The effortless insouciance with which the establishment in the Delhi imperium and the state capitals is taking the unprecedented rise of food prices for granted — in November food prices rose by a never-before 4.78 percent, and over the past 12 months food prices as measured by the sectoral index within the Union government’s fudged wholesale prices index (fudged because the consumer doesn’t pay wholesale prices) is 19.95 percent higher than it was last year — deserves strong condemnation. As everybody and his uncle knows, inflation is a tax on the poor and the neglected majority at the base of India’s iniquitous social pyramid, and they suffer grievously when food prices in particular rise so sharply.
Yet notwithstanding the Arjun Sengupta Committee’s conclusion that over 800 million Indians eke out twilight lives on a per capita income of Rs.20 per day, it’s business as usual in the Delhi durbar and the state capitals across the country. The prime minister and his cabinet colleagues fly abroad at the slightest excuse on supposedly important missions with huge delegations including fawning media personnel; it’s festival season in the national capital, and stingingly expensive five-star hotels are chock-a-block; and in the state capitals ministers and bureaucrats practice brazen corruption when they are not spending public funds to refurbish palatial residential and office premises.
The consequence of this self-serving shameless indifference to corruption, misgovernance and grinding poverty of the poor majority is that institutions of governance designed by the founding fathers of the Constitution of India to promote justice and equality have collapsed, or at best are on oxygen. Parliament has little time for orderly and reasoned debate; the judicial system is overwhelmed by the weight of case arrears and shortage of judges; the law and order maintenance machinery is on the point of breakdown, even as insurgencies are flaring up across the sub-continent.
Although it’s plain as a pikestaff that the unprecedented food price inflation which the nation is experiencing currently is intimately connected with widespread distress in rural India which hosts 67 percent of the population, the establishment seems to have little time or inclination to devise a coherent national agriculture policy which would give a fair deal to the country’s rural majority. Contrary to popular belief, the malaise of Indian agriculture is not rooted in production deficiencies but in abysmal rural infrastructure — poor road and rail connectivity, the near absence of warehousing and cold chain facilities, and continuous failure to develop a note-worthy downstream food processing industry. Within the merry-making establishment and great Indian middle class there’s a conspiracy of silence over the fact that over 10 percent of foodgrains, and more than 30 percent of the horticulture production of rural India valued at over Rs.50,000 crore is wasted annually. The outcome of this unaddressed wastage is supply-side constraints and high food prices.
This diagnosis of the root cause of pervasive poverty in reportedly shining India is hardly novel. The great failure of the post-independence Delhi imperium has been chronic inability to write a logical prescription and follow it up with a consistent line of treatment.
Need for new States Reorganisation Commission
The concession by the union home minister that a new and separate state of Telangana will be carved out of the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh (pop. 76 million), has provoked a chain reaction across the country. New Delhi’s bland unconditional concession — a knee-jerk response to the fast unto death undertaken by C.R. Chandrashekhara Rao, leader of the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti — to expeditiously legislate the formation of Telangana (pop.30 million), has inspired several self-serving parochial leaders across the country to revive their agitations in the Darjeeling Hill Region (for a new state of Gorkhaland), in Uttar Pradesh (for the new states of Harit, Bundelkhand and Poorvanchal), Maharashtra (Vidharba), Assam (Bodoland) and Karnataka (Coorg).
Admittedly there is an argument for smaller states within the Indian Union which currently constitutes 28 states (and seven Union territories), each with its own legislative assembly and executive headed by chief ministers. India’s large states some of which if sovereign entities, match the size and demographics of European countries — the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 166 million) is 1.16 times the size of Britain and France and hosts three times their population — are clearly unwieldy and suffer poor governance. In this connection, it’s pertinent to note that the United States with a population of 304 million is divided into 50 states of the union, against India’s 28 states.
Nevertheless it’s glaringly obvious that the prime motive of parochial politicians spearheading the demand for smaller states is not the welfare of their people as much as their aspiration to power and pelf, and the loaves and fishes of office. Already the high cost of governance reflected in the huge revenue budget deficits of over-staffed govern-ments at the Centre and in the states, is a huge drag on development spending, particularly on social sector (education, health etc) investment. The multiplication of states within the Indian Union will inevitably spiral revenue/non-development spending countrywide, and stoke the omnipresent fires of inflation.
Against this backdrop, the best available option is to establish a new States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) on the model of the original SRC which redrew the federal map of India by rewriting state boundaries on the basis of language and ethnicity in 1956. However, sufficient care would have to be taken to staff the commission with knowledgeable experts with the ability to examine the stability potential and economic viability of proposed new states. While acknowledging the common sense proposition that smaller states tend to be better governed and administered (e.g Goa and Himachal Pradesh), disturbance of the status quo solely on the basis of ethnicity, religion, cultural distinctiveness and/or socio-economic under-development is insufficient cause. It will inevitably lead to the balkanization of India, and loss of power and influence in the councils of the newly-emerging globalised world order.