Planning - a 60:40 model

By S. Swaminathan

Is the market usurping the State as a result of liberalisation? Far from it. The Planning Commission is sounding the bugles for the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002-2007). Call it the socialist addiction or whatever, planning like government is a continuum!

So long as the tear is not wiped off every human eye, planning will continue but should it be imprisoned in the mould that has been such a stereotype since the days of Indira Gandhi? It is this stereotype which has meant so such target-mania and the continued obsession with quantitative leap-frogging in Plan outlays to the tragic neglect of social priorities.

Growth rate syndrome

The Planning Commission, now in its initial forays, after scanning the Ninth Plan scenario, seems virtually disinclined to swallow the Vajpayee prescription of a 9 per cent growth rate. Why did the Prime Minister set his eyes on a 9 per cent growth rate? Is it the influence of numerology or the expertise of an unnamed advisor? In any case, jumping from a 6 per cent growth to 9 per cent is rather far-fetched even granting that the potential of the Indian economy - in agriculture, manufacture and in basic and sophisticated segments of the services sector - is yet to be harnessed.

That apart, the fallacy of chasing growth rates for their own sake, without adequate recognition of the quality of growth (whether it widens or narrows the development divide), has time and again been exposed. Would it not be wiser to formulate a Plan on the basis of triggering a mass base for growth, in agriculture, village and small industry and in education and public health, science and technology and in infrastructure where the outcome will not be target-bound but will occur depending upon the intensity and spread-effects of investments made by governments, the private sector and the wider community?

The idea of physical planning, as opposed to the Indian habit of financial planning (with all its resource constraints and lopsided prioritisation) has been known for decades. From time to time, hazy concepts of physical planning, such as the 20-point programme during the Emergency and the Minimum Needs approach which appeared to commend itself to the United Front Government led by Mr. Deve Gowda, have come into the national agenda but only as ``the icing on the cake.''

Never in the long history of planning in India has there been clear, pragmatic recognition that the paramount object of planning is to eliminate poverty through the empowerment of people at the lowest strata of society. On the contrary, poverty alleviation has been regarded as an add-on to a whole range of investment efforts which are broadly directed towards economic development (with social change remaining as a consummation to be devoutly wished for). This is the truth even though the political class continues to assert that it is not a captive of the ``trickle down'' mirage and that it believes in directly attacking poverty rather than trusting growth to produce the ameliorative effect.

People and the Plan

Years of verbosity on a participative pattern of planning have made little difference to the sordid reality that the Five- Year Plans are learned monuments of bureaucratic prose rather than the articulation of the needs of people at the grassroots level. An example of the divide between promise and performance in this respect is the Ninth Plan which will officially be terminated on March 31, 2002.

In its original Approach Paper to the Ninth Plan, the Planning Commission made this high-sounding statement: ``The principal task of the Ninth Plan will be to usher in a new era of people- oriented planning, in which not only the Government at the centre and in the States, but the people at large, particularly the poor, can fully participate.'' What is the reality? Not even State governments, leave alone the Corporations, Municipalities, and Panchayati Raj institutions, participate in the assessment of needs and of available resources, even apart from the fact that the planning process is dominated by an urban bias (which is also the bane of the system of governance).

The notion that a Five-Year Plan is a blueprint for national salvation drawn up by a conclave of high-brow professionals who know how to grasp the social and economic reality regardless of the experience of the poor, particularly in the rural areas, has entrenched itself strongly in the ``body politic''.

Unless the inherited tradition of ``top-down'' planning is consciously replaced by a grassroots (``from the ground-up'') mindset, any number of such plans will fail to do justice to more than 650 millions who live in India's villages numbering around 5.80 lakhs. Nor can the social imperative of Antyodaya - lifting up the most disadvantaged poor - be translated into a credible national effort, without the whole structure of the Plan being shaped by rural priorities.

The logic is simple. Unless development is mistakenly regarded as the westernisation of India, and as a rapid process of urbanisation, villages are where the Plan should focus. Deserted villages and prosperous cities cannot go together. Nor can infrastructure development only be a matter of urban amenities even though the Five-Year Plans, so far, have failed to pay adequate attention to rural needs whether it is access to drinking water, road connectivity, electricity, quality schooling or reliable medicare - either diagnostics or therapy.

Given the political culture of centralisation and urbanisation, it is not surprising that the Five-Year Plans have, by and large, served to enrich the urban middle class, apart from the affluent, and to marginalise the poor in the rural areas, caught in tiny land holdings, agricultural labour, village services and production activities including in the handloom sector.

If the poor, in small driblets, have managed to escape from their rural habitations, it has mostly resulted in the proliferation of urban slums rather than in economic empowerment. Should planning seek to correct this situation or should it reinforce the exodus of the poor from the rural areas? This would appear to be the central question. Should the Tenth Plan be one more edition of a strategy that has been known to be flawed or should it be a break from the past?

Plan outlay is not all. But there is no question that if available financial resources are not allocated, in an adequate measure, for the development of villages, rural poverty and the resultant exodus to cities and towns can hardly be stemmed. Taking the Ninth Plan public sector outlays (Centre and States), not even 20 per cent was committed to agriculture, irrigation and rural development.

Even granting that a number of sectoral outlays (general services, social services and economic services) do involve allocations benefiting the rural areas, the Plan, as a whole, can be said to be clearly biased against the rural communities.

The alternative approach required is one where the minimum unmet needs of the villages would be taken as the minimum tasks to be accomplished against the benchmarks of the country's big towns rather than the metropolitan centres. The aggregate cost of such an effort (on the basis of contemporary Indian technologies) should be the minimum outlay in the Plan for the rural areas.

If all this is difficult to capture in data terms, at short notice, it should be possible for the Planning Commission to adopt a 60:40 model of allocation of resources, respectively for the rural and urban areas, corresponding approximately to the population spread as between the rural and urban habitations.

Even with all the details unspelt, a Plan anchored in this proposition would mean that backward States such as Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and the Northeastern States, will fare better in Plan allocations than the other States. But then if these other States can also use the 60:40 model for their own development expenditure, the future could be more promising for the rural poor. It all depends, of course, on governance!

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