Four decades after the Congress proclaimed ‘garibi hatao’ and promised to banish hunger and poverty from the country, it is now looking to hand out free food to win yet another election
In 1971, the Congress, or rather the faction of the party led by Indira Gandhi, launched the ‘garibi hatao’ slogan to win the election and beat its rivals in the game of hoodwinking the people. Twenty years after that — during most of which period the Congress was in power except for a tiny interval —data showed that 51 per cent of the people were still below the poverty line, with an income of $1.25 per capita per day.
Another 20 years down the line, a controversial poverty line and contested data showed that around 30 per cent of the people were still below the poverty line. The latest data is so controversial that the Congress-led UPA Government itself has had to set up several committees to define where to draw the poverty line. At first, it was the Planning Commission that drew the poverty line. When it was widely challenged, the Tendulkar Committee was constituted.
The Tendulkar Committee did not give a clean chit to the Government. So, yet another committee was set up — the Rangarajan Committee. This committee is yet to give its report. But even if you accept the claim that some 29.8 per cent of the people live below poverty line as of 2009-10 (Economic Survey 2012-2013), the fact is that the bulk of the poor are still with us. In other words, even four decades after the Congress said garibi hatao, the slogan has remained only a pipe-dream.
With this record, one can only conclude that the latest promise of conferring food security by doling out low-priced food grains to 75 per cent of the rural people and 50 per cent of the urban population is yet another attempt to hoodwink people, as the general election is less than a year away.
Over the decades, the Congress has repeated its electoral tactics with predictable regularity. In 1971, it sought to mislead the people by blaming the Opposition for the state of affairs when it was only the Nehru-Gandhi family that had been at the helm since 1947.
Now, once again, it is the Opposition that is being pilloried. The Congress’s claim that it had to resort to the ‘Ordinance path’ to enforce the food grains entitlement scheme is so outrageously false that no right-thinking person can be fooled. The ruling party says that food security was its electoral promise in 2009. Then, why did it wait till 2012 to force it down our throatsIJ
The fact is that the ‘super Cabinet’, called the National Advisory Council, consisting of all sorts of jholawallahs and headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who has no accountability even to her party, was in sharp conflict with the Government over the nitty-gritties of the scheme.
As usual, the devil was all in the details. The scheme travelled back and forth between the NAC (or more correctly Ms Gandhi) and the Government for years. The draft bill itself was finalised only in 2011 and it took Government almost two years to decide on the recommendations of the standing committee. So, who is to blameIJ
The latest excuse the ruling party trots out is that the Opposition washed out session after session in Parliament. This is yet another white lie. Take the last session for example. The contention between Government and the Opposition was the continuation of Mr Ashwani Kumar as the Union law Minister after he was found to be interfering with the CBI investigation in the coal block allocation scam.
If the Government wanted the Budget session to go ahead, all that was needed was to get the then law Minister to resign. For weeks the Prime Minister went on saying that Mr Kumar would not go, but finally he had to give in, after the Supreme Court rapped the Government by pointing out that the law Minister’s interference had taken the soul out of the CBI’s investigation report. Surely, the culprit is the Government whose wrongdoing has been found out first by the media and then confirmed by the apex court.
As for the food security scheme, it has been seen by several international economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and OP Bhalla, and they all agree that it is both unworkable and a sheer waste of money. Also, while the Congress blames the BJP particularly, it is the BJP’s Government in Chhattisgarh that has been praised for its efficient implementation of the Public Distribution System, enabling all those below poverty line to get low-priced food grains. The success of the PDS in reducing the impact of poverty under the Raman Singh regime has been widely recognised. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, who are no supporters of the BJP, have hailed the scheme in their latest book, An Uncertain Glory: India and its contradictions, in which they write about the way a corruption-ridden, inefficient PDS has been transformed in Chhattisgarh: “Many recent reports indicate that food distribution in Chhattisgarh is now quite regular, with most cardholders getting the quota every month at the correct price.” They quote several investigations in support of this contention. They also add that in some districts of the State, even pulses are distributed at the symbolic price of five-rupee a kilo.
All this carries a big lesson: What is needed is not another scheme but an efficient implementation of the existing PDS to bring succour to the needy. Why is it that BJP-led State Governments are able to do this while Congress-led State regimes, in Rajasthan and Assam for instance, failIJ
The report quoted speaks of the absence of corruption that has made the difference, apart from an efficient organisation. Chhattisgarh was under Congress rule earlier. Why did it not succeed then, while the BJP has demonstrated years of success, leading even to the re-election of this GovernmentIJ
The difference is in corruption and governance. If in the so- called backward States like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, as well as in the developed States like Gujarat, the BJP-led Governments can distribute low price grains to the needy, why cannot this be done on a national scaleIJ The Congress has no answer because its Governments, including at the Centre, are riddled with corruption and inefficiency.
The food security scheme is the Congress’s election gimmick to cover up its widely acknowledged policy paralysis that has led to a deceleration of the economy from a healthy nine per cent growth to five per cent, a fall in the value of the rupee accompanied by fast depletion of foreign exchange reserves, a continuing current account deficit, and fiscal mismanagement that has shot up deficit to over five per cent of the GDP.