Sunday, May 23, 2010

A critical evaluation of UPA's performance.

Tavleen Singh,columnist with the Indian Express.

As someone whose usual reaction to our politicians is disdain, let me begin by confessing that one of the few for whom I have real respect is the Prime Minister. I have been a fan since the nineties, when he became the finance minister who shook India out of its socialist coma by abolishing the license-quota-permit raj. With socialism enshrined in our Constitution and embedded in our DNA, it was a brave thing to do even if he did it because we were flat broke. So my disappointment in the performance of his second government runs deep. As the only Prime Minister to have been given a second consecutive term in more than forty years, there was so much he could have done to rectify the things that prevent India from becoming a fully developed country.


As an economist, he knows better than you or I that the things that need drastic, revolutionary change lie mostly in what economists call the social sector. Our state schools are among the worst in the world, our public hospitals are horrific, we have more mobile phones than public toilets and this absence of basic sanitation along with unclean water is the cause of most of our diseases. No matter how fast the economy grows, no matter how much money we pour into NREGA, no matter how many airports and roads we build, if we fail on the education and public health front, there is no chance of India becoming a developed country in this century.



Sadly, all that Dr Manmohan Singh’s social sector ministers have done is tiptoe around these problems and pass the buck to the state governments. It is true that primary education and healthcare are state subjects but it is also true that when the Government of India lights up a new path, state governments happily walk down it. Did a single chief minister sneer when Rajiv Gandhi came up with the idea of Navodaya Vidyalayas? And, nobody would sneer now if Kapil Sibal formulates a policy to radically improve state schools. Nor would anyone protest if he did something about the mess in higher education, which comes directly under him. India used to have the best universities in Asia in the sixties and the seventies. We no longer do and the reason is mostly too much government intervention.


It is on account of too much government intervention that we are nowhere near building the 600 more universities that we desperately need. Instead of getting on with the job, the Government of India spends its time banging on about the Right to Education Bill. What use is the right to education if there are not enough schools and colleges?

Indian citizens already have the right to free healthcare but so horrendous is the state of our public hospitals that more than 80 per cent of Indians use private services. Nothing has been done to make things better. Nothing at all. What makes things worse is that, for those who can afford it, private hospitals in India are today among the best in the world. Not only do our political leaders no longer rush to foreign hospitals when they get sick, we receive increasing numbers of medical tourists every year.


If public hospitals are to improve, we need hundreds of thousands more doctors and nurses but government makes it almost impossible to set up new medical colleges. Now that they have caught the criminal who was running the Medical Council of India like a mafia operation, can something not be done to facilitate the setting up of new medical and nursing colleges?


On the sanitation front, it is something of an achievement that the Ministry of Urban Development did a survey of our cities and found that not one of them meets standards of hygiene and sanitation. Now that the Minister has discovered this, could he please come up with solutions? It’s true that every city must deal with its own unique problems but can the Ministry of Urban Development not act as a consultant?


There are other areas in which Dr Manmohan Singh’s second government is not showing dynamism but in my humble opinion, often expressed in this space, there is nothing more important than education, healthcare and sanitation. Everything else will fall into place once we have healthy, educated citizens who live in sanitary towns, cities and villages. Why is India one of the only countries left in the world that has not been able to deal with problems that are so fundamentally important? Why is the Prime Minister unable to make the sort of dramatic changes here that he made with the economy in the nineties? So, in the week of the first anniversary of his second government, I give him no more than four out of ten

Courtesy : The Indian Express.

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