Did you happen to by any chance stumble upon the one hour pre-budget show on NDTV 24X7 – “The India Story” with economist and nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Deputy Chairperson of Planning Commission of India Montek Singh Ahluwalia, moderated by Dr Prannoy Roy? The show was meant to discuss “threadbare” the economic slowdown, the government’s major flagship schemes and Foreign Direct Investment in retail.

The hour-long programme was conducted at Miranda House and was also attended by students of St Stephen’s. The presence of the three wise men of India made you take notice of the programme and believe (hope) that perhaps you would get a little wiser by the end of the programme. That perhaps all the questions about India’s economy from slow growth rate to the rising unemployment would be answered. You would have also expected that the young blood from India’s elite colleges would put some tough questions to the Oxford-educated member of the Planning Commission and ask what exactly has gone wrong with the “India growth story” under his watch.

But sadly by the end of the show, no questions were been answered. What we got instead was a lot of high falutin jargon and convoluted sentences which said nothing at all. The key takeaways can be summed up in the following points:

1. The aam aadmi is just a creation of some “ghastly news channels”
2. Subsidies are the only cause of India’s deplorable economic condition
3. The States, not the Centre, should be responsible for identifying the beneficiaries of Direct Cash Transfer
4. Just one per cent of India’s total crop produce is wasted due to lack of storage. India is overflowing with food grains otherwise.
5. Direct Cash Transfer is the panacea for all that is ailing India’s poor.

Take a look at the following conversation:    

Prof Amartya Sen: “I think that if your fiscal responsibility is a way big one, what is unfortunate is that every time the things like feeding the kids come up, fiscal responsibility unleashes itself and tells us not to do it. While you are having the real subsidy you have electricity tax that doesn’t cover the cost and there is a huge loss and we have fertiliser subsidies. We don’t even have import duties on gold and diamonds and in a meeting that Montek chaired, I suggested that they must do something, and I have to say I don’t think it was result of my admonition that they tried to do something. But there was so much agitation from the aam aadmi.”

Dr Roy: I think there is a key point. The aam aadmi now is not the aam aadmi or the middle class, but the relatively poor among the rich and I think it’s got a bit to do with the ghastly news channels that keep projecting them.

Dr Roy: So Montek, I think one of the key points is that government subsidies or the focus seems to be among the aam aadmi which is actually much richer than the true aam aadmi’, middle class, the urban. But these LPG subsidies, diesel subsidies, we are not focusing on the real cause. Is that one problem you do see? But we are discussing it at least.

Montek S Ahluwalia: No I think there is no doubt that the subsidy structure that has evolved did not evolve from a presumption that, look let’s do something for the poor. It was there, it was allowed to develop and there is a huge understandable, political resistance to be withdrawing subsidy. Most people are not aware to what extent these things are being subsidised.

But the data released by the Petroleum Ministry’s website, which we must commend for transparency of information, showed that when it came to wringing the maximum benefit out of subsidised cylinders, our legislators topped the charts.

http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=84984

Now here’s the argument made by Montek – which met with negligible resistance from Dr Roy.

Montek S Ahluwalia: One thing I want to correct Prannoy that something you said, whatever you said sounds so credible and your audience picks it after me.

Dr Roy: Whereas you mean all this is not true though…

Montek S Ahluwalia: You said that 20 per cent of the food grain stocks is eaten away by rats every year. Now with the great respect this is completely wrong. I mean there is a loss and sometimes the loss they report to me is like 0.1 per cent. I tend not to believe that. But you know this number, 20 per cent, it would be criminal if the loss was 20 per cent. It isn’t. There is no, absolutely no document anywhere. The loss may be 1 per cent and if you are going to have a large stock that’s part of the cost of character.

Dr Roy: So why do you have 17 million tons of food grain when children are dying? Forget how much, 12 per cent, 2 per cent, 20 per cent. Why can’t you distribute that food to children?

Montek S Ahluwalia: If you are going to produce 150 million tonnes and they all are going to come two points in the year at any given time. Then there are going to be large stocks. Now the difference in our case is most of the stocks are government stocks.

And the question on malnourishment and hunger remains answered. Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report by the Naandi Foundation in 2012 pegged the cumulative effect of malnourishment on Indian children at 42 per cent. The report said that over 40 per cent of under-fives are severely or moderately underweight and that 59 per cent of them suffer from moderate to severe stunting. The Prime Minister termed the report as a “national shame”.

After watching to the entire show, some obvious questions ring in your mind:

1. The discussion was meant to be on FDI in retail and how it would change India’s dwindling economy. Why was the policy not discussed threadbare at a time when even the Supreme Court has questioned the government if the policy was a “political gimmick”? Why were the students asking questions not concerned about how FDI will generate jobs for them? Why did they keep veering back to the issue of Direct Cash transfer when it has nothing to do with them?
2. What is the reason behind Prannoy Roy’s aversion for the aam aadmi? Does he really believe that some “ghastly news channels” can actually determine the economic divisions of our society?
3. Finally, did NDTV need to provide the platform for Montek to explain the benefits of Direct Cash Transfer scheme, since that’s all this programme ended up being about?

Perhaps Dr Roy belongs to the civilised school of journalism which believes in using kid gloves while dealing with government representatives and academics. Which is all fine and dandy, but Dr Roy, ask a few pertinent questions please. Or is that the purview of the “ghastly news channels” who would go hammer and tongs to get their answers. Well, we can only hope so.

Image By: Abhishek Verma