The Hindu : MSPB moots village sabhas' empowerment

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 06, 2002

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MSPB moots village sabhas' empowerment

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI MARCH 5. The Maharashtra State Planning Board has recommended empowerment of village sabhas by a law. In its approach paper to the 10th Plan (2002-2007), the Board, which is headed by Ratnakar Mahajan and approved by a Cabinet sub-committee, has recommended authority to gram sabhas to prioritise projects for their own villages and monitor their implementation. It stressed the need for the Government to prioritise its areas of concern.

As for public borrowings, the Board wanted such tendency discouraged. "There are limits to such borrowings which have ballooned in the past few years.''

Significantly, these suggestions have been made to a Government that did not take up the mid-term appraisal of the 9th Five-Year Plan.

According to Dr. Mahajan, his team's effort had been to provide a direction to policy-making and not providing escort service to the Government. Details have to be worked out by implementers of policy guidelines given by the Board, he said.

The approach document, is in a way, a censure of the present practices, especially those relating to fiscal management and the inability or even unwillingness to work out priorities to match the clothe to the coat.

Everything the Board now wants done requires the Government to unlearn the established ways that hinge on populism sans fiscal discipline.

It may be recalled that Maharashtra has edged towards a debt trap and had been finding it difficult to finance even normal development and is leaning heavily on raising public debt. The approach paper, released to the media on Monday, has listed dependence on debt, increasing burden of servicing them, inefficient energy sector, subsidy-laden monopoly, cotton procurement scheme in its current shape, large outgo on salaries, incomplete irrigation and drinking water schemes as a strain on the present system of fiscal management.

Irrigation projects are affected by lack of funds and it would be appropriate, according to the Board, if those with half the work done are completed first so that there are returns from the investments instead of spreading the resources thin. It would not be inadvisable to push down in priority those that have had only up to 15 per cent of the work done.

Instead of promoting self-employment, the Board has suggested that five per cent of the funds raised currently by taxes and levies to finance employee guarantee scheme (EGS) be set aside as a corpus to encourage entrepreneurship.

Given that nearly 85 per cent of farmers depend on dryland farming, the Government should provide sharper focus on ensuring its viability.

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