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The Limits of Ambition
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| Thursday October 8, 2009 |
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In the brink of another election, Maharashtra presents that enduring paradox: a spectacularly malgoverned state, that has, with one exception, elected Congress governments since its inception. (In this, it holds a record of sorts – no other major state in India has been so consistently ruled by the Congress). It is, by general consensus, a great lost opportunity. Perhaps the most emblematic example of squandered greatness is Maharashtra’s employment guarantee scheme, conceived in the famine years of the early seventies and subsequently the template for the UPA’s national flagship. The EGS was, quite apart from its intent, a remarkable attempt to bridge wealthy, highly urbanised Maharashtra and its impoverished rural interior : the funds for the scheme were raised through professional tax. About 3 decades on, Maharashtra’s EGS has come to represent much of the failed promise of one of India’s most progressive states: corruption, unspent funds, unpaid labour, incomplete works. Almost every CAG report is a familiar indictment: a 2006 report finds that ‘registration of labour is incomplete’, ‘scheme has not met targets’, ‘of the 10,000 crores collected for the scheme, only 4677 crores have been spent’ and so on. In 2005 , a whistle-blowing collector in Solapur who unearthed massive rigging in the local EGS rolls faced an escalating level of official aggression that culminated in the chief minister’s office.
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Sreenivasan Jain is Managing Editor, NDTV 24x7.
