Original sin outcomes

Getting India Back on Track; Bibek Debroy, Ashley J. Tellis, Reece Trevor random house; Price: Rs.499; 333pp WHY HAS POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA, A landmass endowed with abundant resources, tested entrepreneurial traditions and participatory democracy, fallen so low that a third of the population suffers basic deprivations of food, clothing, shelter, education, primary healthcare, law, justice, clean water and sanitation among other appurtenances of civilised life? Several informed answers to this baffling conundrum are provided in this excellent but largely unsung compilation of 18 essays published on the eve of General Election 2014.  There™s much to learn from the authors™ valuable analyses which could be the prelude of a socio-economic reform agenda for the new BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government swept to power in New Delhi in May. A near-fatal misjudgement made by the newly independent Indian state 67 years ago was to adopt the socialist centrally planned, command and control model of economic development. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India™s powerful first prime minister ” and supine captains of Indian industry who endorsed the Bombay Plan of 1948 ” wholly ignored the glorious private enterprise, business and trading traditions of the subcontinent which enabled it to contribute 20 percent of global GNP right until the mid-18th century. Instead, the task of national development was entrusted to an army of business-illiterate clerks in massive public sector enterprises which were established de novo, and given the go-ahead to capture the œcommanding heights of economy. Simultaneously this army of government babus was given the authority to suppress the growth of private enterprise through a comprehensive licence-permit-quota regimen. Unsurprisingly this army of bureaucrats failed to get the country™s 300 plus  capital-intensive central  public sector enterprises and an equivalent number in the states going. But they succeeded brilliantly in chaining private business enterprises for over four decades. This foolish wrong-turn of post-independence India is forthrightly recounted by US-based political scientist Ashley Tellis in the introductory essay. Inorganic neta-babu socialism which struck deep and poisonous roots in the Indian polity, not only mired the economy in the so-called Hindu rate of GDP growth (3.5 percent per annum) for  over three decades,  it also created a wasteful State with premature welfare pretensions. Just how wasteful is detailed by Surjit Bhalla who recites the huge annual wastage of 25 million tonnes of foodgrains procured by the public sector Food Corporation of India for canalisation into the public distribution system (PDS) established to provide subsidised staples to the poor. According to Bhalla, 50 percent of the foodgrains purchased at government mandated prices vanishes in transit, and another 25 percent rots in the inadequate storage facilities of  the corporation. Of the remaining 25 percent only 10 percent reaches the targeted beneficiaries. In one of its last initiatives before it demitted office in May, the Congress-led UPA government enacted the populist National Food Security Act which expands the PDS and is likely to require an annual budgetary subsidy of Rs.200,000 crore ” more than twice the Centre™s expenditure on education and health ” writes…