Election package

The Union and Railway Budgets have taken populism to new heights with an eye on the elections in four States and Puducherry.

RULING parties using the Budget as an instrument to bolster their electoral prospects and mass base is a common practice in India. Political parties of almost all ideological hues indulge in this populist exercise, especially in the face of impending elections to State Assemblies or the Lok Sabha. But the Trinamool Congress' Mamata Banerjee and the Congress' Pranab Kumar Mukherjee, who presented the United Progressive Alliance government's Railway and Union Budgets respectively for 2011-12, have taken populism to new, unambiguous highs.

Indeed, both the Ministers were unabashedly blatant in providing special care and attention to States where Assembly elections are to be held in April-May. In particular, they paid extra attention to West Bengal in terms of allocation of projects. West Bengal, the home State of both Ministers, is where the Congress and the Trinamool Congress jointly take on the ruling Left Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in an Assembly election spread over six phases.

The other election-bound States of Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala and the Union Territory of Puducherry received varying degrees of ministerial largesse, with an obvious focus on potentially vote-winning projects.

The Railway Minister was particularly liberal in her attention to West Bengal. She allocated to the State as many as 34 new metro rail services, 20 new express trains, 50 suburban train services, a metro coach factory, a software excellence centre, a track-making factory, a railway industrial park, a polytechnic and a shelter for the homeless. Interestingly, the industrial park is to be set up at Nandigram and the coach factory at Singur, two controversial sites where Mamata Banerjee's party had fought spirited political and organisational battles against the acquisition of land from farmers for industrialisation in the private sector.

Expressly stating We love Kerala in her speech, Mamata Banerjee allotted 12 new trains to the election-bound State, including seven express services. A special Student Express on the Chennai-Puducherry-Thiruvananthapuram route was also part of her pronouncements. Another train, christened Vivekananda Express, is expected to link Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Apart from this, Tamil Nadu is to get an integrated suburban train network. She also promised to increase the capacity of the coach factory in Perambur, Tamil Nadu, and to start work on the proposed coach factory in Palakkad, Kerala, though no money has been allocated in the Railway Budget for the project.

Pranab Mukherjee's special consideration for election-bound States included an allocation of Rs.200 crore as a one-time grant to the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, West Bengal, and an allocation of Rs.100 crore as a one-time grant to the Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University at Pookode, Kerala. Apart from this, he granted Rs.50 crore each to upcoming centres of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Murshidabad, West Bengal, and Malappuram, Kerala. The Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development at Sriperumbudur near Chennai and the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, received Rs.20 crore each.

The personality traits of the two Ministers came to the fore in their comments both during the Budget presentations and later. Allocating Rs.300 crore each for the development of nutricereals, the Accelerated Fodder Development Programme and the National Mission for Protein Supplements, Pranab Mukherjee said members of Parliament may be curious as to why all these new initiatives [were] being launched with an allocation of Rs.300 crore. He then provided the answer: Well, the number 3 happens to be my lucky number.

Mamata Banerjee's response to questions about the West Bengal bias was even more interesting. Talking to journalists in Parliament House after the presentation of the Railway Budget, she claimed that politicians who criticised her and her Budget did so because they were jealous. She repeated the comment in other forums, including television interviews, albeit with the addition of the phrase politically motivated.

Pranab Mukherjee used the speech to take potshots at some of his Cabinet colleagues, in particular former Finance Minister and current Home Minister P. Chidambaram. He said the opinion regarding a drift in governance was misplaced. It was clearly a response to Chidambaram's recent interview to The Wall Street Journal, wherein he had said that the UPA government did suffer from a governance deficit in some areas and an ethical deficit.

Another notable political aspect of the Union Budget was the manner in which Pranab Mukherjee sought to address some of the concerns raised by Rahul Gandhi, a Congress general secretary and son of party president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Almost a week before the presentation of the Budget, Rahul Gandhi met Pranab Mukherjee along with a delegation and put forth some demands. These included advocacy for special attention to the issues of farmers, weavers and anganwadi workers.

The proposal to provide Rs.3,000 crore to the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in order to benefit 15,000 cooperative societies and about three lakh handloom weavers and the scheme of direct transfer of cash instead of subsidised kerosene, LPG and fertilizers to below poverty line (BPL) families are considered to be the results of this intervention. The cash subsidy is expected to curb the diversion of these items.

However, these measures have been termed cosmetic by a number of social activists and politicians. Shruti Raghuvanshi, a Varanasi-based social activist who has taken up issues of weavers of the region, alleged that a large number of the societies that came under the purview of NABARD were actually controlled by private sector textile owners. She claimed that ultimately the benefits routed through the new scheme would also be controlled by them. What is required is a scheme that addresses directly the plight of workers in the weaving industry rather than circuitous schemes such as these, she said.

Siddiq Hassan, leader of the Varanasi-based Bunkar Dastkar Adhikar Manch (Weavers Rights Organisation), said the scheme as visualised now did not address the poor weaver, who had been pushed into penury. Ideally, the government should have advanced schemes such as the weaver's ration card, which was initiated last year. Such schemes reach the poorest weaver, who has no organisation, private or cooperative, to support him or her. But, clearly, that is not the approach the government has taken, Siddiq Hassan told Frontline.

Professor Sudhir Kumar Panwar of the Kisan Jagriti Manch, a collective of activists and academics that addresses the concerns of farmers and seeks to make them part of the perspectives of think tanks and policymakers, was of the view that the proposal to initiate direct transfer of fertilizer subsidy to some farmers was a tactical move to further reduce public investment in agriculture.

In fact, the proposal itself has anomalies, because a farmer who can avail himself of fertilizer subsidy cannot be in the BPL category because the specifications for being in that category make it clear that the said person should not have any land. So, in effect this is just jugglery of technical terms, which essentially covers up the real state of affairs. Budget 2011 has apparently five special schemes, targeted schemes, of Rs.300 crore aimed at agricultural diversification. This ultimately would benefit consumers. Moreover, it is happening after Rs. 4,900 crore have been taken away from the general category of farmers through subsidy cut, Panwar pointed out.

The overall thrust of the Union and Railway Budgets have been similarly criticised. Commenting on the Railway Budget, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh told Frontline that Mamata Banerjee had taken the concept of inclusive growth to new heights by blatantly taking money away from Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh and investing it in West Bengal.

Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said the parochial, narrow and sectarian Budgets clearly reflected the lack of vision and the rising inefficiency of the UPA government. CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury said both Mamata Banerjee and Pranab Mukherjee had a penchant for making empty promises, which the government systematically failed to fulfil.

Mamata Banerjee's 2010-11 track record itself is testimony to her unrealistic promises and failed expectations. Union Budget 2011-12 has also fallen way short of expectations with only a marginal hike in outlays towards the social sector, Sitaram Yechury pointed out.

The Delhi-based Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), an advocacy group seeking to bring greater transparency and accountability in governance, said the government seemed to have stuck to the path of fiscal conservatism this year too, making the poor bear the brunt of its conservative policy.

It pointed out that notwithstanding the growing recognition of the need to expand coverage of the public distribution system (PDS), the outlay for food subsidy had been slashed from Rs.60,600 crore in 2010-11 (Revised Estimates, or RE) to Rs.60,573 crore in 2011-12 (Budget Estimates, or BE ). It stated: Further, the total outlay for the social sector (education, health, water and sanitation, etc.), excluding Non-Plan Capital Expenditure that is usually very small and sporadic, which went up from 1.86 per cent in 2009-10 to 2.06 per cent in 2010-11 (RE), has slumped to 1.96 per cent in 2011-12 (BE). The outlay for Plan Expenditure on social sectors shows an increase from Rs.1,27,416 crore in 2010-11 (RE) to Rs.1,45,113 crore in 2011-12 (BE), but that for Non-Plan Revenue Expenditure on social sectors registers a sharp decline from Rs.35,085 crore to Rs.20,862 crore. This kind of a lopsided policy for social sector spending has already given rise to acute staff shortages in most States.

Evidently, beyond the narrow considerations of electoral politics and the sops for election-bound States, the Union and Railway Budgets failed to address the real concerns of people or present a comprehensive development vision. However, within the Congress, the popular perception is that the Budgets would give the party and the ruling coalition an impetus to climb out of the morass of corruption scandals and shake off the credibility deficit and face the crucial Assembly elections with some confidence. That expectation sums up, in a sense, the core thrust of the Budgets.