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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Hand over PDS to village panchayats by Mani Shankar Aiyar

Hand over PDS to village panchayats by Mani Shankar Aiyar

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published Published on Jan 24, 2011   modified Modified on Jan 24, 2011

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule.

In effect, in the last two decades, 65 percent of our people employed in the agriculture and allied activities sector have been stranded in the colonial age while the manufacturing and services sectors boom towards making India a super economic power.

This is the paradigm of India prospering while Indians are not. It is time for a course correction which prioritises agriculture and allied activities over manufacturing and IT. Even if this does result in some moderation in our high rates of GDP growth, such moderation would be more than compensated by the economic welfare of around 140 million families, comprising nearly 700 million of our people who live in rural India. They also comprise a bulk of the 77% of our population identified by the Arjun Sengupta Committee who survive on an income of less than Rs 20 a day.

The redirecting of public savings away from the capital markets to public investment in agriculture and irrigation, combined with incentivisation of agricultural production through higher minimum support prices and more effective government procurement would stimulate such a sustained rise in agricultural production.

If people wonder why Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were such heroes despite being the progenitors of the Hindu rate of growth, it was because economic policy was channelling a substantial proportion of what we now regard as low rates of growth to the people at large. On the other hand, the current phenomena of high rates of growth is being achieved by deliberately promoting inequalities in order that the successful Indian has preferential access to national savings.

In a desperately poor country like India it is the unsuccessful Indian who needs to be prioritised over the successful Indian and that means reverting to Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum and ensuring that everything else waits but not agriculture. It is also essential to ensure effective implementation of public distribution system (PDS) by taking it away from the bureaucratic stranglehold of civil supplies’ departments and placing the responsibility on village panchayats and nagarpalikas.

They, in turn, should be responsible to the gram/ward sabhas in rural areas and the neighbourhood committees in urban areas. The essential lesson for governance is that only empowerment guarantees entitlements and it is only through a combination of empowerment and entitlement that enrichment follows.

Our democracy disempowered the feudal classes and empowered the middle class. The middle class used such empowerment initially to secure full and free access to entitlements of public goods and services such as education and health, which then blossomed into the enrichment which we have seen in the last two decades. I recommend exactly the same process of empowerment leading to entitlements and the two together to enrichment for the 65 percent of our population living in rural areas.

This can be done by giving them and their locally-elected representatives the power to run their own PDS outlets, perhaps in close association with local women’s’ self help groups, and then to extend such local empowerment to the other 28 subjects listed in the 11th Schedule of the Constitution.

In short, if we want to fight poverty by increasing rural output and ensure inclusive growth, it will have to be done by inclusive governance. If I may quote my mentor Rajiv Gandhi: “If we want adequate food supplies and effective control over food inflation, our twin slogans must be ‘power to the people’ and ‘maximum democracy through maximum devolution’.”

(Mani Shankar Aiyar is Rajya Sabha member & former Panchayati Raj minister)

The Economic Times, 23 January, 2011, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/features/sunday-et/economy/hand-over-pds-to-village-panchayats/articleshow/7344975.cms


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