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Hardly stirring

IN A BITS-AND-PIECES speech from the Red Fort on Independence Day, the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, stuck to a drilled diet of promises that would have enthused none. In spanning events from the Agra initiative to economic reforms, he made su ch lofty claims as India being one of the ten fastest growing economies apart from being a top ranker in information technology and missile technology.

At one place Mr Vajpayee credits the New Economic Policy with bringing down the number of those below the poverty line from 36 per cent to 26 per cent and at another doubts if any benefits are seeping to the poor in the rural areas. ``Inequalities have i ncreased,'' he claims and forgets that the malady has been in the system all the 40-odd years of economic planning and not by a decade of NEP. The NEP, as initiated in the 1990s, is meant to reduce government presence in the economy leaving the job to pr ivate initiative and has never made claims to being a headache pill.

One is not sure if Mr Vajpayee believes in reforms going by the sheaf of economic measures he outlined, such as the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana costing Rs 10,000 crore, a National Nutrition Mission and the Ambedkar-Valmiki Malin Basti Awas Yojana. Th e severely strained union finances do not permit of the Prime Minister taking financial luxuries but the promise having been made, the Finance Minister will now have to come up with funds. There are a large number of such plans on the books which could w ell have been left to the NGOs working for years with the poor. Agreeing that projects have not become realities, the Prime Minister has come up with the bizarre idea of a Rapid Action Force to ``monitor implementation of various poverty-alleviation and employment generation programmes.'' But he provided no details.

For Mr Vajpayee the slowdown, which has been haunting the economy for the last four years, is a ``temporary phenomenon'' and talks of investments in infrastructure when most bankers can only speak of fund sanctions and not disbursements, with some financ ial entities not keen on funding power projects. One appreciates the Prime Minister being cut up over the poor flow of funds to the unorganised sector as bankers have to develop alternatives to collateral funding as the deprived have nothing but themselv es to offer. Yet, expert committees place rural NPAs at around 45 per cent with corporate NPAs being placed at 50 per cent, as all along the government has encouraged defaults by offering immunity to powerful borrowers. A reference has been made to scams afflicting the system with the Prime Minister saying that ``the success of liberalisation requires the steady development of a corporate ethic,'' when every important financial entity, including various regulators, are owned by the government in part or full. The funny thing about reforms is either one goes the full distance or does not take the journey as there are no resting places en route. At the Red Fort yesterday, the Prime Minister did not provide any clue to his Government's itinerary.