WISH & FULFILMENT --- West Bengal Budget Analysis

Dr Dasgupta’s Well-Intentioned Prescription For An Indeterminate Group

“My budget is aimed at the poorest of the poor. So it won’t be proper to label me Kalpataru.”

~ Dr Asim Dasgupta after presenting the West Bengal budget on 17 March 2008
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By ARINDAM GHOSH-DASTIDAR

A critical, if scarcely noted, feature of Bengal’s social development has been the near-total disappearance of able-bodied beggars, a fairly common sight till not so long ago. Even the percentage of the lame and the halt among those seeking alms has dwindled considerably over the years. Far from projecting such positives as an index of a state on the roll, Dr Asim Dasgupta’s budget for 2008-09 has promised cooked food to the poorest section, including beggars. A tidy sum of Rs 100 crores has been earmarked for an indeterminate group and the proposal is arguably in response to the overwhelming disaster of the two icons of welfare economics ~ the Public Distribution System and the National Rural Employment Generation Scheme. We are tempted to enter a caveat that should the cooked food distribution system be handled by the village mafia in the manner of rationing, it is doomed to a similar fate.

Two months before the panchayat election, the budget seeks to benefit a wide cross-section of the dispossessed. The statewide canvas of the cooked food scheme is much too vast. However well-intentioned, it may not exactly serve the purpose of poverty alleviation if it gets diffused. If poverty alleviation is indeed the objective, the package ought to have focused primarily on the basket case of Purulia, Bankura and Midnapore. This is the perennially arid and impoverished belt where, by the Chief Minister’s own admission in November 2005, all alleviation schemes have floundered, notably also the ones that ought to have benefited from the prime-pumping by Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID).

Amlasole village in West Midnapore reported five starvation deaths in 2004 though it was politically diagnosed as malnutrition by the party office in Kolkata. Mercifully, there was no such semantic quibbling when Kuna Shabar died of starvation in the same district on 29 December last year. Misgivings that the reality of hunger and death in the three districts may find its echo in the panchayat elections in May are not wholly unfounded. Hence this contrived revival of the socialist baggage, however disillusioned Mr Jyoti Basu and Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee may be with the political philosophy.

Likewise, the Provident Fund scheme for the unorganised sector, including maid servants, may appear to be a benevolent move on the face of it; but here again the target group is an indeterminate quantity and the burden on the exchequer remains to be worked out. The record of both the national and state governments across the country doesn't inspire optimism. The Government of India’s standing assurance of a monthly allowance for the unorganised worker is yet to materialise as neither the Centre nor the states have been able to agree on the contributory ratio.

Touching, if fatally belated, is the concern for the peasant. A Rs 100-crore special assistance fund is to be set up for landlosers. This compensation package has been proposed two years after the government suffered a jolt in Singur and after enough died and more suffered cruel and barbarous reprisal in Nandigram. The Centre’s loan-waiver has been matched by the state with a Rs 6,175-crore target as bank loan for agriculture. To what extent this will be feasible must remain an open question given the rapid privatisation of the banking sector. As in large parts of the country, the farmer in Bengal is still dependent on the mahajan and money-lender, an affluent section of the rural populace. And rather presumptuous is the demand for universal banking in Bengal during the 11th Plan given the corruption that has led to the closure of at least one cooperative bank, a major source of rural agricultural funding.

Dr Dasgupta has matched the government’s overkill on industrialisation with a profound faith in the data yielded by Farm Management Studies. “Both employment generation and production per acre are highest in the case of small and marginal farmers. The high priority on land reforms will remain firmly in place”. Indeed, industry gets a relatively minor rating in the budget. Electoral compulsions may have convinced the government that the patta ~ the icon of agrarian reforms since the era of the Great Mughals ~ still means more to the rural voter than such totems of post-modern industrialisation as a Special Economic Zone.

While the anxiety to address the increasing disenchantment in the rural areas is perceptible, the budget offers little or nothing in relation to the primary indices of welfare ~ basic health, education and employment generation. The one-time tax on new cars and the tax on foreign liquor are targeted at those in the level of affluent subsistence, whose number is legion in Kolkata and its eastern fringe. With Singur set to roll out the people’s car this year, the Nano effect can be expected to net a fair amount to the kitty, now contending with a Rs 2-crore deficit budget.

From the permanently poor to the noveau riche the budget takes care of the market preferences of a wide cross-section. To symbolise the progress from Sutanati to shopping malls, the state’s finance minister proposes to set up food malls under a new market corporation, a move that is concordant with the fantasy of a Shining Bengal. The government's retail outlet chain will sell the produce procured directly from farmers by self-help groups.

The consumer may be able to avoid the flotsam and the jetsam of the para bazar, but there is no mistaking that the government's compulsion is more political than plainly economic. There is little doubt that the state-sponsored procurement-to-retail set-up has been studiously thought up to counter the Forward Bloc’s opposition to the entry of corporate private enterprise in the retail sector. The junior partner’s violent methods have provoked Reliance to down its shutters for now.

Overall, there is more of tinkering than assertion in the exercise. Whether the focus is on Parliament or the panchayat, whether the budget is the handiwork of a Harvard-educated lawyer or an MIT-trained economist, the electoral compulsions are equally compelling. The poor may be overawed at the munificence just as the corporate world may feel a mite let down because there isn’t much that a reformist government has to offer in this budget. In the manner of Palaniappan Chidambaram, Asim Dasgupta has been able to reflect the flavour of the season. And that is enough.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Statesman