I

The farcical fashion in which the issue of economic reforms is being dealt with by the entire range of political parties shows that our politicians have only one agenda in mind -- to push others out so they can get into positions of power themselves. They are behaving more like rival gangsters than politicians who choose to be in different political parties on the basis of ideological divides. For instance, the entire opposition had responded to the Congress party's half-hearted policy of economic reforms as though the tentative relaxations on the entry of foreign capital were a sell-out to the Multi-national Corporations and the World Bank IMF lobby. They never tired of evoking paranoid fears of the phoren hand colluding with the Congress Party to re-enslave India in a manner more devious than that of East India Company.

Yet as soon as these parties got the chance to form the government, they began convincing who ever would believe them that they were as committed to the agenda of economic reforms as the Narasimha Rao government. That, in itself,is not saying very much because even the agenda of economic reforms of the Congress came mainly as a response to a crisis situation of bankruptcy and total depletion of foreign exchange reserves. It was hardly a well worked-out plan of economic resurgence. Rao and his team were unable to provide a coherent plan of action on economic reforms because they became hostage to their primary agenda -- to cling to power at any cost. That is why their liberalisation moves were more like a half step forward, two steps backward,three steps to the side and many more in the air! Most Congress party politicians did all they could to sabotage attempts to restructure our economy because that would curtail the vast discretionary powers of politicians and bureaucrats, and hence their ability to loot and plunder the people and resources of this country. The urea scam, the fodder scam, the sugar scam,and the hawala payoffs, are all testimony to the fact that the statist controls on the economy are alive and kicking, despite all the talk of liberalisation.

Most pro-reform businessmen and newspapers have celebrated the volte-face of various political parties on economic reforms as a welcome sign that good sense inevitably dawns on people once they get catapulted into power. However, for most ordinary citizens of the country, it brings confusion and cynicism. The electorate concludes that politicians, no matter what their affiliation, cannot be trusted to stick to their own professed programmes; ideology is prostituted at the altar of power seeking, and politicians of every hue appear to be chips off the same block. This has created a serious ideological vacuum in the country. In the last years, this vacuum has been sought to be filled by a whole range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who claim to be working for the disadvantaged sections of our society. Because they are seen as idealists and the conscience-keepers of our society, outside of the dirty world of electoral politics, their critique of economic reforms has been given more weight than merited by their political weightage. Unlike political parties, who can be called to account and even defeated in elections if they propagate foolish and impractical ideas, there is very little political accountability demanded of NGOs. Since the sources of their support lie outside our society , they are not compelled to be accountable to the people on whose behalf they claim to speak. Therefore NGOs can indulge in ideological fantasies and even recommend disastrous policies with impunity. Their response to economic reforms reminds me of a popular saying, Neem Hakim Khatra-e-jaan, (Quacks are dangerous for your life).

The most comprehensive set of NGO document opposing economic reforms currently available have been prepared by NGOs working on women's issues. The organised initiative on this front by feminists is mainly because of the funding made available by international aid organisations to prepare NGO agendas for the United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Two major documents came out of this process -- A Perspective from the Indian Women's Movement and The Economic Agenda -- both of which are frontal attacks on the proposed economic reforms in India. While the vast majority of NGOs are virulently opposed to economic reforms, a few like SEWA who have a creditable track record of concretely working to strengthen the rights of the working poor have demanded the widening of the scope of economic reforms agenda. They want that the dismantling of the license permit raj even for the urban rural self-employed poor.

In the view of anti-reform NGOs, privatisation of the public sector (via deregulation and delicensing) will lead to large scale job retrenchment, unemployment, insecure lives for workers, and an increase in the power of criminal gangs. They maintain that working conditions will deteriorate and many welfare benefits will be withdrawn, that there will be a fall in real wages, leading to longer working hours, and that many more workers will nevertheless slip below the poverty level. The ending of state monopolies in telecommunications and the power sector will, in their view, jeopardise India's security. Major cuts in government spending and government employment schemes will,they allege, mean worsening health services and denial of access to the poor,increases in child mortality, deterioration of civic services, worsening of access to education, and more unhygienic living. They claim that following liberalisation, the poor will no longer have any safety net or social security.

This doomsday scenario of the supposed consequences of economic reforms is, unfortunately, not a futuristic nightmare. The unhypnotised reader will recognise that what these groups are predicting will be the future plight of our people is actually the existing reality for today's Indians, thanks to over four decades of sarkari socialism that our bureaucracy so assiduously fostered. Vast unemployment and underemployment, low wages, millions working under conditions of servitude, high infant mortality rates, widespread preventable epidemics, more than half the population living below the official poverty line, millions being ejected out of the agricultural sector as destitutes and coming to urban areas to eke out a miserable living as beggars, garbage pickers , scavengers, and coolies, the inability of Indian industry to provide employment on any scale, and the notoriously shoddy goods forced on Indian consumers at exorbitant prices -- all this has already happened -- not because of economic reforms but in the absence of them.

These NGOs' vigorous opposition to economic reforms shows that for all their pro-poor rhetoric, they are more loyal to the government than those in government, having imbibed their radicalism from the rhetoric of the left parties. This is because their world view is essentially statist. By statism, I mean a world view which subordinates civil society to the dictates of the state and its bureaucracy. Statists are those who believe in the government playing an over-arching, omnipresent role in controlling social and economic affairs. They do not trust ordinary people to behave sensibly or to have the innate capacity to resolve social conflicts among themselves, without petitioning the sarkar for its wise interventions of the kind we witnessed over the Ayodhya Mandir-Masjid conflict. In their view, the state is the primary vehicle for societal engineering and therefore those in power ought to determine organisational principles for the entire society. They seem convinced that if they can prevail upon the state to pass what they consider proper laws, people can be made to behave in ways approved by these self-appointed social engineers. Thus, they borrow lock, stock and barrel from the agenda of the Nehruvian Congress and its pet child -- our "socialist" bureaucracy.

State socialism may be discredited the world over and violently disowned by those who have lived under the tyranny of socialist dictators, yet strangely enough, its ideological hold is still strong in India. Our present constitution makes it mandatory for every political party seeking to be registered with the Election Commission to swear an oath of fidelity not just to democracy and secularism, but also to socialism -- an ideology whose principles are vague enough to provide good cover to our bureaucrats, politicians and "licensees" as they loot the country for their own personal gain. It is understandable that our bureaucracy is feeling threatened by the prospect of losing its power as our economy sinks further and further under the dead weight of the corrupt and bloated government machinery. People have finally begun to demand that the governmental controls which have wrecked our economy be removed.

Yet our sarkari babus, aware of how discredited and mistrusted they are on account of the mess they have made of our country, dare not openly fight to retain their position. With no one else willing to defend them, our bureaucrats have found a valuable ally in certain NGOs who have valiantly risen to their rescue by declaring a jehad against economic reforms. This NGO alliance with the bureaucracy should hardly come as a surprise since for all their "anti-government" rhetoric, the statist NGOs depend on the sarkar for their very survival. Most of those organisations called NGOs in our country today get their funds either directly from the government, or from various international donor agencies that require prior clearance and sanction by the government.

Most NGOs that campaign against liberalisation have focussed obsessively on the need to prevent the entry of foreign capital and collaborations between Indian and foreign companies. Here an ethical issue is involved. If they think bringing in western money and intellectual know-how is so harmful, they ought to start their campaign by refusing to apply for or accept grants for their political work from various western donor agencies. Or is it that our statist NGOs want us to continue presenting ourselves before the world as beggars requiring endless doses of foreign aid rather than aspiring to become active participants in the world economy? Is it because a good part of foreign aid money gets routed through them that they prefer foreign aid to foreign trade? The money that could enter our country as business investments would bypass the NGOs altogether.

Following their advice amounts to molding the entire Indian economy after these small organisations who are themselves not even economically independent, whose livelihood comes from encashing on India's poverty abroad, peddling the misery of the Indian people and gathering crumbs on their behalf. Any self-respecting Indian would prefer that we do business with foreigners aspiring to be equal partners, rather than appear before them as grovelling supplicants.

Various opinion polls conducted in the recent past claim that the Indian electorate does not consider economic reforms a high priority issue. Instead, poverty, corruption and unemployment remain high on voter's agenda. The post-election India Today Marg survey reports that only 5 percent of voters listed economic reforms as an important issue. Removal of poverty, tackling corruption and providing employment were the three issues listed among the highest priority among 80 percent of the voters.

The apparent lack of interest in economic reforms is primarily due to the fact that our political parties have deliberately stunted the debate on economic reforms by focusing and much harping over the entry of foreign capital and Multi-national Corporations into India.

Not surprisingly, the average citizens do not see any reason to be particularly excited about whether they buy flavoured sugar water at exorbitant prices under the brand name of Pepsi or Thums-up. Only those making a career out of ideological power games can mesmerise themselves into believing that kicking out Coca-Cola and replacing it with a cheap, tasteless imitation labelled Double Seven or Thums Up is an act of patriotism. Had our swadeshi socialist George Fernandes replaced the firangi Coca Cola with hygienically prepared desi drink like kanji, thandai, matthha, jaljeera or panna, people may have seen the uses and superiority of swadeshi. But when Indian consumers are asked to buy sub-standard imitation s of foreign products,no wonder few, if any, vote for swadeshi or find the issue of any importance.

It is crucially important to include the concerns of the average citizens in the agenda of economic reforms when listing poverty, unemployment and corruption as the three primary issues of concern, the voters are in fact not dismissing economic reforms but demanding that the agenda of liberalisation and destatisation should include their concerns. They are demanding a bottom-up approach to economic reforms.

The far more important, though neglected aspect of liberalisation is ending the continuing soul-destroying harassment inflicted by government agencies on ordinary citizens of this country when they undertake any independent economic activity -- all so that a whole range of unaccountable sarkari thugs can parasite on the people and extort huge bribes from them and prevent them from earning a decent livelihood with dignity.

The worst victims of this license-permit-quota raj, which grew out of the colonial machinery of governance in alliance with some of the destructive aspects of Soviet style socialism added on during the Nehru dynasty era, are the poor and the vulnerable groups in our society. Those who are concerned about the plight of the poor need to ensure that the purposes and objectives of reforms do not stay vague and abstract, do not remain confined to the to players of our economy. We need to expand their scope to include the numerous governmental restrictions which thwart the economic initiative of the vulnerable groups in our country, thus keeping them trapped in poverty.

The leftists of various hues oppose privatisation on the plea that the market marginalises the poor. If they were less caught in cliches and were to look carefully, they would discover that the poor are already enmeshed in the market, except that various state interventions make the market in which they try to survive much more skewed against them. Even small marginal farmers try to grow whatever cash crops they can manage such as groundnuts, vegetables, bananas, cotton, grapes and fruits. How else would they meet their cash requirements for buying clothes, soap, footwear, utensils and other necessities? Those who oppose the commercialisation of agriculture forget that even the poor have needs other than staving off hunger with plain dal and roti. Those who are compelled into 100 percent subsistence farming cannot grow enough food for year-round survival and have to seasonally migrate in search of wage work. For instance an unpublished 1995 SEWA survey of six villages in Sabarkantha district found that though 93 percent of these families live below the poverty line (with 97 percent of the families possessing less than five bighas of land), all of them grow vegetables like tomatoes, brinjals, onions, potatoes and even some fruit like watermelons as cash crops.

In remote tribal areas, women bring chickens they rear, homemade rice-beer, and forest produce that they gather to local markets. But here, too, state interventions make things worse for the poor. For example, forest dwellers who survive by making products from bamboo, cane, and other fibres have to get government licenses to buy this raw material and to transport the finished product from their homes to the market. The government sells these products to these poor crafts families at a price which is often 200 to 300 percent higher than what the paper mills pay for the same forest produce. Thus government monopolies actually rob the poor to subsidise the rich. Poor villagers earning their livelihood from collection of tendu leaves need licenses to hold stocks of even one bag of these leaves. They cannot freely sell the leaves on the open market or even use them to make beedis in their homes. A 1995 SEWA survey provides another concrete instance of how the license regime works against the interests of the poor by keeping them out of the market economy. The women living in desert areas (Santalpura Taluka) of Banaskantha district survive mainly by gathering gum from the Babul trees owned by the Forest Department which insists on licenses for gum collection. As long as the women had no licenses, they were collecting this gum "illegally" and selling to private traders. After joining SEWA they formed DWCRA groups and demanded licenses so that they could operate "legally". However, this meant they can now only sell the gum to the Forest Corporation at rates arbitrarily fixed by the latter at much lower than market rates.

As the rates of gum were reduced by the Forest Corporation from Rs 20 per kg in 1990 to Rs 8 per kg in 1995, the average earnings of women dropped from Rs 25 per day to Rs 12 per day in the last five years, though their working hours have increased. Th e rates of gum range from Rs 25 to 30 per kg in the open market but the Forest Corporation will not allow them to enter the open market. They have to sell their gum to the Corporation for one-fourth the market price. SEWA conducted a study of 80 women from nine villages and found that as a result of the lowering of rates, these women were near starvation. For 93 percent of them, gum picking is their main occupation with 68 percent of families earning less than Rs 500 per month; 25 percent earn between Rs 500 to Rs 1000 per month. As a fall out of "licensing", poverty levels have gone up. Seventy seven percent of families have children also engaged in picking gum. Many have consequently left school. Seventy six percent men have become bonded servants to farmers in other villages; 64 percent of women have had to pawn their jewellery; 70 percent have mortgaged their land while 63 percent of families have had to sell their land.

Take the allocation of credit as another example. Our financial institutions and public sector banks were nationalised ostensibly as a "socialist" measure that would provide credit at reasonable rates to the poor. In actuality they provide loans to the rich at relatively moderate rates of interest -- moderate, that is, when compared to what others are forced to pay(if they are lucky enough to get any loans at all). Indian industrialists, in fact, have perfected the art of getting financial institutions to invest public money in their enterprises while management and ownership remains with private businessmen. Our government even provides low interest car loans as well as concessional house building loans to bureaucrats and babus. But the poor who need credit the most are denied access to credit through the government controlled banking system on the ground t hat they have no collateral. Even those who do have some property to mortgage to banks end up paying hefty commissions to bank staff for getting even pitiful amounts sanctioned. Farmers who get small amounts as crop loans from the government controlled rural banks have to face the prospect of imprisonment without trial for 40 days for any default in payment. Bank staff are authorised to arrest them without as much as lodging a First Information Report (FIR). They have the power to confiscate and auction what ever property the indebted farmer owns,including household goods and utensils that are seized by bank officials if they default or delay in paying back loans. In fact, the money spent on their food while in jail, the T.A. and D.A. of bank staff who go to arrest them is added to their loan amount. This happens even when the default is due to drought or crop failure. But our industrialists get away with defaulting and embezzling crores of rupees as unpaid loans.

The poor generally are left at the mercy of market sharks in the informal sector. Even in Delhi, poor slum dwellers borrow from local money lenders at rates ranging from 60 to 300 percent per annum. The government has a virtual monopoly on banking in t he rural sector through nationalised or government-controlled cooperative banks. Private money lending at usurious rates is officially illegal. Yet the majority of the poor borrow money from these illegal sources at ruinous rates of interest. SEWA, an organisation known for its pioneering work in providing cheap and easy credit for self-employed women in Ahmedabad, applied for permission to the Reserve Bank of India in 1984 to extend its services to rural areas as well. They had conducted a survey that found poor rural families were paying interest rates ranging from 45 to 180 percent per year for minor loans. It took SEWA 12 years and much effort to secure permission to provide credit despite the enormous influence and respect they have at the national and international level. The reason offered for the endless delay was that rural banking is the government's monopoly even though the nationalised banks have failed to reach the poor, especially those in rural areas. Thus the licence-permit raj actively obstructs the growth of competing or potentially competing institutions which can genuinely serve the economic interests of the poor.

Even when these rural destitutes come to urban areas as migrants,various state controls continue to hound them and obstruct their economic initiative, despite the kind of work they attempt to do. To survive, they must act illegally at every turn. Poor migrants to the city cannot afford to rent a "legal" accommodation, thanks to the land monopoly that the government enjoys. They pay exorbitant rents for miserable jhuggis built by slum lords with political patronage by encroaching on government la nd. Even the government-sponsored organisations created to promote better housing for the people's sector such as HUDCO and National Housing Board are restricted from giving loans or materials to "illegal" or "unauthorised" dwellings จจ with the result t hat the poor, whose housing conditions need urgent improving, are altogether ignored. The electricity connection they use is illegal because they are denied a regular connection, on the plea that they are living in unauthorised colonies. They are compelled to pay regular haftas to the electricity department employees in return for the privilege of "stealing" electricity. The list of extortions is endless. When an eviction is threatened they promise more money and votes as captive vote banks of local dadas.

While the government is lifting some restrictions on large-scale business and trade, the small traders (especially the hawkers and the vendors) are still subjected to restrictions which make it illegal for them to carry on their trades. Although there are no reliable figures of the total number of persons engaged in vending in the country, it is estimated that in the city of Bombay alone there are 250,000 vendors. This gives us a glimpse of the vastness of this sector. Yet almost all the vendors in our country are "illegal" and subject to archaic licensing laws. They live in mortal dread of the staff of local municipalities, licensing authorities and local police who systematically parasite on them. Even after making regular payoffs to all these sarkari tyrants, they are subjected to frequent rounds-ups, challans, confiscation of their goods, fines and then pay even more bribes -- all this for the ostensible purpose of clearing the city of unauthorised encroachments. However, the real purpose of this harassment is to get still more money out of them and keep them in a state of fear so they won't resist paying even larger protection amounts in the future. SEWA of Gujarat had to fight a long drawn-out legal battle which went up to the Supreme Court t o defend the right of women vegetable vendors to ply their trade where they had been selling vegetables for generations. Yet even after a mutually agreed upon settlement and payment of mutually agreed upon fees, their status is still not "legally" regularised.

The poor need to be liberated from the clutches of the government even more urgently than the rich. Take the example of a cycle rickshaw puller in Delhi, whose job is extremely arduous, poor paying and on the bottom rungs of our urban economy. Let us examine how the licence-permit system is used by our sarkari babus to fleece rickshaw pullers on every possible pretext. Up to a few years ago the Municipal Corporation of Delhi had a fixed quota of 20,000 rickshaw permits for the entire city of Delhi. In recent years this was revised to 50,000 rickshaws. Legal rickshaws must pay a licence fee of Rs 27 per rickshaw and t he licence has to be renewed yearly. In this trade, which absorbs a large number of poor rural migrants, the number of "illegal" rickshaws -- i.e., without an official licence is believed to be twice the number of the "legal" rickshaws. This is because:

• the demand for rickshaws far outstrips the sanctioned quota; and
• getting a licence is neither easy nor does it protect rickshaw pullers from official harassment.

To begin with they would have to pay hefty bribes to get a licence. The fee itself may be a mere Rs 27 per year but the going rate for "buying" a license in the black market is Rs 500-600 per rickshaw. You simply cannot get it without paying the bribes. However, getting a licence does not ensure that they can thereafter carry on their trade without extortion and harassment. In fact, the way the whole trade is regulated by the corporation makes it less of a hassle to ply an "illegal" rickshaw rented from a big operator (who can handle the police) rather than to own one legally. This is how it works.

The big fleet owners get dozens or even hundreds of benami licences made by suitably greasing palms. In addition, they pay regular local haftas to the police. Each thekedar has in addition several unlicensed rickshaws for which he pays any thing between Rs 60 to Rs 90 per month as protection money to Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) babus. Estimating there are at a minimum 50,000 illegal rickshaws in Delhi, this amounts to Rs 35 lakh per month as bribes at the rate of Rs 70 per rickshaw. This is apart from what the babus get in black money (Rs 100 to 150) for yearly renewal of licences and other extortions.

The MCD conducts frequent raids in each zone during which all the rickshaws are rounded up and towed away to MCD premises to check their legal status. Those that have a licence are released after the owner shows all the documents and pays Rs 30 as bribe money per rickshaw. However, the amount demanded can be very arbitrary. I met a contractor whose 50 legal rickshaws had been seized. He had been unable to get them released because the amount demanded of him (Rs 300 per rickshaw) was beyond his capacity to pay. Therefore he has had to simply fold up his trade. Out of this sum a certain percentage goes to the head office at the Town Hall and the rest is shared among the officials involved in the raid. The "illegal" rickshaw owners have to pay a fine o f Rs 100 and Rs 3 per day extra for each day the rickshaw lies at the MCD storehouse. Often an enthusiastic bureaucrat decides that too many rickshaws are causing traffic congestion and, therefore, the illegal ones should be confiscated and then destroyed or auctioned. At such times the bribe rate goes up and the owners have to pay anything from Rs 350 to Rs 600 to secure the release of the rickshaw before they are auctioned.

Apart from these payments, monthly haftas are paid to the police by the fleet owners. Yet this does not spare them occasional confiscation of rickshaws by the traffic police on the ground that they are plying in prohibited zones. The Okhla area is the most lucrative of all zones in Delhi (from the point of view of the bribe extractors) because in this zone all rickshaws are illegal as there is no sanctioned quota for Okhla.

In addition, the MCD can fine a licence-holding rickshaw for any number of violations, such as not having a bell or a light on the front handle, reflectors at the back, or proper mud guards. When caught, the licenced rickshaws have to pay a fine of Rs 100 per vehicle and storage charges however many the number of days the rickshaw is held, plus at least Rs 30 as bribe for the release. Despite all the fines for missing safety accessories, virtually no rickshaw in Delhi has the accessories expected of it because checking them is merely a pretext for harassment rather than a method of achieving safer rickshaw transport.

Thus, the one lakh rickshaw drivers in the city of Delhi alone seem to be giving anything from 1-2 crore worth of bribes every month to the MCD babus and hawaldars. In addition, they are constantly harassed, demeaned and made to feel like criminal s for simply providing an essential service and earning a meagre livelihood through their hard labour. They are harassed for parking their vehicles at night and harassed for occupying space on the roads though they pay road tax as much as anyone else. N o wonder only big contractors can cope with the system and ordinary rickshaw drivers prefer to rent at exorbitant rates rather than put themselves at the direct mercy of the sarkar. The rickshaw rent thus includes protection money. An important consequence of this draining system is that no one has either the motivation or the capital to improve the quality of the rickshaws or even to keep them in good repair. Most of them are of primitive vintage and in a dilapidated condition, requiring much more effort and strength to drive them than they would be if the drivers owned their own machines and had an incentive to keep them in good repair and upgrade them as they earned more money. Most important of all, their illegal status makes rickshaw puller s forever frightened and easy to tyrannise.

Thus our bureaucratic machinery is working overtime to keep the people poor and grovelling. Poverty is not a natural condition. People all over the world have a natural tendency to better their material conditions, and struggle against scarcity and deprivation. Whenever you see a group of people unable to fend for themselves, it's wise to look around and see who or what is obstructing them. When you see water go up a slope it is obvious that there is some external force like a booster pump which is making that happen. Similarly, when you see people in a state of destitution or grinding poverty, it is safe to assume some person or group has worked hard to reduce them to that condition by obstructing them from taking care of their own needs. The only effective way to alleviate poverty, therefore, is to remove the hurdles in the way of people fending for themselves in a dignified fashion.

Poor, middle class or even rich, there is literally no activity you can carry out in any area which involves contact with the government without greasing palms or being humiliated and made to appear like a grovelling supplicant before an imperial authority. You have to pay off for everything -- getting a house plan sanctioned, getting an electricity or a water connection, getting a driving licence, a phone connection or even getting a death certificate! For instance, the going rate for buying a licence in black for a coolie's job at a small town railway station is about Rs 15,000. At Delhi railway station the rate is over one lakh rupees.

Just ask the poor how they fear going near a government office or near a police station. It is well known that even beggars pay regular haftas to get police clearance to beg or else they will be arrested under the Vagrancy Act or under some other law. Beggars are frequently rounded up and jailed because the government assumes the right to prevent people from seeking alms, even if they are destitute.

Our police are known to extract large regular haftas from brothels. According to a survey conducted by the Indian Health Organisation, a Bombay based outfit, the monthly police earnings from brothels in Bombay run into many crores of rupees. The 300 odd brothels in Parwalla Lane, for instance,pay Rs 1000 each per month as hafta. On Falkland Road about 3000 brothels pay Rs 300 each per month. This money apparently reaches even departments like the CID vigilance. These payoffs continue despite th e fact that prostitution is legal in Bombay. In Delhi, to get a posting as the SHO for G.B. Road, where many brothels are situated, policemen are reported to be paying Rs 10-15 lakh rupees as a bribe to their seniors in charge of transfers.

In fact, crime in our society is directly proportionate to people's proximity to government offices, courts and police stations. The closer you come to these institutions, the more crime and corruption you witness. The further you go from them, the more you witness the innate honesty of most people in this country. Even today, remote villages which are accessible from district headquarters witness less crime.

Today, the biggest obstacle to our economic and moral well-being as a society are the various crippling sarkari controls which make all of us, but especially enterprising working people and the poor, into helpless supplicants before all of those who man t he government machinery. Our bureaucracy has been allowed to trample on our self respect for too long and has cultivated habits of dependency and passivity in our people. This grovelling dependency has destroyed the inner health of our society as well as its power of resistance against evil in much the same way as the AIDS virus destroys a body's immune system. This is perhaps why even those who claim to speak on behalf of the poor cannot go beyond encouraging people to hope that somehow the sarkar will take care of all their needs.

In actual fact, poverty alleviation has become among the most lucrative businesses for our politicians and bureaucrats. Anti-poverty schemes, what with billions of rupees coming from firengi aid agencies to help our poor, provide them grand opportunities for more loot. The best poverty alleviation programme can be that this parasite sarkar get off the people's backs. De-bureaucratisation should not be confined to public sector undertaking. It should be extended to many of the state-owned Corporations supposedly created for the benefit of the poor -- such as the Forest Corporation, Handloom and Handicrafts Corporations, Fisheries Corporation, Khadi and Village Industries Corporation. Because of the financial backing of the government, these corporations have become notorious for wasting money, inefficient functioning, and outright corruption. Despite all the money that is being pumped into them by various ministries, they are still unable to compete with small private traders. Almost all of them run at huge losses and are known to harass and exploit the artisans worse than any private trader. They need to be freed from government control and ministries and handed over to the artisans whose interests they are supposed to serve and made to compete in the market.