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12/31/13 Calling for more government spending for the poor - Analysis - DNA

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www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-calling-for-more-government-spending-for-the-poor-1925594 1/11 12/31/13 Calling for more government spending for the poor - Analysis - DNA

www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-calling-for-more-government-spending-for-the-poor-1925594 2/11 12/31/13 Calling for more government spending for the poor - Analysis - DNA

Home > Analysis > Column Calling for more government spending for the poor Wednesday, Nov 27, 2013, 9:56 IST | Agency: DNA Gargi Gupta

Poll fever is at its height and now that the political parties are done with their manifestos, it is the turn of “civil society”. Delhi-based Council for Social Development (CSD), a think-tank of social workers and social scientists, has come up with a “citizen’s agenda for change”. What should be the real agenda of governments; what are the real issues that face the country today, they ask, ignoring the high-decibel debates, the allegations and counter-allegations that parties are flinging at each other, the name- calling and the realpolitik.

Their prognosis — governments at the Centre and states, especially since India liberalised its economy www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-calling-for-more-government-spending-for-the-poor-1925594 3/11 12/31/13 Calling for more government spending for the poor - Analysis - DNA in 1991, have been pursuing policies and programmes that are “corporate-propelled”.

In other words, they favour big companies, either because the latter have the money to bribe officials and bend them to their will, or, as is increasingly evident, because the governments truly believe that the prosperity and welfare of our poor millions can only come about when big companies execute big projects that provide employment to big numbers of people. Allied to this, they find, is the belief among mandarins that private companies are more efficient than large, plodding sarkari machinery, and who should move out of administering social services such as education, health, nutrition, etc, and hand them over to the former.

Their prescription: a 12-point “agenda of change” advocating, mainly, that growth policies should be oriented towards the people, especially the poor and marginalised; that the government should make sure that they have access to education, health care, nutrition, as a matter of right; and that these should be “justiciable”, that is, people should be able to take officials to court if they are denied access to any of these services. Further, the CSD agenda continues, it doesn’t matter what neo-liberals say about the need to control fiscal deficit, social sector spending — on education, health, and so on — that it is the only way to pull the country out of the doldrums and that government spending in this sector, in terms of percentage of GNP, should match what developed countries and the better-off among the developing ones, spend — between 3-6 per cent. India currently spends around 1.7 per cent of its GDP on the social sector. As Professor Muchkund Dubey, former diplomat and chairman of CSD pointed out, India has fallen to 136 in UNDP’s Human Development Indicators index, down two ranks from 134 in 2011.

This might sound like a very general criticism of government policies, but it is backed by a pointed reading of recent developments. As economist Amit Bhaduri pointed out, the way rules have been bent to benefit certain companies in the allocation of coal blocks and the opposition of forest dwellers to large industries coming up over their land overruled, is a form of corruption. For the political class, corruption was no longer merely a simple matter of taking bribes, but about bending the laws so that they are more in line with what the companies wanted and would profit more from, rather than what was good for the greatest number of people. Even laws such as the much-vaunted Right to Food Act, the new Land Acquisition Act and PESA, that originally had a socialist thrust, had become diluted over time by the need to accommodate the corporate agenda, leaving the poor even more destitute.

Agendas have a way of being forgotten as soon as the election fever dies down. Will this one fare any better?

The author is Features Editor, dna

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