EDITORIAL : THE INDIAN EXPRESS, INDIA

 

 

Trunk calls

If there is one place where Kamal Ataturk turns right to Kautilya, and Krishna Menon and Kamraj still find a meeting point, and Firoz Shah runs into Ashoka, it is Delhi. Its streets, named after leaders of all kinds of lost kingdoms and modern politicians, Latin American revolutionaries, Russian novelists and sundry local heroes, are like an entertaining jigsaw puzzle where history and geography collapse in the most bizarre fashion. And now, after naming every pathway, stretch and thoroughfare, Delhi has exhausted almost all its streets. Yet, names are pouring in from various parts of the state and even across the country at the State Naming Authority, the nodal agency for this evidently popular nomenclature. But naming must go on, apparently, and the state government has turned to the Delhi Development Authority to allow it to name the trees in the Millennium Park after some very important people.

 

Rights & roadblocks

Indian government uses public funds to alleviate, prevent and end poverty; but, unarguably, does so inefficiently. A new report from the World Bank for the Planning Commission on India’s “social protection” programmes outlines the scope of the failure and provides a few answers. Those programmes can be divided into three kinds, the report argues: those that prevent a slide into poverty, like social security and insurance schemes; those few that promote a rise out of poverty, like mid-day meals and conditional transfers like Nitish Kumar’s bicycle giveaways; and those that protect those who are nevertheless poor from the worst effects of poverty.

It is the last section which eats up most of India’s spending on the social sector, and is also the most inefficient, driven by the catastrophic, chronic failure of the public distribution system for food. Reform of the PDS is inevitable; but the report lists possible approaches. One is “incremental”, in which we tinker with those parts of the PDS that work least while retaining the overall model. Radical, fundamental reform would require a cash-transfer option when the state fails to provide grain. In between, there is an “intermediate” approach in which some deep-seated innovations are introduced to the existing system, such as smart cards. The report surveys these options conscientiously, but it winds up, of course, acknowledging that fundamental reform is the only sensible option for a programme that constitutes a large chunk of social-sector spending but benefits barely 40 per cent of those it is supposed to. Ruling that out for nothing but an idealistic rights-based attempt is “likely to leave many poor households with a stronger legal right but better a real-world situation”.