[These were the twin slogans coined by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in presenting to Parliament on 15 May 1989[1] his initial draft Constitutional amendment for according Constitutional sanction, sanctity and safeguards to the third tier of governance that aimed at involving people in their respective neighbourhood communities in the running of their own affairs through “institutions of local self-government”comprising their own elected representatives, responsible to their own community electorate and, therefore, likely to be more responsive than a distant bureaucracy to the felt and articulated needs and demands of their neighbourhood communities.]
INCLUSIVE GROWTH THROUGH INCLUSIVE GOVERNANCE
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
It is curious but true that although
from the time of Mahatma Gandhi leading the struggle for Independence to the
present day there has been extensive recognition in India of the imperative of
effective Panchayat Raj[1] (local self-government) for
both deepening India’s democracy and making its development processes
“inclusive”, that is, ensuring that the people at large, and especially the
poor, are tangibly benefitted by the growth process, actual progress in
securing this goal has been fitful, uncertain and not sustained.
This is partly because of
- insufficient conceptual clarity and conviction regarding the indispensability of Panchayat Raj, that is, inclusive governance to inclusive development; and partly because of
- resistance to the systemic
revolution entailed in effective Panchayat Raj on the part of vested
interests in the polity and the bureaucracy who stand to lose their powers
of patronage and influence if there is indeed a genuine overhaul of the
development process in the direction of “Power to the People” through
“Maximum Democracy and Maximum Devolution”.
These were the twin slogans coined
by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in presenting to Parliament on 15 May 1989[1] his
initial draft Constitutional amendment for according Constitutional sanction,
sanctity and safeguards to the third tier of governance that aimed at involving
people in their respective neighbourhood communities in the running of their
own affairs through “institutions of local self-government”comprising their own elected
representatives, responsible to their own community electorate and, therefore,
likely to be more responsive than a distant bureaucracy to the felt and
articulated needs and demands of their neighbourhood communities.
The Indian experience would appear
to indicate that while financial resources constitute an essential component of
poverty alleviation, financial resources alone without effective community
participation result in outcomes not being anywhere near commensurate with
outlays. Pari passu, more effective
Panchayat Raj should result in outcomes being brought more in line with
outlays.
India’s record on Central budgetary
outlays on social sector spending (including programmes targeted at a direct
assault on extreme poverty) has been most impressive, rising from about
Rs.7,500 crore in 1994-95 to over Rs. 1,85,000 crore provided for in fiscal
2011-12, and nearly Rs.2,00,000 crore proposed for the coming financial year,
an augmentation on Central Government outlays of some 25 times over the last 18
years, perhaps the highest in the world. This is in addition to an outlay of
nearly the same amount on subsidies primarily intended to cushion the poor
against rising prices of food, fuel, and critical agricultural inputs. This
makes India among the fastest growing spenders on programmes designed to target
multi-dimensional poverty. Yet, the UN Human Development Index, first published
in 1994, placed India at position 134 in the league ranking and the 2011 UN HDI
places India at the same position -134. We appear to be on a treadmill of
social development, running very fast to stay at the same place!
For the World Food Programme tells
us that half the world’s hungry live in India and the International Food Policy
Research Institute’s most recent report classifies India’s food security index
as “alarming”[1]. Notwithstanding India’s
extraordinarily high growth rate, India remains a low-income, food deficit
country in which as much as 35% of the population consumes less than 80% of its
minimum human energy requirements; where 9 out of 10 pregnant women suffer from
malnutrition and anaemia, and, in consequence, 47% of children under the age of
5 are moderately to severely undernourished?[2].
FAO tells us that in the five years leading to the turn of the century, India
added more newly hungry millions than the rest of the world put together[3].
Action Aid has just confirmed this for more recent years.
Why is there such a mismatch between
the halting, uncertain, sporadic and un-sustained amelioration in the condition
of the vast majority of Indians and growth in the booming service and
manufacturing sectors of the Indian economy and the income of the
entrepreneurial and highly skilled classes? Why is India prospering but most
Indians are not? Why are higher outlays impacting so relatively little on all
that makes life more bearable for the poor? And why is political attention to
the issues of poverty so muted in comparison to the hurrahs we hear over GDP
growth rates?[4] For, alas, the poverty of
our politics is reflected in the politics of our poverty!
In the absence of Inclusive
Governance, the people at the grassroots, that is, the intended beneficiaries
of poverty alleviation programmes, are left abjectly dependent on a
bureaucratic delivery mechanism over which they have no effective control. The
alternative system would be participatory development, or Panchayati Raj, where
the people themselves are enabled to build their own future through elected
representatives responsible to the local community and, therefore, responsive
to their needs.[5]
Not only is responsive bureaucratic
administration almost a contradiction in terms, the Indian experience of the
last six decades would appear to confirm that bureaucratic delivery mechanisms
absorb a disproportionately high share of the earmarked expenditure: up to 85
paise in the rupee, said Rajiv Gandhi (based on one study commissioned by the
Planning Commission of one programme in Bihar state); perhaps 83 paise says Dr.
Kirit Parekh, former Member of the Planning Commission, in an evaluation of one
key programme, the Public Distribution System[6];
not quite so high, says the Prime Minister. We can leave it to experts to argue
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; for our purposes, it is enough to
note that 75%-85% of expenditure on poverty alleviation schemes is absorbed by
the delivery mechanism itself. No wonder outcomes are so derisory.
Worse, precisely because over a hundred
schemes are delivered to the same set of beneficiaries through mutually
insulated administrative silos, set up by Central government ministries intent
on jealously guarding their respective fiefdoms, convergence of schemes at the
delivery point becomes virtually impossible, thus depriving beneficiaries of
the multiplier effect that would operate if the beneficiaries themselves,
through their locally elected leaders, were to have the authority to plan and
implement the utilisation of these resources in keeping with their own
respective priorities.
The challenge being to convert
accelerated growth into inclusive growth, the path favoured by Government after
Government in India has been to exponentially increase spending on social
sector and anti-poverty programmes in the expectation that a critical mass of
expenditure will somehow be reached for the money thrown at the poor to become
the straw they can clutch at to rise out of their misery. The intention is
sound but commentator after commentator rues the fact that implementation has
been hopeless. But, as is the wont of economists as a tribe, they point the
finger of accusation at dreadfully poor implementation and then think it is
someone else’s job to find the solution[7].
The critical systemic fault lies in
the present practice of implementation.
Over a hundred social sector and poverty alleviation Centrally Sponsored
Schemes (CSS)[8] are implemented by
separate agencies for each scheme operating through parallel bodies set up by
the Central and State government bureaucracy in collaboration with civil
society organisations to perform tasks that the Eleventh Schedule of the
Constitution specifies might best be entrusted to the PRIs. In consequence, the
beneficiaries remain hapless recipients of government/NGO largesse instead of
actively participating in designing the schemes, adapting them to local
community priorities and being effectively in charge of supervision, guidance
and disciplinary action. The implementation agencies, therefore, look over
their shoulder to those who entrusted the task to them instead of towards the beneficiaries
for approval or course correction. In these circumstances, it is hardly
surprising that Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) are reduced to hapless
spectators and rubber-stamps instead of providing “advice and consent” to the
elected panchayat executive as is the democratic requirement when the executive
is held responsible to the people. Thus outcomes fall woefully short of
outlays, as we have seen.
@ The author is a member of Indian parliament.
[1] “Food Security: India ranks
lower than Rwanda, India 67th in Global Hunger Index Among 81 Countries
With Worst Figures”, Times of India, 12 October 2011, p.11, “Times Nation”
section. The report relates to the findings of the International Food Policy
Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index, comprised of three equally weighted
indicators: the proportion of the population that is undernourished; the
proportion of children that is underweight; and under-five child mortality.
“India has the ignominy of being among the countries with the least
improvement” in the last ten years, that is, precisely the period of explosive
GDP growth. However, IFPRI have moved India a notch ahead from “extremely
alarming” to “alarming”.
[4] cf. N.C.B. Nath, “Political Perspectives on Chronic Poverty”
in A.K. Mehta and A. Shepherd (ed), “Chronic Poverty and Development Policy
in India”, op.cit., pp.248-271:
“… the political class is, by and large, not equipped or willing to deal with
chronic poverty problems”(p.266). See also Table 8.3 at pp. 258-259 which
provides a useful compendium of “Selected Opinions” on “Poverty
Reduction and Political Regimes”
[5] The institutional basis for such inclusive governance has now been
deeply entrenched through a series of elections to nearly 300,000 PRIs and
municipal bodies, to which have been elected nearly 3.2 million
representatives, including 1.2 million women, 86 000 of who hold office. See The State of The Panchayats report,
2006, op.cit. Table 1, pp.29-32,
updated to 2010 in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 of V.N.Alok and P.K.Chaubey, Panchayats in India: Measuring Devolution by States, Macmillan Publishers India, 2010, p.13 and p.15.
[7] See, for example, “The India Mosaic”, Academic Foundation,
New Delhi, 2004, edited for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation by Bibek Debroy; his
own contribution to the volume, “The Idea of India and the Economic Tryst”
quotes Nehru’s famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech: “The service of India means
the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and
ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity”, and then goes on to
deplore, in much the same terms used here, how distant we are from that goal. But
beyond saying “The national goal cannot be accepted as a national one without a
buy-in by these deprived sections” there is little by way of a roadmap as to
how this might be achieved.
Similarly,
the 8-point programme for dealing with chronic poverty suggested by Mehta and
Shepherd, op.cit., pp. 46-48, includes a number of normative
recommendations but not a word on governance issues.
Arjun
Sengupta’s “Reforms, Equity and the IMF”, Har-Anand, New Delhi, 2001,
makes the case at pp.255-256 that “Development, however, is not just a matter
of increasing the GDP” and touches the key point that “in social sector
investments, there is so much fat and wastage that a proper system of
delivering public expenditure through government organisations and Panchayats might
have so much impact on productivity that it may not require much increase in
the quantum of investment as against a properly targeted implementation of the
existing investments themselves” – but does not elaborate, rather like Pontius Pilate who “would not wait for
an answer”!
William N.
Bissell, whose Making India Work, Penguin, 2009, is making waves
actually seeks to promote people’s participation by dismantling Panchayat Raj!
(p.200)
Even the
latest foray into this subject, India: Perspectives on Equitable Development,
Academic Foundation, New Delhi 2009, excellent in analysing the problem falls
short on the systemic solution.
[8] and ACA –
Additional Central Assistance - allocated at its discretion by the Planning
Commission
