How much is enough for Jayati Ghosh?
The JNU professor Jayati Ghosh claims in a Mint Op Ed that 2016 Budget allocations are “too miserly for good quality delivery of nutrition, health and education services.”
What did she say about 2015 budget? Yes, you guessed it right! Not enough money allocated to socio-economic programs. And for earlier budgets? Not Enough!
How does one muster the inspiration to write a column on the budget saying pretty much the same that was said on earlier budgets? How does one keep saying the same thing budget after budget and think that it’s an important or insightful or useful comment? What’s the intellectual or scholarly work in that?
The basic formula is this: Allocation for this program or that ministry is only marginally higher or is actually a reduction in real or nominal terms or has become a smaller percentage of GDP than in the previous year or is miserly or inhumane compared to the real distress that the people are suffering. (And of course the ‘real distress’ is only known to JNUwallas.) No matter what the allocation is, it is never going to be enough by one of these standards. The scholarship is in figuring out which one applies to which program or ministry in a given budget.
Among all the problems with this scholarship, at least two of my concerns are these:
1. The spending by people really doesn’t matter; only the state spending should be the barometer of the quality of service that people get. People spending their own money for nutrition, health or eduction? That’s a bourgeois idea, can happen only in crass capitalist society, in the noble world of JNU, all the responsibility must be with the state. Private spending on education, for example, is more than half of state spending, but that has no significance of any kind, not even worth a mention. May be in Ms Ghosh’s universe, private spending just shows how low the society has fallen — the higher the private spending, the less noble the society. The state spending is never enough, because the society can always become nobler and nobler.
This is a cue about how much state spending is enough. When the private spending is ZERO! The noblest society ever!
2. Many of the government programs are not designed to replace peoples’ spending; they are more like safety nets so that those who can’t afford to spend still have access to basic services. Such programs should expand when people are worse off and contract when they are better off. But are ‘people’ actually ever better off? One would think that when the economy, for example, is growing at 8–10% a year for 15–20 years, the people should be better off. Aha, you don’t really know the real world! In the real world that the JNU eyes see (the rest of us have false eyes, er, consciousness), the economic growth only enriches the rich and poor are actually getting worse off. After lifting the burden of 20 years of economic growth, the poor are barely able to stand, let alone keep pace with the better off. Ergo, the state spending on basic needs must always grow! The higher the economic growth, even higher should be state spending!!
In the JNU universe, saying the same thing year after year that state spending is not enough is just to tell the rest that my eyes are still real, no haziness of people standing up for themselves, of swalamban or swabhiman.
