A Very Sick idea

TRUST the government to get healthy firms to foot part of the bill to help sick firms get back on the rails. It is so characteristic of the way it has chosen to govern the country — pass the buck on to someone else whenever you can, appears to be the NDA’s underlying credo. Unable to cut runaway expenditure on subsidies a couple of years ago, finance minister Yashwant Sinha piously stood up in Parliament and increased taxes on the so-called better-off among us, expressing certainty that we wouldn’t mind taking on a little extra burden to help alleviate the suffering of our unfortunate brethren.

At the risk of sounding self-centred, may we say that we do mind? Helping our unfortunate brethren, for one, should be a matter of personal choice, and not something imposed on us from above. But what’s more important is that all of us pay our taxes for precisely this noble purpose — to help our unfortunate brethren.

What exactly does Mr Average Citizen get for his taxes? Apart, of course, for the pleasure of being called a full-fledged Indian as opposed to, say, a Non-Resident Indian, who is essentially an Indian who doesn’t pay taxes? It surely cannot be law and order — there is precious little evidence of this. Nor can it be certain basic amenities like cheap housing, or uninterrupted supply of electricity and water. It’s true we don’t pay excessively for our roads, but then where do we have them? The list goes on. So, our tax money is paid precisely so that the government can organise food-for-work schemes for the poor, so that it can provide subsidised food for the poor, so that it can provide them free medicine and education.

We’re not making any of this up. It’s all there in each year’s budget documents. The problem, however, arises when the government finds, like it did, for instance, that over 40 per cent of grain meant for the poor gets stolen along the way. Or that the firms which borrowed money from the bank decided to siphon it away, and then went sick. By the way, getting healthy firms to give 0.1 per cent of their turnover isn’t going to help revive sick companies anyway.

The crux of the problem is that these units are either in unviable areas, like textiles, or that promoters have siphoned off hundreds of crores of funds. The government needs to tackle these tough issues, not just dodge them or pass on the buck to others. Similarly, it needs to find ways to ensure ration grain doesn’t get stolen, or that industrialists aren’t allowed to rape the firms they run. Foot your own bill, please.