T N Ninan: VIPs & development

The extra status accorded to VIPs is usually in inverse proportion to the development index that a country has. On a Bangladesh Biman flight to Dhaka some years ago, the business class cabin had a toilet marked “For VIPs only”, which meant that paying passengers who were non-VIPs in the business cabin had to go look for a toilet elsewhere. We don’t go to quite that degree, but it is routine for ministers to be driven to the foot of the staircase that leads up to the aircraft cabin, with an airline employee as an escort, and with an attendant running up the stairs to deposit the minister’s hand baggage in the overhead bin. When Jyoti Basu, as chief minister of West Bengal, was spotted taking the usual passenger bus to the airport terminal, it became the subject of a news report! By way of contrast, I once attended a conference in Sweden where the Swedish king walked in midway through a business session and stood quietly in a corner of the small hall because no chair was vacant. The speaker continued as though nothing unusual had happened; eventually, a conference organiser went and got the king a chair. It is not an accident that the Scandinavian countries routinely get the highest rankings on everything from per capita income and development indices to (in an inverse ordering) the extent of corruption.

With that as a backdrop, here are a couple of questions for the parliamentarians who got very agitated about the security drill that the former president, Abdul Kalam, was subjected to. First, were they picking on the wrong target (Continental Airlines), when the real culprit was the government—which must (or should) have known that its instructions on the VIPs who were to be exempted from the usual security drill conflicted with laws and rules issued by other countries? If the government knew of the conflicting rules that airlines were being asked to follow, did it do anything to address the contradictions? Or did it simply wish away the problem, and wait for the Kalam kind of episode to happen?

Second, and more important, what is the scale on the basis of which parliamentarians calibrate their outrage? The courtesy shown, or not shown, to a former head of state is of course an issue, but how does it compare with, say, the report by the Planning Commission that every rupee that reaches the poor costs the government Rs 3.35? Put another way, of every rupee that the government spends on the poor, only 30 paise reach the target. That is better that the figure once quoted by Rajiv Gandhi, but nevertheless implies massive inefficiency and leakage. Yet no one has seen parliamentarians expressing any outrage over such enormous government waste, or taking ministers to task.

This is not a cheap shot at parliamentarians, but an important question with regard to the quality of parliamentary oversight. At a time when government budgets have shifted their focus very substantially from paying for the building of physical assets (power stations and the like—where you could benchmark costs and other parameters with private sector providers in order to measure efficiency), and the thrust of government spending has moved to large anti-poverty programmes with huge budgets, it is vital for the system to ensure that the money is spent wisely and well. But if parliamentarians do not pay attention to the issue, and do not ensure that the country is getting the maximum bang for the taxpayer’s buck, it does raise questions about the implications of the change in spending priorities. It also raises questions about parliamentarians’ own sense of priorities.