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WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Maybe we don't give the finance minister as much credit as we should, for what he is managing to do. Take the criticism aimed at the government, that it is wasting good public money on a national rural employment guarantee (NREG) programme that has been shown to involve the usual degree of waste and misdirection associated with government programmes. As it turns out, a member of the National Advisory Committee (which used to be chaired by Sonia Gandhi and is now being wound up) has spilt the beans: the government has allocated less money for employment programmes (including food for work) than was the case even three years ago, before the NREG programme got under way. You would not suspect this when you read that the programme is being extended from a little over 300 districts this year to all 596 rural districts next year; nor would you guess it from the finance minister's mention in his Budget speech that he is increasing the allocation for the scheme from Rs 12,000 crore to Rs 16,000 crore "" an announcement greeted with thumping of desks in the Treasury benches. The truth, as it turns out, is that the minister has clubbed various employment programmes together and quietly controlled the spending "" because he knows that much of the money will go into contractors' or officials' pockets. So the government has won brownie points for spending money to benefit the 'aam aadmi', while the Budget has been protected.

This is of a piece with the grandstanding done by the finance minister, who spent over an hour in the Lok Sabha spelling out the details of each scheme with an unpronouncable name and stressed the outlays and the spending hikes. In truth, as you realise when you look at the total expenditure numbers, the government is being careful in its spending intentions; the growth of expenditure over this year and the next will be barely equal to the growth in GDP, and much less than the growth in tax revenue. Here too, since the finance minister knows that the bulk of government spending reaches the wrong pockets, or is ineffective, he is doing what damage control he can.

This is not all. Mr Chidambaram has got a lot of flak for his announcement of a massive loan waiver (though the government is claiming credit for it to garner votes). The focus of some of the criticism has been the damage that such a waiver will do to credit discipline, and how it will affect bank balance sheets. But again, it turns out that, of the Rs 60,000 crore waiver announced, the banks will have to write off only about Rs 11,000 crore. And of that, they may have already done provisioning for half the sum under the normal Reserve Bank rules for dealing with overdue loans. Given that total bank credit is more than Rs 20,00,000 crore, writing off Rs 5,500 crore worth of loans is not going to do serious damage. To be sure, the rest of the money will have to be written off by the regional rural banks and by cooperative credit institutions, but these have always been riddled with problems and are not the main credit system that the country has. It is also interesting that the minister has still not disclosed how he will make good such money, and over what period of time (three years has been mentioned). So it is entirely possible that he is trying a deep finesse here as well.

You could argue that a minister who appears to be doing something while not actually doing it is deceiving both the public and Parliament. Mr Chidambaram's defence, one supposes, would be that every statement he has made is true and therefore he is not guilty of deception. The more substantive defence would be that a finance minister who feels he is responsible for the health of the fisc, when confronted with all manner of unpalatable demands from the political system, is entitled to play a few games himself in order to protect the financial system. If that is indeed what Mr Chidambaram has been doing, he deserves more thanks than he has got so far.