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VIEWPOINT
Let's
Get Real
It's time
we demanded a budget that will give us what we genuinely need
By
Tavleen Singh
 The
combination this week of being in a rich, orderly, western country and
our own impending annual budget exercise makes me painfully aware of the
futility of it all. Year after year, when it comes to budget time, the
political debate turns to matters economic and year after year, our economic
pundits expound on such things as the fiscal deficit and the government's
need to increase infrastructure spending and year after year, we continue
to ignore the things that are really important. Why do we still have the
largest number of illiterate people in the world? Why do our people still
live without access to such fundamental needs as clean drinking water,
sanitation and housing. By which decade of the 21st century can we hope
to see planned Indian cities in which people live with basic dignity and
children do not beg for food on the streets?
What is
the point of debating the nuances of the budget if we continue to consider
these things so unimportant that they barely make a footnote in the reams
of verbiage the finance minister spouts every year when he presents his
budget to Parliament? If I sound gloomier than usual, it is because when
I write from rich, orderly, western countries, these things seem more
important with every passing year. There are rich and poor people here,
and disparities exist here too, but the poorest of the poor live at least
like human beings should. They have roofs, however humble, over their
heads.
They live
in cities and villages that have proper systems of waste disposal, so
their children do not suffer from diseases caused by unsanitary living
conditions, they drink clean water and have the chance to go to proper
schools. They also have access to decent healthcare and reliable supply
of electricity. So, 50 years after Independence, why do our own people
have to continue living in filth and misery?
 Why
have there been so many budget exercises that treat these most important
of things as if they were insignificant, mere footnotes in the finance
minister's grandiose vision of India? Could it be because we do not care?
Could it be because there is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities?
I believe
there is, and I believe nothing will change until we find ourselves a
finance minister who begins his budget speech not with romantic Urdu verse
but with an admission that he and his predecessors have failed the people
of India. Failed them by annually weaving a grandiose dream of prosperity
when the average Indian is not even able to dream a simple dream of a
home in a clean, sanitary town or village, a school to send his children
to, a hospital that does not require walking miles, a decent job and decent
public transport that can get him there.
This dream
will only become reality when the finance minister begins by explaining
why we spend such a paltry percentage of the budget on education, healthcare
and sanitation and such a vast amount on running the government.
Why do we
need so many officials living in comparative splendour when we are unable
to provide schools that are real schools? The minister for human resources
development likes to boast these days about how the literacy rate has
gone up by more than 10 per cent in the past decade. But it is not about
literacy as we know, because anyone who can scrawl his name on a piece
of paper is considered literate. This does not qualify as being educated
by the standards of the world, but we choose to ignore this in favour
of delusory numbers.
Just as
we choose to pretend that our system of healthcare exists because it exists
on paper. Technically we have a wonderfully intricate network of hospitals,
health centres and sub-centres that cater to even the humblest of our
citizens. But the truth is even the poorest villager searches for a private
doctor when he is in need. And our humblest of socialist politicians rushes
off to some foreign hospital when he needs medical attention. Vishwanath
Pratap Singh, that messiah of the dispossessed, has even gone on record
to say that he needs to go abroad because Indian water is not clean enough
for his weekly dialysis.
He is right
but what did he do about this when he was finance minister? Is he the
only Indian who needs clean water? No, and something has gone very wrong
with our country if a former prime minister can even dare make a statement
like this, but what do we do about it? Nothing.
We continue
to allow our finance ministers to get away with not doing their job. Like
kings of yore they distribute charity in the form of poverty-alleviation
schemes in the name of some prime minister or the other without telling
us why they cannot give us what we really need: schools, hospitals, sanitation,
housing, roads and jobs. Well, enough is enough, let us demand a real
budget for a change.
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METRO TODAY
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