People's Democracy

FEELING GOOD?

Deceitful Campaign of “Shining Wallahs”

Dipankar Mukherjee 

AMIDST the cacophony of feel good factor in a ‘Shining India’ let us admit that some are really feeling good if not great in the years of  Su-raj(!) from 1998 onwards. To cite a single instance, for those who pay corporate tax, customs duty, income tax, and central excise duty, the outstanding amount of unrecovered taxes was Rs 47,888 crore as on March 31, 1998. The same reached Rs 86,342 crore as on March 31, 2002.  The figure must have crossed Rs 1,00,000 crore by now. Along with those who are having more than Rs 1 lakh crore NPAs (Non Performing Assets, i.e. the unreturned amounts) in the banks, what more do you ask from a government.

But the blitzkrieg campaign of a ‘Shining India’, costing no less than Rs 500 crore of public money, does not talk about those who use kerosene, public transport or diesel in fields, gas cylinder at home where the figures say something totally different:

Retail sale price (in Delhi)

If the “shining wallahs” come back to power, the above situation is going to shine further as in the de-administered price scenario of this regime kerosene would cost Rs 15 per litre and LPG cylinder Rs 350 per cylinder. Let us not forget that it is the users of these products who were made to pay cess for funding the construction of the Golden Quadrilateral Roads, though from the glimpse of a smiling Vajpayee, it appears as if he or his party is the donor for the construction of every kilometer of these highway roads.

To a farmer, the government has given some more costlier inputs to ‘feel good’ about apart from the price hike in diesel. One tonne of urea costed Rs 3,680 in June 1998. The current price is Rs 4,830 per tonne. A tonne of DAP costed Rs 8,300 per tonne  in 1998. Today it is Rs 9,350 per tonne. Similarly, complex fertilizer, like NPK, costed Rs 7,500 per tonne against the current price of Rs 8,060 per tonne. It has already been pronounced that after the general elections the urea price will be de-administered. This would push the urea price to around Rs 8,000 per tonne.

With the new Electricity Bill, 2003, another gift from the NDA government, cross subsidy is going to be removed in power tariffs. The common man will, therefore, have to pay a minimum of Rs 4 - 5 per unit (the present average ranges from Rs 1.5 to Rs 2 in the country for domestic tariff). The agricultural tariff would also similarly be hiked with the removal of subsidy.

The impact on the food economy of the nation due to the increase in the cost of such inputs is quite visible. As per the report of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), State of Food Insecurity in World 2003, the number of undernourished people experiencing chronic hunger in India has gone up to 214.5 million during the 1999-2001 period as compared to 194.7 million during 1995-97. Even as per the latest National Sample Survey (NSS) report, one in every two hundred households in rural areas and one in thousand households in urban areas goes hungry. A rough estimate indicates a staggering figure of 500 million undernourished in the country. This at a time when the government of the day and its leader publicly boast of having record stocks of foodgrains in the FCI godowns, which they are exporting at subsidized prices for consumption by animals. More dangerously, the PDS is on the point of being virtually dismantled by the present government. The latest available data shows that against 20.8 million tonnes of foodgrains distributed through PDS in 1991, only 10.9 million tonnes were distributed through PDS in 1999-2000. The distribution has fallen down further because of the high issue price of rice and wheat, which is beyond the reach of the undernourished and hungry people of the country.  The cost of wheat  has been increased to Rs 4.5 per kg for BPL category against Rs 2.5 per kg earlier. For APL category, it has been increased from Rs 4.5 per kg to Rs 9 per kg. Similarly, for rice the rates are Rs 5.9 per kg against Rs 3.50 earlier for BPL and for people in APL category it is Rs 11.80 per kg against Rs 5.9 per kg. Till now, this `efficient’ government has not identified the BPL category people. As for APL, there are very few takers because of the steep price.

UNEMPLOYMENT is another area of feel good factor of the NDA government. It was promised that one crore jobs a year will be generated, and the Planning Commission has now produced a magic figure of 84 lakh jobs to be generating annually through a big one page advertisement in newspapers. But what do the figures (Annual Report of the Labour Ministry) say regarding registered unemployed only, not withstanding the fact that many educated unemployed do not nowadays register themselves in employment exchanges out of sheer frustration.

Thus, against the more than 41 million job seekers, placement was a meager 99 thousand during 2001-2002. Along with the above registered unemployed, millions of unregistered unemployed are languishing on the streets. However, one glance at the vacancies in only one government department, i.e. Railways, is glaring enough to show the will of the present government to give employment. As on November 30, 2003, there were 1,18,052 vacancies in Group C and 39,759 vacancies in Group D in the railways. Even when the government of the day was making another record of sorts with the number of rail accidents, these vacancies had not been filled up. The pre-election step to fill up 20,000 vacancies in Group D, led to loss of 60 precious lives without filling up a single post, because of the parochial violence sparked off due to biased recruitment modalities. 75 lakh applicants, including MBAs, engineering graduates, diploma holders, etc for 20,000 Group D jobs, is the face of real India which cannot be covered up by a propaganda and campaign on public money. 

This campaign of deceit and deception must be exposed and the “shining wallahs” must be taught a lesson so that they do not get a chance to come back to fritter away public money on such deceitful campaigns in future.