A FIVE TRILLION DOLLAR ECONOMY IS NO PANACEA FOR OUR ILLS.

                         

   I drove back from my cottage in Mashobra( Shimla) to Delhi last week. It took me eleven hours- four and a half hours to Timber Trail and six and a half from there to our over rated capital city. In 1980 ( which was 40 years ago in case you too, like me, are numerically challenged) I used to make the journey in eight hours in my beat-up, second hand Fiat which used to heat up every hundred kilometers, requiring its radiator to be topped up regularly like some of my friends in the Gymkhana bar. AND I didn't have to shell out Rs. 350/ in toll fees. In these intervening years, thousands of crores have been spent on a new expressway, on four laning the mountain stretch, on fly overs and under passes. Thousands of acres of fertile land have been acquired, mountain sides excavated, millions of tonnes of soil and debris thrown into stream beds, choking them, thousands displaced from their occupations and businesses, hundreds of lives lost in accidents on these super highways. To what end if it takes me 40% more time to cover the same distance as compared to forty years ago? Its the same, if not worse, in the cities- traffic in Mumbai and Kolkatta moves at the same space as the horse drawn carriages a hundred years ago. In the early seventies I could drive from the north campus of DU ( there was no south campus then) on my Jawa mobike to my uncles's place in Greater Kailash in 25 minutes; today it takes at least an hour. We are nonetheless informed by economists and politicians of all ilks that this is progress.

   It's the same in all other areas of human/ economic activity. Our GDP has grown a zillion times since Independence, but we have more people below the poverty line than we had then, in absolute numbers ( forget the percentage argument, that is simply something economists use to cover the ugly truth). Life expectancy may have reached 70 years but deaths from diabetes, cancer, heart attacks have increased exponentially. Lakhs of crores of rupees have been invested in medical colleges and health care institutions but  more people are dying of diseases ( remember the recent Gorakhpur and Muzzafarpur encephalitis deaths of children?) than ever before. Aldous Huxley put his finger on it many years ago when he presciently observed: 'Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human life left."

  Food production has gone up a hundred times and yet 38% of children below the age of five are stunted/ wasted from malnutrition. GDP has been growing at a remarkable 7%-8% for the last 15 years but unemployment is at a 45 year high. 13000 farmers commit suicide every year even though they are given free power and water, subsidies worth Rs. 75000 crores every year, and periodic loan waivers. Inflation is at an all time low and yet consumption, industrial production and household savings are showing a persistent decline. The country has 900 large dams/ reservoirs but 60%of agriculture is still dependent on the monsoons. We have some of the most draconian laws in the world and yet rapes, lynchings, mob violence, assault on children continue to rise: according to WHO India has the highest number of child abuse cases in the world. We have pledged to achieve a green cover of 30% of geographical area by 2030, to bring an additional one million hectares under trees, but we continue deforestation on a colossal scale- 1.6 million hectares denuded in the last ten years, 16 million trees felled. Our culture worships women but we kill millions of infant girls every year- the national sex ratio is 896 girls for every 1000 boys: in the " progressive" state of Haryana the figure is 833. We proudly boast of India's trump card- the "demographic dividend"- but our education system is in shambles: students in class V cannot read class II texts and 67% of engineers are unemployable, according to a recent industry report. This is not a dividend, it is a primed grenade waiting to explode.

   These are only some of the paradoxes and failures of our pure GDP focused growth. There is something fundamentally wrong with the political/ economic path we have been following all these years. In following the same shibboleths of western economies we have dug ourselves into a hole and devastated our natural environment, all to no effect. Our national character, with the kind of role models we have in politics, industry, media and various professions, is unrecognizable from what it was when we proudly acquired independence in a different era. We have become a deeply divided, inequitable, heartless and lawless society and it shows in our ranking in the World Happiness Index- at 140 out of 155 countries. And the brutal, capital centric and materialistic policies of the present government are only making things worse. We are very much in danger of progressing from Lance Pritchett's description of us as a " flailing state" to a "failed state" in terms of values, principles and character.

   We need to move away from our unhealthy GDP obsession: it has to be balanced with wider considerations: of humaneness, equity, compassion, concern for the environment, responsiveness. Instead of being just a five trillion dollar economy, how about striving to become a Zero Infant Mortality Economy, or an Equal Sex-Ratio Society, or a Universal Health Care Economy, or a Zero Net Carbon Emission Economy or a Nobody Goes to Bed Hungry Economy? How about aspiring to go up on the Happiness or Environment Performance Index with the same zeal we show for the Ease of Doing Business Index?

   If the distortions and perversions that have us in a stranglehold are not corrected-soon- it will not matter if we become a 5 trillion dollar economy or not for, as Milton Friedman famously remarked:  "So what if it meets all criteria of economic success except one: you cannot live there!"

    

TIPPLERS DESERVE A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

   The Holy Cow is now an accepted reality in India- it is the de facto national animal as we speak, and will no doubt also become so de jure shortly, perhaps even acquire constitutional status once the cattle auctions for the Rajya Sabha are over. State governments have now started providing specific budgetary provisions for its welfare- UP has provided Rs. 600 crore for construction and maintenance of cattle shelters ( more than for school buildings) and  Himachal too has allocated a separate budget for it.. Both states have imposed a cess on liquor to garner funds for this noble purpose, though most reports would appear to indicate that most of this lucre is going to the gau rakshaks rather than the gaus- the deaths of hundreds of cows in cattle shelters in UP over the last week would appear to bear this out. But this milking of the milch cow is par for the course in today's politics and is not the subject of this piece; I am on a far more important point.

   In my blog last week [ https://avayshukla.blogspot.com/2019/07/no-more-animal-spirits-please.html ] I had referred to the cess imposed on all liquor sold in the state for the welfare of cows as the Animal Farm school of economics. A good friend of mine ( whose name I cannot reveal since he is still yoked to the sarkari bullock- cart) has made a very pertinent observation on this: why is it that the burden of bovine welfare is thrust only upon the alcoholics? Should non-drinkers not share this onerous burden too?- after all, the cow is their "mata" too. My friend goes even further- he suggests that this alcohol cess discriminates against drinkers, violates Article 14 of the Constitution, and, if challenged, is liable to be struck down by any judge, sober or drunk. He would like some upright member of the Bar ( the High Court bar, not the Gymkhana Club bar) to mount a constitutional challenge to this cess before other states also get into the spirit of this taxation.

  Come to think of it, my friend is right. Any tax should be equitable and should not be discriminatory. The onus of looking after the national animal should be the responsibility of all citizens and not only of Jake the Peg. In fact, a greater responsibility devolves upon milk drinkers and consumers of Baba Ramdev's ghee, for are they not the ultimate beneficiaries of this transmutation of alcohol into milk? I'm beginning to suspect that the gau rakshaks are not as stupid as they look, that their grasp of economics is perhaps just as good as their grasp of lathis, for this cess is a win-win for them: they have to pay nothing for the up-keep of the cows, they receive govt. funds for their gaushalas, and they get to drink the milk free! And they didn't even have to go to Harvard to figure this out- all it needed was some hard work bashing up a few cattle traders. No wonder the Prime Minister prefers hard work over Harvard - as they say in Yogi's UP these days: " Jiski lathi uski BA!" As for me, I'd gladly give up my daily peg for such a deal.

   No, sir, the alcoholics deserve a level playing field. Non-drinkers should either pay a cess on the milk they consume, or it should be made mandatory for every teetotaller household to buy at least two units of booze every month; they need not imbibe it, they can always sell it to a buddy ( like me or my anonymous friend) or to parched army guys whose quota has been recently slashed ( an unwise move, according to me, for it's best to keep retired army chaps drunk all the time, otherwise they may sober up and decide that if they can hold on to Siachen they can do the same to Lutyen's Delhi, that if the BJP can come to power on the army's Balakot shoulders then the army can do so on its own !). Of course, the mandatory purchase of alcohol by every household may have an unforeseen result: people may give up the lactose and switch to the golden Hippocrene. But that would not be a bad thing at all: it would mean more shekels for the consolidated fund and we would go up a few notches in the Happiness Index too.

  Patriotism would henceforth be defined, not by how many cattle smugglers you lynch but by how many pegs you tipple. Because it would all be- hic!- for the benefit of the cow. There's a lesson here for Mr. Prohibition Babu, the Chief Minister of Bihar.

NO MORE ANIMAL SPIRITS, PLEASE!

   The joke goes something like this: A physicist, a NASA scientist and a World Bank economist are sitting in a bar discussing their respective contributions to the discovery of the Universe. The NASA guy boasts that they were the ones who  made space travel and discovery of planets possible. The physicist claims that NASA's work would not have been possible if physics had not revealed the science behind the creation of a universe out of the cosmic chaos. The economist remains silent.

" What about you guys," asks the NASA man, " what is the contribution of economics to the universe?"

The World Bank economist smiles: " Who do you think created the chaos?" he asks.

   We in India can vouch for the fact that no truer word was ever said, the confused economic goulash dished out  since 1947 is ample proof of that, and the last five years leave no doubts whatsoever. Our economists, both the home grown variety and the imported IMF/ World Bank types, have tried out every known theory and school of economics on us: classical, neo-classical, Marxian, Market economics, Chartalism, Behavioural economics, New Keynesian, Post Keynesian, even Modinomics ( which is more a political doctrine than an economic one, for it ensures that the BJP keeps winning elections even as the country goes to the dogs). We have been lectured to ad- nauseam by the desi economists of National Advisory Council fame and by the international eminences taking a toilet break in India on their way from Geneva or Davos to Harvard or Berkeley. But nothing seems to have worked: we still have more than 200 million people below the poverty line, 40% of our children are stunted from lack of nutrition, 13000 farmers commit suicide every year, we are amongst the most inequitable countries in the world, endemic unemployment continues to haunt our youth, and now we can no longer even rely on our economic statistics or budget figures! It is, therefore, no surprise that our newly minted Chief Economic Advisor has now offered us the latest nostrum: Animal Spirits. What India needs, he has declared, is an infusion of Animal Spirits into our economy and society!

   This advice from the Animal Farm school of economics may not surprise us, but it is certainly a cause for alarm. For if there is one thing India has a  surplus of these days it is animal spirits. Its earlier version had resulted in Mr. Somnath Bharti's dog being interrogated in a Delhi police station, the Jallikattu bull being elevated to the status of a Holy Cow in Tamil Nadu, and an Interpol Look-Out notice being issued for Mr. Azham Khan's missing buffaloes in UP. In more recent times this unholy ardor has resulted in the mob lynching of dozens of people, the rapes of more than 30000 women every year, the culling of alleged criminals by gung-ho cops in choreographed encounters, the transformation of Parliament into a latter day Colosseum, the conversion of state Assemblies into fish markets where regular auctions are held for newly arrived minnows, and similar activities more suited to a jungle than a civilised society. Any more infusion of animal spirits into our economy will, to carry the analogy further,  result in even more squirreling away of the national wealth in Antigua and the Cayman Islands, and wildebeest type of migrations of our uber rich to greener pastures abroad. No, sir, we don't need more of animal spirits; what we could do with instead is a touch of the human spirit, something which both our economists and politicians have forgotten about.

  Perhaps the Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, Mr. Jai Ram Thakur, has got it right: he has ignored the animal bit and concentrated on the pure spirit part. Spirits- the 80 degree proof type- is the new vehicle for Himachal's development: he has imposed two cesses on all liquor sold in the state- one to fund " gaushalas" or cattle shelters, and the other to fund a new Film Policy. In addition, every vend and bar now has to sell a minimum quantity of liquor or face stiff penalties! This is Himachal's spirited version of Minimum Income Guarantee or Minimum Support Price- the MBC or Minimum Booze Consumption. Liquor is the new milch cow of the state- how's this for combining economics and gau raksha? It may be time to appoint Baba Ramdev as our Chief Economic Advisor.

SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

          SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

   Last year it was a water crisis, this year it is the traffic chaos and accidents. Post the bus accident in Khalini area of Shimla on the 1st of this month which claimed the lives of two young girls and the bus driver, it would be amusing- were it not so tragic- to observe the knee jerk reactions of the citizens of Shimla: Ministers rushing to the hospital, residents vandalising parked cars, the High Court issuing notices on children safety, inquiries being ordered and so on. Deja vu again, for we have seen it all a dozen times before and more than 1300 people continue to die in Himachal every year in road accidents. Everyone blames the state government, and rightly so, for ALL governments have been criminally negligent and culpable in making Shimla the mess it is today.

   But the bitter truth is that the residents and citizens of the city are equally to blame and they cannot adopt a holier than thou posture, or pose as hapless victims of government apathy. Over the years they have been vocal and active participants in the degeneration and uglification of this once lovely city and have stoutly opposed any effort to preserve its natural assets or improve its functioning and infrastructure. They consequently live in a mess of their own making and have lost the right to complain.

  Take, for example, the issue of rampant, illegal constructions, of which a recent survey recorded more than 20000. Instead of pressing the government to demolish them the citizens have repeatedly forced the authorities to regularise them: so far there have been five such regularisation ( retention) schemes; the sixth one, passed by the previous Congress government, has been struck down by the High Court but the present dispensation has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court ( it is telling that the present government is a BJP one- when it comes to rank populism politicians are like peas in a pod!). Such rampant vote pandering only encourages more violations.The National Green Tribunal's orders banning further constructions in the city are openly flouted, the limit of two and a half storeys does not even merit a fig leaf, and people are building what they want, where they want, for the next regularisation policy is only an election away. Hundreds of illegal home stays ( the latest tax evading racket) add to the chaos, congestion and parking woes.

  Shimla is being asphyxiated by the sheer volume of traffic on its roads which can neither be expanded nor widened because of the topography. A population of about two lakhs boasts of 1.25 lakh registered vehicles, a density higher even than that of Delhi. Add to this another 5000 tourist vehicles and 600 buses entering the city every day. Everyone happily goes about buying cars, with no thought given to where they will be parked. Rules require  every building to have parking areas/ floors but these are only shown in the building plans: once approved they are converted to regular floors. Houses are constructed on 60-70 degree gradients, without proper access, and the cars simply left on the roads. The government is of course culpable for even approving such building plans, but surely the citizens too have to bear responsibility here: they cannot break the laws deliberately and then blame the government alone for the inconvenience and accidents. All reports indicate that the Khalini accident happened because the road was reduced to half its width because of illegally parked vehicles. Half- hearted attempts to declare some arterial roads as one way are resisted, everyone wants a permit for their vehicles to ply on restricted roads, attempts to cap the number of taxis or to install meters on them are met with protests, nobody wants to walk, as in the old days.

                                             

                                                  ( SPOT  THE TREE IN  SHIMLA.)

   The slopes and forests are littered with plastic and waste; Shimla's nallahs (watercourses), which once flowed the year round and charged innumerable springs and cascades, are now smothered in garbage. A recent clean-up initiative by the district administration and some  NGOs resulted in about twenty tons of waste being excavated from these watercourses. Not all this garbage can be ascribed to tourists: the residents are equally responsible. All attempts at door-to-door collection or segregation have failed. It is, after all, much easier and less expensive to just chuck the bloody thing down the hillside. The monkey menace in the town is directly attributable to this open dumping of rubbish, but the good burghers will not admit to this; instead they demand that the monkeys be either shot as vermin or exported for medical purposes! Water harvesting has been made mandatory but it is neither adopted by the building owners nor implemented by the government.

   It's the same with Shimla's rapidly disappearing green cover. Blessed with perhaps the world's largest urban forest, the city is losing it all to construction and road building. Its only remaining forests lie in the 17 green belts ( comprising 400 hectares) which were notified in the early 2000's, and where no construction of any kind is permissible- without these forested areas the town would look like the seventh rock from the sun. And yet many citizens continue to resist these restrictions in the green belt, eyeing their commercial potential. They are supported by a vision-less and spineless government which has tried everything to open up the area for construction activity. Fortunately, the High Court and the National Green Tribunal have ruled in favour of keeping these areas closed.

   Finally, it appears that civil society does not exist in Shimla. One cannot, of course, expect any  expression of concern at this deterioration from the bureaucracy, cocooned in their privileges and conduct rules, but one would have expected some push back from its prominent citizens, the many retired officers and veterans, NGOs like INTACH. But sadly, the former are more interested in their bridge at ADC and golf at Annandale and Naldehra, and the latter at being on the right side of the government lest the invitations to govt. functions dry up. Which is a tragedy in itself. Democracies and civil society are sustained by its citizens and not by just the government of the day. If the citizens do not demonstrate civic values and ethics, if they do not observe laws and rules, if they do not hold a government to account, then they have only themselves to blame when things begin to go wrong. As you sow so shall you reap. A Biblical adage the citizens of Shimla would do well to remember before it is too late.

THE PANGS OF FATEHPUR.

   Ensconced in my tiny village near Mashobra in the Shimla hills, these days I feel like Raja Hari Singh Katoch of Kangra when he was besieged in the Kangra fort by Jahangir in 1620.  Worse, actually, because the stalwart Raja had to put up with the inconvenience for only fourteen months whereas I have had to endure it every year for the last 14 years. And it's not the Mughal army I have to contend with but the Khan Market and Lutyen's gangs of Delhi.

   Come April every year and members of these gangs, in their tens of thousands, clamber up the mountain landscape and take over our roads, markets, forests and every bed in every homestead. Like locusts they devour everything and leave behind in their wake tonnes of plastic, bottles, empty packets of chips, cigarettes and condoms. Like Jahangir, they lay claim to our lawns, apple trees and parking places; the women have been spared so far, but that's only because we hide them with the cattle. We huddle in our houses, waiting for the pestilence- called tourists in modern parlance- to pass.

   I have given the origins of this annual invasion a lot of thought, and have come to the conclusion that it occurs primarily because we no longer visit our grandparents, and instead prefer to go on vacation to the hills! Think about it. The internet, competitive consumerism and the breakdown of familial relationships drive us to constantly seek " new experiences" and new vistas. Even if it means being stuck for eight hours on the Rohtang pass, being ripped off by taxi drivers in Dharamshala or abused by the pony wallahs in Kufri. It was different when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties.

  My grandfather, a patriarch no one messed with, stayed in a village of Fatehpur district in UP called Husainganj ( unless the good Yogi has now changed its name). He had built himself a huge haveli there and inscribed one golden rule in its stones: all his children and 17 grandkids had to visit him every summer: he even paid for the rail tickets. So I never even saw a mountain( or sea, or desert) till I was 25: every summer vacation my Dad would pack the family into a second class coach of the Kalka mail at Calcutta ( or Hazaribagh or Asansol or wherever he happened to be posted at the time) for the 24 hour journey to Fatehpur- annual migrations one looks back on with fond nostalgia mixed with a regret that my own sons ( part of the KM gang) have never seen this facet of the Old India. For today train travel is all about getting to the destination as quickly as possible, it's never about the pleasures of the journey itself. I recently travelled by Shatabdi to Kanpur and found that of the 62 passengers, 60 of them had buried their persona and noses into their smart phones. The 61st was a seven eight year old kid ( who should have been smothered at birth) who was sliding the door open and shut, letting in the flies and letting out the cold air. I was the 62nd, observing it all and weeping like Alexander the Great for I had now seen it all.

   For us the journey was itself a delight. There were no AC coaches or electric traction back then. We would stick our heads out of the open windows, breathing in the soot and smoke from the Bullet engines, jump out at every station to buy comics from the AH Wheeler stalls ( where have they all disappeared?), grab the local station food from the vendors- "jhalmoori" at Asansol, aloo tikkis at Dhanbad, samosas at Mughalsarai, puri-aloo at Benaras, the delicious pedas at Allahabad. All extremely unhygienic, swarming with e-colis no doubt, but Michelin star stuff which built up the immunity which in later years has enabled us to tackle the tasteless swill IRCTC serves on trains nowadays. But the "piece de resistance" for which we all used to wait, came at Fatehpur, which arrived at the opportune time for breakfast. Its generally deserted restaurant served the best buttered toast and omelette on the Grand Trunk line, on round tables covered with spotless linen and cutlery.  (The only railway restaurant that comes even close to its ambience and service is the Barog station on the Kalka- Shimla line). We left the restaurant only when they ran out of eggs, for the next two weeks in Husainganj was to be a vegetarian existence, without even onions and garlic.

   There was only a dirt track between Fatehpur and Husainganj, a distance of about ten kms; there were no buses, only the occasional horse carriage on a sharing basis. But my grandfather had the biggest haveli in the village and there was no way his grand brats would travel in a "tonga", for us he sent his personal bullock cart, drawn by two of his finest oxen: a magnificent, snow white pair standing almost five feet high at the shoulders, bedecked with colourful ribbons and tinkling bells, their regal horns sheathed in copper. The bullock cart itself was a caparisoned wonder, with sun shades, carpeted with Mirzapuri rugs and stocked with sugarcane stalks, peanuts and nimboo-pani.  We flew down the dirt track like Ben-Hur in the last lap of his famous race , giving the term " cattle class" an entirely new meaning. It set the tone for the next month, a controlled chaos of joint family living, over which my grandfather proudly presided: a patriarch who held his large family together with stern dictats, superb logistic skills and well placed inducements.

   He is gone now, of course, and so is the world we grew up in: the haveli is in ruins, the bullock cart is now a symbol of penury, not of status, the omelette is now a leathery strip served with sarkari reluctance, the station food vendors replaced by catering franchisees hawking packaged rubbish, most trains do not even stop at Fatehpur. Why should they? Nobody goes there for everyone is now headed for the mountains, the seaside resorts or the casinos of Goa. In this world of OYO rooms, Make My Trip.com, Airbnb and cashbacks, visiting grandfathers is such a waste of time. But I do wish the millennial generation would start visiting the old critters again: it would make them happy, it would lift my siege and might even save the mountains from further depredation. I speak, of course, as a grandfather-in-waiting.

MUZAFFARPUR DEATHS: HOW TO OUTSOURCE ONE'S CONSCIENCE.

   India is replete with deja vu moments, and the more things change the more they remain the same. In 2017 alone 175 children had died of encephalitis in Gorakhpur; today, as we applaud India's win over Pakistan at the World Cup, 156 have already died in Muzaffarpur of the same disease. The only thing that has changed in between is the grand introduction of the Ayushman Bharat or the PMJAY programme which had assured health care to 500 million of the country's poorest. The epidemic in Muzaffarpur was its first major test, and it has failed miserably.

  I rarely watch the trash that is churned out on our television channels every evening, but a programme on the Muzaffarpur tragedy by Faye D'Souza on MIRROR NOW on the 18th evening made the maggots crawl on my decaying conscience like nothing before. It painted a horrifying picture of a district hospital with doctor-less wards, no medicines, no electricity, an all pervasive blanket of filth, rotting food for patients and dying children packed two and three on beds. All certified to be kosher by the visiting Union Health Minister, a Chief Minister and a state Health Minister who attributed the deaths to consumption of " lychees" on an empty stomach and the administration's preoccupation with the elections! As one of the panelists on the show ( a doctor himself) said: not even a healthy man would survive in these wards after three days.

   What happened to Ayushman Bharat, that much vaunted panacea for universal health? Why could it not save these children? The answer is simple: because it is nothing but a quick fix, an M-seal that simply papers over the cracks without actually repairing it. It is not that PMJAY is defective per se, the problem is that it does not address the root cause of the problem, which Muzzafarpur ( like Gorakhpur earlier) has brought to the fore: an abysmal lack of both public and private health infrastructure in the rural areas. It is an excuse for the government abdicating its primary responsibility, pandering to its Guinness addiction: the largest political party in the world, the tallest statue in the world, the biggest income distribution scheme in the world, the biggest health care programme on the planet, and so on. These impressive statistics merely hide an ugly truth- the rural poor have no access to health care because it just doesn't exist on the ground, and PMJAY exists only on paper for them.

   India spends less than 2% of GDP on health, as against a global average of 6.5%; the Union budget provides Rs. 32000 crore for the sector, a mere Rs. 300 per head! WHO norms provide for a bed intensity of 3.5 per thousand population, whereas our figure is 1.3, and the shocking reality is that 70% of these beds are in the top 20 cities of the country. There exists a mind boggling shortage of doctors and nurses- a deficit of 1.5 million doctors and 2.4 million nurses- and we churn out only 50000 doctors every year from our medical colleges. It has been estimated that to cover these deficiencies an additional investment of Rs. 1.65 trillion is needed, 2% of our GDP.

   It is this yawning chasm in health infrastructure that the govt. needs to address; its failure to do so means that Ayushman Bharat can at best benefit only the urban populations, leaving 60% of India to contend with more Muzaffarpurs in the future. The essence of PMJAY is enabling private sector hospitals to take up the slack in availability of govt. infrastucture, but this business model fails when there exists no private health sector, as in our rural areas, because there is no money to be made there. Where then does the critical patient go? Back to the non-functional PHCs and corruption ridden govt. hospitals which are charnel houses in any case, as Faye D'Souza's programme so shockingly revealed.

   The govt. continues to live the illusion that big ticket announcements and projects will solve the problem: as evidence we had the Union Health Minister proudly proclaiming this week that a Super Speciality hospital has been sanctioned for Muzaffarpur. It will not help, because in the absence of primary health care the patients would have died before reaching the mythical super hospital. Studies have repeatedly shown that 80% of ailments can be managed at the PHC level if only governments were serious about investing in these institutions. Instead, as the MIRROR TODAY report has revealed, 90% of Muzaffarpur's PHCs are non-functional. Ditto for most other states. If they had been functioning the majority of these dead children would have survived.

   It is therefore no surprise that Ayushman Bharat could not save them, just as that other out-sourced gift to the private sector, the PM's Kisan Bima Yojana, has done little for the farmers, who therefore continue to kill themselves by the bushel. According to RTI  information obtained by THE WIRE, just for Kharif 2018 insurance companies collected a premium of Rs. 20,747 crores; they have so far paid out only Rs. 7697 crore as claims, even though additional claims of Rs.5171 crores are pending with them. At best, therefore ( for the insurers) they will pocket Rs. 13050 crores, at worst Rs. 7880 crores. It doesn't require a Niti Aayog to figure who are the real beneficiaries of this programme- last I heard, no insurance CEO had committed suicide. Outsourced insurance schemes like the Kisan Bima Yojana or Ayushman Bharat can at best be a supplement to the government's efforts, they cannot be a substitute for creation of essential infrastructure and policies such as irrigation, MSPs, dismantelling of unnecessary regulatory mechanisms, provision of village level health facilities and medical staff. 

   It's the same with all outsourcing by the government of its basic functions- education, public security, public health, transport, and in the days to come, the civil services too. We expect a government to deliver basic public goods, rather than farm it out to blood suckers because it cannot resolve its inefficiencies.This ever expanding outsourcing  policy is worse than a placebo- at least a placebo causes no harm but here people are becoming paupers, killing themselves or dying unsung three to a bed in some rat infested hospital because the govt. aspires to another Guinness record and a hero's reception at that temple of doom, Davos.

   One question remains, however: where does one outsource one's conscience?

DIRTY LINEN AND CLEAN CHITS.

   I wonder, dear reader, if you too have the same feeling that I'm beginning to entertain of late , viz, that our government has become a gigantic washing machine in which you feed the dirty linen at one end and clean chits emerge at the other? The trial run of this ingenious contraption began with the Bofors case in which, though the resultant chits were clean enough, they still left an ambiguous smell which persists to this day. But over the years this washing machine has been improved upon and today the clean chits come out smelling of roses, the dirt flushed into the holy Ganga and recycled under the Swachh Bharat programme.

   Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav have been given a clean chit in the disproportionate assets case. Mr. Vanzara and his cohorts have been dry cleaned in the Ishrat Jahan and assorted encounter cases in Gujarat. The Quick Wash mode of the washing cycle has removed all the stains from Mr. Ranjan Gogoi's clothes. It's taking a little longer for Mr. Chidambram and his son who are in the fourth or fifth washing cycle but I have no doubt they too will eventually emerge lily white. Mr. Modi and Shah too have passed the laundromat test with saffron colours. Mr. Yogi Adithyanath did not even have to go the dry cleaner's- he installed his own machine in his house and gave himself a clean chit in the various charges pending against him! Other sectors of the economy may be in dire straits but the Clean Chit business is thriving, and this gives economists in the PM's Economic Advisory Council a lot of hope that even our GDP figures can be similarly white washed.

  Actually, I am not surprised, for chits are the very essence of government- it would be well nigh impossible to run a government without these ubiquitous chits. They come in all shapes, sizes, colours, with and without signatures. The stupid bureaucrats shred them, the smart ones like Mr. Sanjay Baru preserve them and then make millions by converting them into kiss-and-tell books. In the early 80's and 90's chits ( called DO's) enabled the favoured few to get allotments of coal, steel and cement, all of which then commanded stupendous premiums. Chits from a gnome in the CPV section of MEA enable some to obtain precious visas for countries with tough entry rules. They get you appointments in government, admissions in schools, tickets on trains, free booze during election times. They can also bail a Minister out of a mess, as this anecdote illustrates.

  During a session of the Vidhan Sabha of a state, in response to a question, the Home Minister was reading out the crime statistics of the state. After giving the figures for murder, rape, dacoity, assaults and other such benign social interactions, he read out the figures for " Buggery." I do not now recall what the exact figure was, but it was so high that it caused much outrage ( mixed with some revelry) in the House. A thoroughly alarmed and flummoxed Home Secretary in the Officers' gallery quickly scribbled something on a chit and sent it to his Minister. The worthy glanced at it ,rose from his seat with a sheepish grin and announced that he had misread the reply and that the figures quoted by him related to " Burglary" and not Buggery! A timely chit had saved the day, and the morals of the state!

   But chits can also get one into trouble, as a colleague ( now retired, with his pension intact) discovered, much to his discomfiture some years ago. YK was posted in the Himachal secretariat as Joint Secretary( Forests) and part of his onerous duties involved giving approvals for resin tapping, a highly profitable business. One day a resin contractor's file was put up to him for sanction. YK opened the file and found, clipped to the note sheet, a chit with the contractor's name and two thousand rupee notes pinned to it, giving the words "note sheet" an entirely new meaning. Now, YK was known to have the explosive and unpredictable temperament of a grizzly bear, and on that day he did not disappoint. He stood up on his hind legs, let out a roar that would have done a Yellowstone grizzly proud, caught hold of the contractor lurking outside his door and summoned the police. We advised him to drop the matter, return the moolah and blacklist the contractor rather than spend the rest of his life giving evidence in  courts. YK, however, chose to follow the straight and narrow path of the righteous. And met the same fate that generally befalls all righteous suckers. In the police station the contractor claimed that he had actually attached  FOUR thousand rupee notes, not two, to his chit ! He solemnly wanted to know, therefore, what had happened to the two missing notes? So did the police. The boot was now on the other paw, as it were. It took YK a fair amount of time to convince the police that he was as pure as the driven snow; the contractor was convicted, but not before the magistrate had cast an appraising look or two at YK which clearly hinted that he would have liked to have packed off two for the price of one. YK now can't bear the sight of a thousand rupee note and was overjoyed when Mr. Modi demonetised the ruddy things. He discovered the hard way that in the bureaucracy it's not enough to have a clean conscience, one must also possess a clean chit.

  A disclaimer, however, is very much in order: I too have received a clean chit or two during my not so illustrious career. In the early 2000s I was entrusted by a BJP government to inquire into a flood of allegedly dubious appointments made by the previous ( Congress) government on the basis of chits, not merit. My report vindicated these charges, and, quite naturally, was termed as politically biased and motivated. The judiciary directed the government to take action on the findings. The ADG   (Police) in his report absolved me of any political bias but added that " Mr. Shukla has a pronounced suicidal instinct", or words to that effect! With which I beg to disagree, for, as Groucho Marx famously told an inquisitive female reporter : " Die, my dear? Why, that's the last thing I shall do!"