The Hindu : The political economy of hunger

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 26, 2003

Opinion

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The political economy of hunger

By Sudhanshu Ranade

There will be a lot of flag-waving today. Most of it will be under official auspices because most of us have yet to discover that there is really nothing official about it. This is sad because it allows us to shirk our responsibility for nation-building, allows us the luxury of simply wallowing in distressed statements about how the Government has failed to perform this duty, neglected that one and made a mess of things in general. Allows us to feel good about ourselves simply by passionate posturing about how nobody (else) really cares — wiping away a tear from time to time for added effect — while bemoaning the fact that people should have to go hungry even as millions of tonnes of food are allowed to simply sit in our godowns, rotting away.

Those who are old enough will have heard this tune before in the days of garibi hatao, though the songs then sung and the tears then shed were about money being allowed to sit idle in banks at a time when most people had to go about without a penny in their pockets. That problem, however, we fixed good and proper. Today, it is the banks that go around without a penny in their pocket.

Perhaps it is time to open the windows, let some fresh air in. First of all, despite popular opinion to the contrary, the fact is that we have all along been spending too much money trying to tackle `poverty', not too little. The problem is not that nothing was done but rather that so little came of it. It is all very well for Amartya Sen to go around saying we must spend more on education, much more. But it isn't really going to help very much in a leaky bucket situation.

It is not corruption-related leaks that I am referring to. Corruption certainly does exist, but is chickenfeed compared to what we lose on account of `inefficiency' — a word I prefer to use within brackets because most of this inefficiency is deliberate. It is the direct result of trying to do too many things, too fast, too `visibly'. We spread our resources too thin, overstretch them too much — posing for the cameras all the while. The reason is that politicians most certainly care. Having heard of Adam Smith's dictum that it is not because of the benevolence of the voter that we get his vote, they care for everyone, they care for everything. It is this that leads them, poor fellows — bless their souls — to gum things up nice and proper (no matter how much money we spend) by deliberately over-reaching themselves, over the heads of others, so to speak.

Fortunately, they are not always able to act on this instinct as vigorously, as forcefully, as `resourcefully' as Ram Vilas Paswan before he left the Vajpayee Government or Indira Gandhi in the days of garibi hatao.

The simple truth is that even if you can do anything, you cannot do everything. You must choose, you must prioritise, you must proceed cautiously. But no politician wants to do this; he simply cannot afford to do so. Similarly, there is no reason for warm-blooded activists (or cold-blooded journalists) to limit the things that they are `concerned' about. They too care. Since many of them manage to make a lucrative career out of it, it is possible that they too have a nodding acquaintance with Adam Smith.

Distinguished economists too can be found jostling in this motley crowd, which is perhaps only to be expected, given their privileged relationship with Smith. But being scientists, they find it hard to reconcile themselves to the idea of doing away with prioritisation altogether. This does not stop them from bringing yet another urgent problem to our attention every second day. But to compensate for this, they simultaneously emphasise the need for selectivity.

But who is to do the selecting? Politicians are an unlikely choice, bureaucrats they do not trust and they themselves have other fish to fry. So some of them have come up with the ingenious concept of self-selecting programmes, in which beneficiaries select themselves. How? By building generous helpings of pain and/or humiliation into relief programmes. Only people who are really very badly off will agree to slogging their guts out all day or submit to the shame of public feeding in order to `entitle' themselves to a pittance, that too of the here today-gone tomorrow sort.

It is on this logic that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, devised her recent noon-meal scheme for farmers, reluctant to allow hucksters to take advantage of the severity of the drought, which, for reasons of her own, she earlier did all she could to exaggerate. I do understand her problem and sympathise with her predicament. But surely we can do better, if we put our minds to it, if we cease to be distracted or overawed by every two-bit `expert' who comes along.

Referring to the power of ideas, Keynes once spoke of how many of the bees in our bonnet can be traced to the work of this or that (perhaps long dead) ideologue, who we may never even have heard of. Maybe so. But I personally am more worried about those that are still alive. So was Keynes. His General Theory was addressed specifically to `professional scholars', those supposed repositories of wisdom, who sat there in the early 1930s — with mass unemployment all around them — insisting that, theoretically, such a state of affairs could not possibly exist.

In short, despite the hard words heaped on those who don't `care', those who just stand there doing nothing are probably of more use to us than those who `protest too much', those who turn on you in fury saying `don't just sit there, do something', those who believe that `the point is not to understand the world; the point is to change it'. As if any good could ever come out of doing `something, anything'.

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