Unseen Blushes & Desert Air
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard brings back school-room memories for many of us, replete with the occasionally baffling rigours of poetry appreciation. The lines quoted above are not only a poignant ode to anonymity, evocative of the unsung and obscure life, but profound in its implication of a tragic waste.
Mr. Gray was lamenting the fate of the generic peasantry in a bucolic agrarian 18th century British setting, but times may not have changed that much when applied to a country like ours, bursting at the seams with a population growing towards a billion and a half mostly unsung souls.
Quantity we indubitably have, and the recent Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games after that demonstrated that our winners often come from small towns and villages; but as a rule, how much do we do to nurture quality?
And to enhance this quality is essential to our better tomorrows. We must have three basics to do so. One, we must have a full belly, and then we need robust health and a dynamic education system.
The Government is not, as yet, doing enough to modernise agriculture towards that full belly of nutrition. We are still reaping the harvest from the Green Revolution of the eighties with nothing substantial done to improve the agricultural, food processing and cold chain infrastructure since then. And this despite persistent food price inflation and the pressure of a huge and growing population.
Still, given as we are to foreign prompting, we might respond to celebrated billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates’ recent talks with the authorities in Bihar and yet others in Delhi, because they want to do something to modernise our agricultural practices.
But, lo and behold, the Union Government seems to be doing something worthwhile about the major lacunae in our Health and Education allocations at last. In the flurry of information packed densely in the Union Budget proposals 2011-12 there is a potential gem of great value, typically embedded in the detail. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has sought to boost the fortunes of both Education and Health by making a deft structural change in policy he is well known for.
“Henceforth”, intoned Mr. Mukherjee, “capital stock in educational institutions and hospitals will be treated as infrastructure sub-sectors,” replying to a discussion on Budget 2011-12 in the Lok Sabha. He went on to state that both would now qualify for capital subsidies through “viability gap funding”.
Now, what this jargon exactly means will have to be revealed in the unfolding of this policy shift, but it seems to suggest that the Government will pitch in with funds to meet budgetary shortfalls of new schools and colleges and technical training establishments and yes, for immunisation and public health awareness programmes as well as hospitals and clinics too!
Where the Government will find the considerable resources needed for this purpose to uplift these woebegone and chronically inadequate infrastructures is not known, but perhaps the miracles of deficit financing will come to the rescue yet again. But to be fair, in an economy growing at near double digits, the deficits will be bridged, as long as the Government is not too profligate, and the money will be well spent as long as the intended beneficiaries are actually delivered their benefits.
This important development could have very favourable consequences if implemented with will and imagination. Already Mrs. Sheila Dixit’s subsequent budget for Delhi does seem, most laudably, to echo this changed emphasis with its higher allocations to both Health and Education and the most welcome announcement of free healthcare for school going students.
But a major worry is the Government’s talent for ruining a good initiative by administering a policy thrust in their typically sarkari fashion. The private sector with its clear-cut profit and growth motives may be far more successful at maintaining standards, collaborating successfully with foreign educational and health entities, unleashing competition, economies of scale, and in short revolutionising our Health and Education landscape. They need to be incentivised and this may be a beginning in that direction.
Should this programme be privatised successfully, one will not hear of school buildings collapsing in the first season after they are built. Nor about rampant corruption that creates black holes into which as much as 90 per cent of the development funds disappear. We would not have to deal with the callous imperviousness engendered by the job from which one cannot be sacked. We would not be building classrooms without teachers, or clinics with a higher rodent population than humans. We wouldn’t be looking at the waste of unusable and ill-maintained medical equipment. We would not be paying the bill for inflated and manipulated tendering and an almost complete lack of accountability. In short, for such routine delights that come as a consequence of most governmental implementation and execution.
The Economist in a recent article entitled Bamboo Capitalism suggests that most of the double–digit Chinese GDP growth, an estimated 70 per cent of it, is “produced by enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state”. The magazine goes on to say that the notion that: “state directed capitalism and tight political control are the elixir of growth” is mistaken. “In fact China has surged forward mainly where the state has stood back” says the article.
This is not to say that the Indian Government’s role as facilitator is not important. Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and others in our Asian region have all benefited from strong Government support of private enterprise that executes objectives the Government holds dear.
There is no reason why we cannot also do this, except perhaps the entrenched mindsets of much of our bureaucracy and political leadership was nurtured, not in the liberating winds of change post 1991, but in the preceding socialist and public-sector favouring decades prior to that dawn.
Therefore, it may be some time yet before we properly start implementing policies meant for a resurgent 21st century economy. Still, the Government needs to be congratulated for doing something good about a vital need at last.
(1,048 words)
25th March 2011
Gautam Mukherjee
Updated version published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer under title"Mindset that stifles hope" on April 5th, 2011 and simultaneously online at www.dailypioneer.com and in the Pioneer epaper. It is also archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com
