How integrated national planning can help India

Many years ago I was in an anti-smoking, anti-tobacco rally with the then state minister for health and the lovely Dr Pankaj Shah, head of the Oncology Department of the Cancer Hospital. They were speaking of the cost per cancer patient to the state.

They said that the state spent Rs1 lakh per person, and as many cases of cancer as there were in Gujarat, this came to a staggering figure.

I asked what the farmers earned per acre of tobacco cultivated, given that all of Kheda was made up of tobacco farmers. I was told that it would probably be Rs1 lakh per acre.

Wouldn't it then make sense, I asked innocently, to pay that money to farmers across the nation to not grow tobacco and actually keep people away from it, rather than encouraging them and subsidising what tobacco lead to?

But these decisions are taken by different ministries, I was told!

The more I look at what our people face in this country the more I feel there is something intrinsically wrong with our planning hierarchies. Look at this example.

One of the worst crises we are facing is that of starvation and under nourishment. It is currently estimated that 25% of our families, over 300 million, suffer hunger, and that close to 45% of all Indian children are malnourished.

Given that scientists know that malnourishment amongst under- twos permanently and adversely affects brain development, this is serious news for the future of the country. So let us look at who deals with the issue.

The problems of hunger and malnourishment have to do with what is grown, what is made available and what is affordable.

The first is the domain of Mr Pawar and the ministry of agriculture. The second, what is distributed, the ministry of civil supplies. The third, the price at which things are available, is in the domain of the commerce ministry and the ministry of finance.

But the main question is dealt with by the ministry of health, and the ministry of women and children (and will be later dealt with by the ministry of human resource development when we have an entire population that performs under par).

So do these ministries parlay together to solve the issues? From all my research and reviews, the answer is a resounding NO. And that is why Mr. Pawar concentrates on more subsidies to sugarcane growers and in encouraging more cash crops.

Thousands of millions of tonnes of wheat lie in the open rotting because the ministry of civil supplies hasn't bothered to pick it up for the public distribution system, while farmers beg for more than rock bottom prices for their valuable produce.

And people, ordinary people, continue to starve or eat the rubbish that is available to us. What we eat is rotten because the ministry of fertilisers and chemicals is pumping toxins into the system, and even subsidising farmers for poisoning the land so that they can keep those fertiliser lobbies happy.

This means that the wheat or vegetables that we do eat lack nutrients, or are actually poisoning us.

This brings in two ministries in a different role — health, because all this bad food leads to us being frequently sick, and the local ministry of civil supplies who make a virtue out of adding nutrients to un-nutritious food.

This is just one example. I could ramble off a hundred. Yet I am not aware of anybody, governmental or not, who is actually looking at the overall systems of planning in this country to see whether the systems we have are archaic and need to be replaced.

We seem to live in the immediate future, in the electoral cycle of delivering goods or results in the five year cycle.

What we need is integrated planning with the people of this nation and sustainability at the core, not systems made for the convenience of the ruling class to rule.

Just as integrated holistic medicine is finally making us look at health as other than not being sick, in national planning too an integrated approach is urgent. But does anyone in power actually want a better, healthier and more empowered nation?