficient provision for the education of able-bodied children, it is unrealistic to believe that officialdom can muster the will or resources to fund separate schools for the nation’s estimated 20 million children with disability. Indeed the fact that barely 4 percent of the disabled receive any education at all is testimony to the failure of the segregated education strategy.
However in a substantially ignorant and superstitious society where irrational prejudice against people with disabilities is ubiquitous, NRCII and champions of disabled citizens run the danger of being classified as a vested, competing interest. Therefore they need to make common cause with crusaders (such as this publication) for quality Education For All.
By adopting a common cause strategy with crusaders for education in general, champions of inclusive education (whose logic has been widely accepted and welcomed by right-thinking people) will derive the ballast of unity. A rising tide will lift all boats.