A dog's breakfast

The draft Common Minimum Programme (CMP) that has been circulated by the Congress to its allies in the United Progressive Alliance is, like all such documents, a dog’s breakfast.

There are leftovers from previous such documents, the dressing up of old promises, and some tasty new morsels. One fresh thought is to install desalination plants along the Coromandel coast to end the acute drinking water shortage in cities along the coast.

Setting up an administrative reforms commission to help revamp the public administration system by using e-governance, similarly, is an idea whose time (as the new Prime Minister likes to say) has come.

It is also a good idea to focus on completing existing irrigation projects in three years — though many will doubt whether this can be delivered. Among the non-economic issues, the promise to repeal Pota is welcome; the experience with all such laws (Misa, Tada, etc) has been negative, in that they get used against political opponents and sundry innocents, while the underlying problem of terrorism remains.

Employment is a thrust area, and it is obvious that some kind of unemployment insurance is on the cards — perhaps one that is paid for at least partly by employers. However, unemployment insurance should be seen as part of a wider social security net, and the employment issue addressed separately.

The surest way to create jobs on a sustainable basis is the systemic one: focus on faster growth with incentives for job creation, and look for ways of getting the manufacturing sector to become vibrant enough to absorb some of the surplus hands now sub-optimally employed in agriculture. This will mean changing today’s labour laws, but the CMP is silent on this — for understandable reasons.

One problem with the CMP is that objectives are not matched with strategy. The proposed education cess, for instance, will not be enough to raise government education spending to the required level, since the step-up required in education spending is about 2.5 per cent of the GDP.

And what the CMP doesn’t dwell on is something equally important: the need to tackle the quality and cost-effectiveness of government education. Similarly, unless there is a centrally-run identification scheme, like the voter I-card, targeting of food subsidies will remain a problem. But the CMP does well to emphasise that the public distribution system needs to be improved in scarcity and poverty-ridden areas.

Since the government is keen to move on poverty-reduction and employment-creation programmes, the government would do well to revive Rajiv Gandhi’s “mission” mode for specific programmes. Indeed, the national highways programme of the NDA that Manmohan Singh has appreciated is itself a “mission” project of sorts.

Some promises in the CMP are predictable repetitions, like reducing subsidies and moving selectively on disinvestment. Even the NDA, for instance, had talked of increasing education spend to 6 per cent of the GDP, and it was the United Front (UF) government’s CMP that first talked of targeting subsidies in the mid-1990s.

The full managerial autonomy to public sector undertakings that is promised in the draft CMP, is something the UF talked of, indeed the UF even brought in the concept of “navratna” PSUs that would have even more freedom. Yet the result of all this is well known — oil sector PSUs can’t even raise the prices of their products.