Union Budget 2017-18 : Grudging Provision for Developing Human Capital

Union finance minister Arun Jaitley’s Rs.79,686 crore (0.47 percent of GDP) provision for education as the Centre’s contribution for national education is grossly inadequate and completely divorced from the needs of the world’s largest child and youth (550 million) population – Dilip Thakore Almost three summers ago when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by then three-term Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was swept to power in New Delhi with the largest Lok Sabha majority since 1985 and formed the BJP/NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government at the Centre, the general expectation was this unapologetically right-wing party would engineer a clean break with post-independence Nehruvian neta-babu socialism. This inorganic rose-tinted ideology, an impractical brew of the liberal idealism of Britain’s Labour party and Soviet-style central planning in which the State would dominate the “commanding heights of the economy” through a vast number of public sector enterprises, trapped newly independent India, which had a free enterprise tradition of several millennia, into a low-development orbit. Described by the late Prof. Raj Krishna of the Delhi School of Economics, as the ‘Hindu rate’ of growth of 3.5 percent per annum or 1.3 percent per capita for over four decades, it imploded the modest material aspirations of an entire generation of midnight’s children. Under this ideological canopy, the Harrow and Cambridge (natural sciences)-educated Jawaharlal Nehru — independent India’s first prime minister — set about engineering a Centrally planned “socialistic pattern of society” in which industry would be dominated by capital-intensive public sector enterprises. The country’s private business houses (Tata, Birla, Walchand Hirachand, Sarabhai, Mafatlal, Kirloskar, Godrej among others), which had survived the unfair imposts and discrimination of British rule and were poised to propel the economy into a high growth trajectory, were obliged to play second fiddle as per the dictates of an army of business-illiterate ‘committed’ bureaucrats.  Over the past six decades of mainly Congress (the political party which led India’s independence movement) rule, this army of babus at the Centre and in the states has fed upon the land and its people and multiplied into a 20 million-strong Soviet-style nomenklatura (privileged class). And it’s hardly an exaggeration that the paltry gains of the Indian economy over the past seven decades since independence, have been cornered by this privileged tribe. Consequently, the egalitarian society promised by Nehruvian socialism has proved to be a cruel joke played on the gullible people of India. According to Hamid Ansari, the Congress-appointed vice president of India, the top 1 percent of India controls 60 percent of the wealth of the nation, with the bottom 50 percent owning only 2 percent (The Hindu, February 11).  Therefore when the right-wing BJP routed the Congress in General Election 2014, the expectation was this party, which had its support base in the business and trading communities of small-town India, would make a clean break with Nehruvian socialism and restore pre-British India’s free enterprise traditions. This expectation was not unreasonable since prime minister Narendra Modi had cut his political teeth in Gujarat, commonly…