Right to governance

The social sector agenda is now getting onerous

This has to be the ultimate irony. Barely a few weeks after a Supreme Court committee comes out with a verdict that the public distribution system is bust and needs a drastic overhaul, the government clears a food security bill that seeks to push more food through this very same burst pipe. If newspaper reports are to be believed, the Congress president is not happy with even this and wants the government to increase the quantity of subsidized food from 25 kg per poor family per month to 35 kg. Apart from the issue of what this increase will do to the subsidy bill, surely there should be a discussion on how the PDS can possibly deliver on its new responsibilities when it is practically non-existent in several states, apart from the huge leaks in it? What is even more curious is that the Congress party should be keen on increasing the scope of the PDS when the government is talking of switching over to cash transfers linked to the Unique ID system. If you take even the 35 kg figure the Congress party is in favour of, and a Rs 10 per kg subsidy, that’s around Rs 4,200 per family per year. Multiply that by around 60 million poor families, and that’s a cash transfer of Rs 25,200 crore as opposed to Rs 55,600 crore that has been budgeted for this year.

The tension between the Congress party’s social sector agenda and the need for governance is not restricted to just the food security bill. The Right to Education Act, it has been pointed out by many including this newspaper, will hit private sector education providers that are ‘unrecognised’ and will, if the Act is scrupulously implemented, result in them being driven out of business. Given that they provide education to a fourth of children in rural India and anywhere around 50 per cent in many cities, this is a serious concern. If these education providers are driven out of business, this means much higher costs for the government which is now mandated by law to provide free schooling to all. More important, since the Act is more focused on quantity and not on quality, there is nothing to assure us that the education provided will be of a higher quality than that provided by the private sector. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), similarly, is in danger of upsetting the wage market clearance with around half the country’s work force registered for jobs under the scheme — around 21.5 crore workers of the workforce of 45 crore have registered under MNREGA. While a large number of states are reporting labour shortages at harvest/sowing time because MNREGA wage rates are higher, there is a demand to further hike MNREGA wages to Rs 100 per day in real terms (that is, indexing these to inflation). That is, the Congress party’s social sector agenda is now beginning to cause a serious problem for the country’s governance. That is bad news.