Prime minister Manmohan Singh it seems has become a dyed-in-the-wool Congressman going by the tenor of his observations at the state chief secretaries’ conference in New Delhi on Monday.
He exhorted the state governments, especially its bureaucrats, to increase agricultural productivity, improve the public distribution system (PDS) and to make innovative and prompt responses to meet the needs of the people.
He also chided the state governments for the false of sense of security with regard to availability of food and reminded them that India’s food productivity was low.
Singh went on to declare, “India lives in the states and unless the states move forward at a pace that is adequate to the challenges we cannot claim that we have delivered inclusive growth.”
The rhetorical flourish would have made some sense if only the Congress record in the matter was credible. It is not. The Congress party has always adopted the attitude of an imperial power, pretending to hold a large and diverse country like India together through its imagined writ.
Congress governments at the Centre have tended to dictate policies for the entire country in big and small issues. The tendency was to claim credit if things were doing well and to push the blame on to the state governments when the situation was bad.
Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar did it in a way last month when he blamed the state governments for not making better use of food stocks. Singh has taken the blame game further and has faulted the state governments on the failures on the farm front.
Perhaps Singh needs to be reminded that agriculture has been neglected ever since he has ushered in economic reforms in 1991.
Economists of all hues now agree that public investments in agriculture have declined steeply and that food grain production has hit a plateau and not able to go any further.
Governments both at the Centre and in the states have been so taken up by the idea of creating a booming service sector and of attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) that they had no time to strategise on the challenges posed by agriculture.
For nearly 20 years now, agriculture has literally disappeared from the policy radar. Singh will have to take the blame with the rest of the policy — and decision-makers. Instead of blaming and chiding the states, it would be more useful if Singh unveiled a national agricultural plan.
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