Have you been to West Bengal lately? Have you wandered through the streets of Calcutta and seen children scrabbling for food in garbage heaps? Have you seen the despair, the relentless, desperate poverty in which a terrifyingly large proportion of the citizens of the City of Joy live? Have you been to Bengal's villages and seen the appalling condition of primary schools in this supposedly enlightened Marxist state?

Well, I have, dear readers, and let me tell you that I found it easy to understand why the NCAER (National Council of Applied Economic Research) found it necessary last year to add West Bengal to the list of four Hindi-belt states that are considered the poorest, most backward, regions of India. There is poverty elsewhere in our country but almost nowhere does it acquire the grim, hopeless visage that it does in Mr Jyoti Basu's Marxist paradise and yet these Marxists dare to lecture us daily on economic matters.

How? Why? On what basis? And, while we are about it who is this man Harkishen Singh Surjeet that we should be forced to listen to his ludicrous opinions on subjects that should be entirely within the domain of government. Comrade Surjeet appears to like publicity as much as he does the sound of his own opinions so it's impossible to switch on a news bulletin these days without coming face to face with himwhite turbanned, white-bearded, white (foreign?) telephone in hand, holding forth on whatever the issue of the day might be. Generally, what he has to say is not worth the soundbyte or newsprint that records it but he appears to manage nevertheless to play the role in Delhi these days of obstructing any intelligent, sensible thing the government might want to do.

Last week the Finance Minister admitted that the government was wasting thousands of crores of taxpayers' money on subsidies that had no merit, and in doing so made one of the bravest and most significant statements by an Indian politician in recent times. ``We have been subsidising things like milk for Delhiites, feeling they are in great need of this, transportation and about 90 per cent of higher education. We have completely ignored primary education and primary health sectors, which has resulted in 70 per cent of the population still not having access to primary health and 50 per cent still illiterate.'' Dead right, Mr Chidambaram, absolutely dead right. But, no sooner were the words out of his mouth than Surjeet and his fellow comrades were ready to tell anyone who cared to listen than they thought cutting subsidies would `further contribute to the misery of the people who are already reeling under the impact of escalating prices'.

Comrade Surjeet appears to like deliberately missing the point which in this case is that we are subsidising university education at the cost of primary education. The result is that we have the largest number of illiterate people in the world while the children of middle-class comrades like Shri Surjeet in any case go abroad for higher studies.

The Finance Minister pointed out also that his ministry's white paper on subsidies had established that we spend more than 50 per cent of them on lowering the price of such things as milk in Delhi and providing electricity free to farmers who might be willing and able to pay for regular supplies of it. The white paper estimates that we spent Rs 137,388 crore, an estimated 14.4 per cent of the GDP in 1994-95, on subsidies of which less than one-third goes on `merit' items like primary education, roads and bridges. Most of it goes on `non-merit' items like electricity, transport, irrigation, agriculture and higher education which, in fact, many Indians can afford to pay for.

If we cut the non-merit bits down we could also cut the fiscal deficit and we might even end up with money to spare so that `the people' in cities like Calcutta and Mumbai can live less miserable lives. So, please go ahead Mr Chidambaram and do whatever you think needs to be done and if you get too much interference from Comrade Surjeet and his pals then chuck their `outside' support. There are abundant signs from the government's other `outside' supporters that they are willing and eager to come inside as soon as possible and, frankly, however decrepit and corrupt the Congress Party may have become, it is infinitely preferable to comrades like Surjeet.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.