After Gujarat , Modi' s Model Now Puts India Under Massive Debt
BY
R.K.MISRA
Estimates may deign to deceive but figures
ferret out facts.
In
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the government’s
cumulative public debt has shot up to an astronomical Rs 2,96,268 crores which
is almost 75,000 crores higher than the size of the state’s budget estimates of Rs,2,17,287 for
2020-21 placed in the State Assembly on February 26.
The
projections for 2022-23 see this debt
burgeoning to Rs 3,71,989 crores in
2022-23.An assertion in the State Assembly would have you believe that a every
child in the state is born to a burden of Rs 48,000. On 31 March 2012 this
figure was Rs 23,163 (calculating the
state population as 6 crores). Gujarat hit headlines recently when it splurged
to give a spectacular welcome to US President Donald Trump during his three
hour visit to Ahmedabad.
Gujarat’s
public debt has been consistent with the rise of chief minister Narendra Modi
who took charge of the state in October 2001, except with one notable difference.
While Modi’s political fortunes soared
Gujarat’s sank deeper into the quicksand of debt. When he first came to power
in 2001-02,the actual debt was Rs 45,301
crores and after he left for Delhi in
2014 ,the Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG) put the total debt of the state
for 2015-16 at Rs 2,21,090 crores.
In
fact, a Reserve Bank of India(RBI) study of state budgets(2015) had revealed
that Gujarat’s outstanding liabilities, also identified as “total debts”, have
crossed Rs 2 lakh crore in 2014-15,reaching Rs 2,100.4 billion or a little
above Rs 2.1 lakh crore, up from Rs 1,886.4 billion in 2013-14, a 10.19 per
cent rise.
When
the BJP first came to power in Gujarat
in 1995 the public debt was around Rs
10,000 crores and barring a 16 month
interruption continues to be in power to this day with Modi being its
longest serving chief minister in history.
Modi
rode into Delhi as Prime Minister riding
astride a thumping mandate which was
largely attributed to the ‘sterling’
model of development that he had successfully implemented in Gujarat. A
cornerstone of this model were the bi-annual Gujarat Global Investor
Summits.
Beginning
with the first one in 2003 up to the seventh one in 2015 the Gujarat government
declared it had signed a total of 51,378 memorandums of Understanding(MOU)
worth a total investment of a mind-boggling Rs 84 lakh crores with the 2011
summit alone accounting for Rs 20.83 lakh crores in proposed investment in the
state. In the run up to the eighth
summit in 2017, the state chief secretary, J.N. Singh claimed an implementation rate of 66 per cent
for the past seven editions.
How
would it compare when weighed against the fact that the GDP of India for the
year 2017-18 was Rs 131.80 lakh crores. In
fact, the figures being trotted out at these summits touched such ludicrously
bloated levels that it subsequently stopped quantifying it in rupee terms and
later even dropped the word ‘investor” from the summit.
According
to the figures published by Gujarat’s own Directorate of Economics and
Statistics only about 8 per cent of the Rs 40 trillion of the investments
proposed at the summits from 2003 to 2011 have been implemented. Figures show
that Maharashtra without any such ‘gloss and glam’ show bagged 30 per cent of
India’s total investment between 2000-to 2016 while Gujarat ranked fifth with 4
per cent.
The
Department of Industry Policy and
Promotion(DIPP) study has brought out that Gujarat’s share in actual
cumulative Foreign Direct
Investment(FDI) inflows to India between 2000 to 2013 broadly coinciding with
Modi rule in Gujarat was only 4 per cent. Gujarat garnered only Rs 39,000
crores out of the cumulative national FDI of
9.1 lakh crores. More significantly Gujarat’s share in the kitty had
been under decline from 3.4 per cent in 2011 to 2.9 per cent in 2012 to 2.4 per
cent in 2013.
The
benefit accruing from the summits to Gujarat
were only a fraction of what it
achieved for Modi. Aided by APCO Worldwide, the US global public affairs and
strategic communications consultancy which had been hired to promote the summit,
Modi hop, step and jumped from a ‘hindu hriday Samrat’ (Hindu heart throb) to
development messiah through the hard-hyped Gujarat Model to become the Prime
Minister in 2014.
The
Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG)
report for the period ending
March 31,2014(Modi rule)placed on the table of the Gujarat Assembly on
March 31,2015 busted the myth of the
model.
It ‘willfully’ understated revenue
expenditure and overstated
revenue surplus. Between 2009-2014
the state government invested Rs 24007 crores in it’s PSUs and got a
return of a mere 0.31 per cent by way of dividend, huge land parcels were given
away to favoured industrial houses. Over the same period 70.95 lakh pregnancies
were registered but there were only 57.66 lakh
deliveries and no effort made to
find out why there were 13.29 lakh less
deliveries. The figure of malnourished children in the state stood at 2.7 lakh.
Education
fared no better. Implementation of RTE as well as other educational schemes, particularly
in the tribal areas was rated poor. The expenditure against available funds was
only 12.67 per cent in 2011-12,14.09 per cent in 2012-13 and 22.42 per cent in
2013-14. Sixty four schools with a total strength of 5698 had no teachers while
874 schools had only one teacher.
Gujarat
under Modi claimed to be a power surplus state which provided electricity round the clock. In a written
reply in the Assembly it was stated that 32,500 million units of power had been
purchased from private players in 2014, a 13 per cent increase over the previous year while the state owned power units
contributed a mere 26,122 million units. The pending applications for
agricultural power connections stood at 1.77 lakhs.
In
hindsight , all the grand memorials of
extravagance- the multi-crore swarnim sankul to house the chief
minister’s office with a helipad to match, the Rs 400 crore mahatma mandir, the
garib kalyan melas, shaala praveshotsavs, khel mahakumbhs and
the numerous other state-wide
‘spectacles’ were initiated and
ballooned on borrowed money !
The splurge
continues as the state continues to slide. Malnourishment in children
has increased by 2.41 lakh children in the last six months since July, 2019 to
3,83,840 lakh.
Over 15,000 newborns or 21 per cent of those born or admitted have
died in government hospitals in the state in the last two years. Over 5200
primary schools are planned to be closed
down in the name of school mergers with tribal, dalit and minority areas being
worst casualties. There are 3 murders, four rapes and 8 kidnappings every day.
Employment under MNREGA stands reduced
by 32,17569 man-days from 4,055064,03 man-days in 2018 to 3,7288935 man-days in
2019. The list is long.
Replication
of the Gujarat Model countrywide had been a promised priority. And as a mark
of continuity the total debt of the
Modi-led central government increased by
54 per cent to Rs 84 lakh crore between June 2014 and March 2019, according to
the department of economic affairs, ministry of Finance.
Remember, every
current decision always carries a future
cost- good, bad or ugly !
Excellent analysis with telling figures.
ReplyDelete