Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s remarks on the revised 12th Five-Year Plan proposals at the full Planning Commission meeting last weekend — where he stressed the need to focus on implementation and governance, while referring to his government’s `1,87,000-crore flagship programmes, to achieve its “inclusive growth” objective — are heartening.
If these two elements actually become the watchword, the country can easily achieve growth of nine per cent, or even higher. Dr Singh would have liked the commission to aim for a 9.5 per cent growth rate, but the commission preferred to peg growth at nine per cent. Perhaps that august body should have stuck to the 9.5 per cent target because, as the saying goes, if you aim for the moon, you will at least reach the stars! Neither the Planning Commission nor the government has ever really lacked either budgetary provisions or paucity of schemes that would put more purchasing power in the hands of those below the poverty line, or just on the borderline. It was always in the implementation and governance parameters that things went awry. To recall the words of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, barely 10 paise in every rupee actually reached the people for whom these programmes were intended.
The flagship National Employment Rural Guarantee Scheme is a spectacular illustration of how a great scheme was significantly hijacked by corrupt officials and politicians and lax state governments. Yet hardly anyone has been jailed for this despite the various reports on the corruption in this scheme that have been published. That’s why it is really welcome that the Planning Commission has for the first time a whole chapter on governance and corruption. Perhaps the major missing point in this whole exercise was accountability. Every ministry should be made accountable for the programmes that come under its purview. The lack of accountability, corruption and non-governance, apart from their moral and ethical reflections, hold up development of the economy, which impedes India’s progress. The Transparency International chairperson told an Indian business TV channel a while ago that the economic cost of corruption in India was 16.6 per cent of its GDP. Think of it: if the government can cash in on the present environment, when the entire country is galvanised to battle corruption, it can achieve double-digit growth quite easily. One only hopes that the issues raised here are taken into account in the final draft, and that targets in all sectors are revised upwards. If only the Planning Commission were to have more confidence in the country’s strengths!