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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

‘Dependence on bureaucracy is why the poor remain poor’


Once, during a tour of his constituency in Tamil Nadu, Member of Parliament and former Panchayati Raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar came across an eight-year-old boy. A chance meeting that he says threw light on why India stagnates at the 134th position in the United Nations Human Development Index.

The boy, Aiyar said during a brief pause in his United Nations Millennium lecture at the British Council on Sunday, had got admission to the village school, free books, a mid-day meal “much better than what he got at home”, but had no teacher to “teach him”.

But when Aiyar posed this same query — why India still stagnates at the 134th position in the UN index — to the Panchayati Raj Minister in an unstarred question, no. 976, on August 3, he found a “clueless” answer.

“In 1994, India stood at 134 on the UN HDI. Fifteen years later in 2009, India continues to be stagnant at the same 134. The ministry had not undertaken any detailed study to analyse the reasons for this stagnation but helpfully added that we had at least risen from position 138 in 1998 back to 134,” Aiyar quoted the minister’s reply in Parliament.

The Vice-President released the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Country Report on June 29 and the United Nations is scheduled to review the document later this month.

Speaking on “goal No. 1: the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger”, Aiyar said the poor remained poor despite the government pouring in “miraculously increased revenues” for MDG-related central and centrally sponsored schemes such as the MNREGA because “all public expenditure is leached in administrative expenses by a colonial system of delivering development through the bureaucracy instead of democratically elected local self-government institutions”.

And so, he explains the predicament of his young fellow constituent as a victim of how “ the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan relies on registered societies, not panchayats responsible to gram sabhas to deliver primary education”.

“The educational programmes of the HRD Ministry rely entirely on bureaucratically appointed registered societies and the state government bureaucracy to deliver primary and secondary education. In consequence, the returns in terms of well-educated youth is nothing compared to the thousands of crores being increased every year on education,” he said.

“To come to the present, neither the Integrated Action Plan on the anvil for the Left-wing extremist-affected areas nor the draft Food Security Bill currently under discussion rely on the panchayats for delivery: both assume the bureaucracy will do the job,” he said.

Aiyar said the stock-market is being “relentlessly” supported by the government which “believes that the health of the stock market reflects the health of the facilitated non-taxable capital” into the stock market.

Without naming AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury said in the same function that his party had always been saying that there are two Indias — one is “shining India” and the other is “suffering India” and is happy to note that “more people are joining the cause”.