In Bastar’s dark interiors, the Naxals are running schools for children, teaching them to be wary of the government.
0n 29 December last year, joint forces comprising the CRPF and state police busted a Naxal training camp during a combing operation in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district, 450 km to the south of Chhattisgarh’s capital city Raipur. INN visited Jappemarka village where the encounter had taken place and found that besides training camps, the Naxals were also running schools for children in the densely forested region.
It takes a two-day trek through forest trails, after crossing the Bailadila hills — known for the National Mineral Development Corporation’s iron ore mines and forming the border between Dantewada and Bijapur districts — to reach this village. In a small clearing amid the woods just outside the village, a group of children greet INN with shouts of “Lal Salaam”, reminding us that we are in Naxal country. They are students of an Ashram Shala (residential school) run by the Naxals for 30-odd children from the nearby half-a-dozen villages.
Then the children sing a song in Gondi, the local tribal language. The song is on “the importance of education in making a revolution”, we are told. This is a region where the Naxals have set up what they call the Janatana Sarkar, or “people’s government”.
Motiram, a student at the Jappemarka Ashram Shala, says he wants to become a teacher in a Naxal school. Motiram doesn’t know the national anthem, but he knows how to hide if the police suddenly show up. But his ‘teacher’ Sukhlal, who was once a member of a Naxal dalam (armed squad), claims the children are not trained in warfare. “They are only given general physical education like in government- run schools,” he says. “After the Salwa Judum (an anti-Naxal campaign) started, the government has closed down all schools in this area. As the villages here are believed to be Naxal-dominated, these children cannot go to schools elsewhere. The Naxal-run schools are their only means of getting education.”
The children are taught from textbooks prepared in Gondi by the ‘education department’ of the Janatana Sarkar, besides the same Hindi textbooks that are used in government schools in Chhattisgarh. Even the school uniform is similar.
Besides Sukhlal, the Jappemarka school has one more teacher and two cooks, who are paid Rs 1,000 every month. The school offers education till Class V. So what will the children do after that? “They can work for the Janatana Sarkar, teach in the Naxal-run schools or become village healthcare workers,” says Sukhlal, who studied till Class V at the government school at Mirtur, 10 km away. The exact locations of the Naxal-run schools are kept secret from ‘outsiders’ as top Naxal leaders visit them occasionally.
When the police raided Jappemarka village on 29 December last year, Sonu, a ‘Class III student’ at the Ashram, hailing from nearby Bechapal village, could not flee into the forests with the others. He says the police thrashed him and let him go only after he said he studied in the government school at Mirtur. Though the Ashram Shala was set on fire during the raid, the children say it is being rebuilt again at another “secret” location.
During the two-day trek to Jappemarka, INN was accompanied by Mohan, the commander of the Bhansi local guerrilla squad. Mohan was a Class V student at the Mirtur government school in 2005 when Salwa Judum started operations in the area. He says atrocities by the Judum forced him to join the Naxals. Mohan showed us several spots where pressure bombs and booby traps had been planted. On receiving information of police presence, the pressure bombs are wired and the wooden covers removed from the trap holes.
Life in these villages is not easy. The villagers often have to spend the nights in the forests to evade police raids. Ramesh, a resident of Udepal village, says the monsoon months are the most difficult, when the tribals cannot even light a fire to ward off wild animals.
In Udepal, INN also met Dashru Mandavi, who says he once aspired to become a government officer. In 2005, after completing his primary education from Mirtur, he enrolled in the government-run residential school at Gangalur for further studies.
Salwa Judum was at its height at the time. One evening, some armed policemen from Gangalur police station came to the school, asked him if he was the dada (Naxal) from Udepal, and then took him away. Later in the night, Dashru told the guard at the police station that he wanted to use the toilet and managed to slip away. The police came to Udepal looking for him, but he had already escaped into the nearby forests.
Dashru says he has not joined the Naxals, but one of his brothers, Sukuram, was shot dead in Udepal in 2006, and two years later, three more of his brothers were arrested. Two of them, Misra Ram and Mangu, died in custody, Dashru alleges, while the third, Bugra, is still in the jail. Dashru claims the police did not even hand over Mangu’s body to the family.
Mahendra Karma, a senior leader of the Congress who is known as the founder of the Salwa Judum, told INN in Dantewada that if the police have indeed destroyed the Naxal-run school in Jappemarka, it was the right thing to do. “The Naxals have destroyed hundreds of government schools.”
Rating a budget is always an interesting exercise, because any evaluation is based on the presupposed expectations that one had. The attempt here is to take things at face value and see if the budget has addressed the issues appropriately.
First, let us look at the growth assumption in Budget 2013-14. This is critical because last year the FM assumed 7.6 percent growth which did not quite materialize, throwing things out of kilter. This year, based on the fiscal deficit numbers, one can work backwards at what kind of growth we have assumed. The number is 12.9 percent in nominal GDP, which is real GDP plus inflation. Given that the government is talking of inflation remaining low now that it has started coming down, it could be assumed to be 6-6.5 percent, which means real GDP has been taken to be between 6.5-7 percent or 6.7 percent, as per the upper limit specified by the Economic Survey.
The question is whether or not we can achieve this number. It looks difficult, considering that we are talking of 5 percent growth for FY13 and there seems to be nothing significant happening at the ground level. If this assumption goes wrong, then the entire structure will crack. What happens to the fiscal deficit ratio in that case?
The fiscal deficit ratio has been assumed to be 4.8 percent of GDP for FY14. The FM has shown resolution in attaining last year’s target. How has he done it considering that there has been slippage in expenditure to a large extent on subsidy and inadequate collections from spectrum sales and disinvestment? He has simply slashed expenditures across the board. Therefore, there is reason for us to believe that in case we run into such slippages, the FM will repeat the action to ensure that the target is maintained. Then what happens to expenditure, which is the third issue of the Budget.
The FM has cut down on project expenditure by as much as 20 percent to control the deficit last year. The same will be replicated here in case of a recurrence. In terms of the other numbers that cannot be compromised it looks unlikely that there could be slippages. We have a diesel policy in place and there is an extra allocation for food subsidy in the light of the likely passage of the food security bill. Therefore, with no expected slippages here (which are the usual suspects), it may be expected that the FM will cut down on project expenditure that will slow down the growth process again.
The fourth issue is whether the fiscal deficit will have an impact on interest rates? The net borrowing programme of the government is higher by around Rs 17,000 cr over last year. Therefore, if the target is maintained, we may not expect liquidity strain to be there even though the gross borrowing programme is as high as Rs 6.3 lakh crore (there are repayments of Rs 1.45 lakh crore this year). One may not expect pressure on liquidity and hence the fear that private sector will be crowed out is not founded. The call on interest rates will be with the RBI which will have its own evaluation.
Fifth, does the Budget stimulate savings? There have been only feeble attempts to take in savings through the Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme even though a lot has been spoken about the need to increase financial savings and move households away from gold. We do not see anything on increasing the tax limit for on savings under 80C section and hence the budget has not really addressed this issue – which it could have done if it wanted. Quite clearly, the FM is not in a mood to give much away.
Sixth, will the budget bring in investment? Here the budget has spoken of infrastructure debt funds (IDFs) and a greater role for IIFCL. He has spoken of ways to get in more FII funds. Companies investing in fresh machinery above Rs 100 crore would get a setoff of 15 percent. Will this help? It will definitely help to channel in some investment, but it cannot be significant to turn the growth process around. Growth has to come from elsewhere.
Seventh, is agriculture to get a boost? Yes, there are measures for farmers to get more credit and interest subvention for those who pay on time. Also private banks will be included in this scheme for the first time. There is some talk on setting up more warehouses as also the spread of the Green Revolution. Therefore, there is a positive here for this sector.
Eighth, is the budget populist? It can be interpreted either way depending on how one looks at it. Given the commitment to inclusive growth, spending on NREGA cannot be contested nor can the expense on food subsidy related with the Food Security Bill. These are also necessities since we have at least 325 million poor people. It becomes the prime responsibility of the government to provide support.
Ninth, will inflation come down or increase? The budget is neutral to inflation as it really does nothing to either increase or decrease prices and hence can be taken to be a positive. Revenue is to come from higher growth and not higher tax rates though some products will witness an increase in excise and customs.
Last, is the budget realistic in its assumptions and aspirations? It is a bit bold when it comes to growth assumption, and quite realistic about others. Even the bold assumption may not be a concern for the FM who will be willing to cut expenses again to protect the 4.8 percent number.
A rating of 7 out of 10 would be right for this one.
Moral policing. Attacks on minorities. Intolerance of the media. Karnataka’s coastal city Mangalore is in the grip of right-wing hooligans.
After a brief lull in 2011 and the early part of 2012, incidents of moral policing and violence are back in the coastal town of Mangalore, Karnataka. Situated between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, the town with a population of just under 5 lakh, has been a hotbed of aggressive Hindutva nationalism ever since the 2009 pub attack case, when members of the Shri Ram Sene vandalised a local pub and beat up the customers there in the name of moral policing.
Four years later, not much has changed. It has been three months since local journalist Naveen Soorinje was wrongfully jailed on charges of conspiracy, unlawful assembly, rioting with deadly weapons, criminal trespass, causing grievous hurt and assault on a woman with intent to outrage her modesty.
Soorinje’s crime? On 28 July 2012, he had captured on video camera a similar attack, this time on youngsters having a party in a private homestay. The whole nation was stunned with pictures of goons belonging to the Hindu Jagarana Vedike (HJV) — an outfit affiliated to the Sangh Parivar — roughing up young boys and girls, some even molesting the girls.
Whereas the Karnataka High Court cleared Soorinje of all the charges, it denied him bail simply for not having informed the police. On 31 January, following a campaign to free Soorinje, the Karnataka Cabinet cleared a note for dropping all charges against the 24-year-old scribe. As this article goes to print, it would have been a month since the note reached Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar for final approval.
Such attacks on the media are not a new phenomenon in Mangalore. On 5 February, the Karavali Ale newspaper had carried a story citing police reports that Keshav, an HJV activist, was the main drug peddler in the Surathkal area. Keshav is a known associate of Satyajit Surathkal, a big name in the HJV, and was arrested by the police with 650 gm of marijuana in his possession.
In response, HJV activists attacked the newspaper’s office, ransacking it and causing injuries to the staff. Two senior staff members had to be hospitalised. A week later, another staff member was waylaid in the dark and attacked with iron rods, sticks and other weapons.
This was not the first time Karavali Ale had been attacked. The paper used to come under regular attack from the Sangh Parivar when Soorinje was a reporter there. “The fear of another possible attack has reduced my staff strength from 20 to four,” says BV Seetharam, editor and proprietor of Karavali Ale.
Sudipto Mondal of The Hindu remembers the time when he came very close to being assaulted by the Sangh Parivar. “Subhash Padil, one of the perpetrators of the July homestay attack, was also part of the infamous pub attack in January 2009. He had once threatened to stab me with a trident,” recalls Mondal.
Incidents of violence have come to characterise Mangalore even more in the recent past and have now become commonplace. Human rights group People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has documented 300 incidents of violence by right-wing fringe groups between 1998 and 2012 in Mangalore. Interestingly, 253 of these happened after the BJP assumed power in 2008. The Bajrang Dal has itself claimed that its cadres have carried out more attacks in the past two years and “rescued more girls” than what has been reported.
“A lot of what we do does not get reported these days because we do not alert the media all the time… Plus, (Hindu) girls usually learn the lesson,” says Puneeth, a young Bajrang Dal worker. “We don’t find them mingling with Muslims boys that often anymore.”
Mangalore PUCL Convenor Suresh Bhat Bakrabail, 67, who has painstakingly documented all such attacks from newspapers, says it is simply impossible to keep a tab on every incident, as “it’s almost on an everyday basis. There’s always something in one or the other newspaper every day”. A look at a few incidents from 2012 alone gives an idea of what he means:
1) 23 January: During a local fair, the police had to resort to lathicharge to control an unruly mob. What started as a harmless conversation between a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy selling watermelons, soon catapulted into a full-blown crisis, when around 150 Hindutva activists first beat the boy, Nazir, and then went around breaking shops belonging to Muslims.
2) 27 February: A Hindu girl working at a beauty parlour had requested a Muslim boy working in the mobile shop next door to help her down the shutters at closing time. As the boy was helping her, a group of people led by the owner of a local garage suddenly appeared on the scene and attacked both of them.
3) 16 March: Prakash Poojary, editor of Hi Udupi magazine, was beaten up by BJP members and Hindutva activists, while distributing the magazine in town. Poojary said that he was attacked for writing about the St Mary’s Island rave party (a State-sponsored event to promote tourism, in which tourists were found consuming psychotropic substances). “If you wish to write about Hindu organisations, be prepared for the consequences,” he recalled his attackers as saying.
4) 17 March: Six people, allegedly of the Sri Ram Sene, barged into the offices of Karavali Maruta, a local Kannada magazine, and ransacked the office. The group was angry about an article criticising them.
5) 7 April: Hussain, 53, was on his way to Mangalore to sell cattle, when a group of Bajrang Dal activists started following the tempo he was driving. Scared, he tried to speed away, but the vehicle veered out of control and overturned at Kottara. According to Hussain’s son Nazir, “the incident took place at around 6 am”. Hussain’s leg was trapped under the vehicle and the Bajrang Dal men, instead of helping him, attacked with swords and wooden planks. This happened in front of a police station.
6) 12 May: Members of the Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva outfits of the twin districts, Udupi and Dakshina Kannada, such as Durga Vahini and Matru Mandal, objected to the screening of the film Katari Veera Surasundarangi. They said that the film portrayed Hindu gods and goddesses in a poor light. The activists vandalised theatres, forcing owners to cancel the screening.
7) 24 June: Members of an alleged local Hindu outfit assaulted a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl because they were talking to each other in a deserted spot. The boy was then handed over to the Mangalore South police.
8) 4 September: Sabira, a student of Government College, Bellary, was sitting with her friends — all Muslims — inside the university campus during a bandh called by the ABVP, when they were accosted by the outfit’s members. Sabira was beaten so badly that she had to be admitted to a hospital. Three months before that, ABVP members had pulled her burqa when she was returning home and had threatened her against wearing it to college.
Shockingly, Hindutva groups do not express any regret at the provocations and incidents of violence. On the contrary, they seem to take pride in their work and speak of it in gloating terms.
Sharan Pumpwell, district president of the Bajrang Dal, is one of those Sangh leaders in Mangalore who have been able to bring several boys into the Dal.
“More than 7,000 Hindu girls have been abducted by Muslims, who force them to fall in love and convert. We are the ones who rescue them,” says Pumpwell. Interestingly, Pumpwell also runs a security agency where his men provide security to one of Mangalore’s biggest malls, City Centre, which is owned by a Muslim. The mall also has one of the poshest pubs in Mangalore. When asked about it, Pumpwell was reluctant to say anything.
On its part, the police denies that it plays a partisan role in such incidents. “We do not tolerate moral policing,” says Pratap Reddy, IGP (Western Range). “Our primary concern is to diffuse the situation, so that it does not go out of hand. Sometimes, the police take the boy or the girl out of the scene for their own safety. However, that does not mean we endorse a particular kind of morality.”
The rise of Hindtuva in coastal Karnataka dates back to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the 1990s, when LK Advani came to Mangalore as part of his Rath Yatra. According to K Phaniraj of the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike (Karnataka Forum for Communal Harmony), the Sangh launched a big movement in 1989 to consolidate castes like Poojaris, Bunts, Billavas and Moghaveera, and revive Hindutva.
The impunity with which these groups operate also stems from the political backing they seem to have got over the years. In August 2007, the then deputy home minister BS Yeddyurappa dropped as many as 51 cases against Sangh Parivar activists, including Shri Ram Sene chief Pramod Muthalik. According to media reports dated 28 January 2009 (four days after the infamous pub attack case), the state Cabinet withdrew more than 42 cases registered against Muthalik.
Again, on 20 February 2010, the Cabinet took the decision to withdraw 17 criminal cases registered against ABVP members. And on 17 June 2010, the state Cabinet withdrew all pending criminal cases against Sangh Parivar activists. In one stroke, the Cabinet withdrew cases against the persons responsible for the attacks against minorities in various cases.
In a strict electoral sense, the stakes seem even in Mangalore. In the eight constituencies of the Dakshina Kannada district, of which Mangalore is a part, the Congress and the BJP have four seats each. But the Sangh Parivar enjoys an overall control over the district administration. “They have cadres and booth-level workers, and can mobilise various outfits during elections, which the Congress lacks,” says UT Khader, an influential Congress leader.
Phaniraj, in fact, believes that Mangalore holds the key in many senses. “I do not feel that Hindu votes will go away from the BJP simply because they have been corrupt in the past five years,” he says. “The cards are currently held by the Hindutva forces in Mangalore. Whenever it wants, the saffron brigade can pull out a joker and change the game.”
Why the suicides may not stop even if Telangana becomes a new state? A suicide phenomenon is unfolding in Telangana, similar to the self-immolation of Tibetans demanding a ‘Free Tibet’, but the demand for a new state is not the only factor fuelling it. In 2013 alone, there have been five reported cases of suicide, mostly among students. While most suicide notes, like that of 19-year-old Kadavendi Neeraj Bharadwaj, a civil engineering student from Warangal, who took his own life on 4 February, blame the Congress for its inaction on the issue of a separate Telangana state, that is not the whole story.
Between November 2009 and January 2012, Telangana had seen 849 suicides. While some of the suicides have been over the issue of statehood, many are the result of debilitating socio-economic conditions. Today, farmers, weavers and students are being pushed to the brink by a deadly cocktail of poverty, indebtedness, agrarian crisis, dim employment prospects and constant political propaganda that they have no future without a separate state.
While lives are being lost, political muckraking continues to rage in Andhra Pradesh. A local court in Ranga Reddy district in the Telangana region, acting on a private petition, has urged the police to register FIRs against Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and the Congress AP in-charge Ghulam Nabi Azad for “making false promises, cheating the people and creating a situation dangerous to social order”. A Hyderabad-based BJP leader has moved another private petition against UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi for abetting suicides in Telangana.
In the Telangana movement, the lower castes seem to have become the foot-soldiers whose suicides are often the result of being pushed into an existence devoid of human dignity. In fact, almost all those who killed themselves in the name of Telangana were from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) or Other Backward Castes (OBCs), while no one from the Velamma community of K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) — the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) supremo leading the Telangana movement — is reported to have committed suicide.
In the village of Mansanapalli in Warangal district’s Bachannapet mandal, nobody knows that better than the parents of 25- year-old Ponnaibona Ashok. Belonging to the extremely backward Mudiraj caste (hereditary village watchmen), they work on their 2-acre farm that barely fetches them an annual income of 50,000. On the morning of 14 December 2009, Ashok consumed pesticide and left behind a one-page suicide note, barely a month after completing his BEd course, which said he had failed to find a job despite his education. “He thought Telangana was the only hope if he was to land a job,” says Ramaswamy Yadagiri, his father.
Soon after Ashok’s suicide, activists from pro-Telangana groups arrived in the village and claimed he had died for Telangana, driven purely by the “sense of betrayal for not being given a separate state”. A large number of youth in the village are graduates, some are even postgraduates. Most loiter around the village and help their families in the fields.
Mansanapalli is part of an ‘atrocity prone area’ under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. No village in the Bachannapet mandal has received funds under the Rajiv Yuva Shakti Scheme, launched in 2004 by the then CM of AP, YS Rajashekhara Reddy, for providing employment to the youth. “Many students drop out at the higher secondary level because they have to help their parents in the fields,” says Ashok’s roommate Srisailam. “Those who manage to reach college and graduate also end up working in the fields along with the school dropouts.”
While many youth from Telangana’s villages study in the big cities of AP, few manage to eke out a living there and often return to a life that seldom justifies the huge investments made in acquiring their degrees. Agriculture, too, is a risky proposition. A drought-prone region, Telangana’s woes have multiplied with the massive use of borewells. In Ashok’s village, the water table has dropped to 150 feet and many farmers face crop failure in a bad rain year. The passbook of Ashok’s parents shows they still owe the bank a sum of Rs 45,000 and are teetering on the brink of defaulting on loan repayments with another Rs 10,000 due to an LIC agent.
While suicides are invariably branded as emotional responses to a political problem, politicians in the state have been guilty of pushing real issues like unemployment and chronic indebtedness under the carpet, choosing instead to hijack personal tragedies and drown them in the cacophony of propaganda. Take the case of Manda Srinivas, a 32-year-old farmer from Athmakuru village of Warangal district. TRS activists and panchayat leaders claim Srinivas died “fasting” for Telangana on 22 December 2009. Srinivas left behind a wife and two daughters aged 10 and 4, who now live in a one-room house in the Dalit quarter of the village. Srinivas had taken a 2-acre plot on lease for cotton farming, on an annual rent of Rs 15,000. To buy pesticides and hire labourers, he took a loan of 1 lakh at a low annual interest of 5 percent, besides promising a part of his produce as part of the repayment.
In December 2009, Srinivas took his cotton produce to the market, but it was rejected on account of its poor quality by private buyers as well as the Cotton Corporation of India. Confronted by his creditors and humiliated, Srinivas consumed pesticide on the night of 22 December that year. “When Srinivas could not support his family, he ended his life. A Dalit who barely managed to keep his family alive could not have given up his life for Telangana,” says Sanga Mahendra, a member of the Dalit organisation Madiga Reservation Porata Samiti. After Srinivas’ death, his wife now works as an agricultural labourer on a daily wage of Rs 100-150. The daughters too join in on some days when work is abundant, bunking school to augment the family income.
The Telangana region has been a hotbed for suicides, especially among farmers, weavers and others from the backward castes. Two-thirds of the suicides in AP from 1996 to 2007 were reported from this region. The Sri Krishna Committee report notes, “Due to drought, failure of new varieties of cotton and loss of livelihood among weavers, between May 2004 and November 2005, Telangana reported 663 suicides out of a total of 1,068 reported suicides (in AP). Based on an analysis of one district from each region, Prakasam from coastal Andhra, Medak from Telangana and Anantapur from Rayalaseema, coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema showed greater number of suicides among the forward castes while Telangana showed a distribution across forward castes, OBCs and SCs.”
While suicides due to distress, especially among the Dalits and the backward castes, have been a recurrent feature in Telangana, the 2009-10 phase of the agitation for statehood saw 313 suicides between 30 November 2009 and 27 February 2010, 218 of which were committed by people aged 18-50. “Many were influenced by the antics of KCR and his nephew Harish Rao. On 29 November that year, Harish doused himself with kerosene but could not find a matchbox to light the fire. KCR threatened to cut himself with broken glass and bleed to death,” says S Simhadri, a professor at Osmania University (OU), Hyderabad. “This sent a dangerous message to young and gullible minds already apprehensive about the future. They kept reminding the people that Telangana is the panacea to all their woes. Many youngsters saw in such actions a chance to redeem their lives and become heroes.”
Simhadri’s opinion finds an echo in the Sri Krishna report, which notes, “The oratory of TRS leader KC Rao has made them believe that a secure future for them lies only in a separate state.” Psychologists term this phenomenon as the ‘Marilyn Monroe syndrome’, where people blindly kill themselves after the death of their revered icon.
One worrying aspect of this politics of suicide is the predominance of students who have succumbed to it. On 19 February 2010, Venugopal Reddy, a 19-year-old student of a private college on Hyderabad’s outskirts, was found charred beyond recognition behind an auditorium of the OU. Soon after, the nation was shocked by visuals of a youngster ablaze outside the university gates. Yadaiah, an orphan who worked at a local restaurant to fund his own education, was neither a student of OU nor associated with any political party. Once his self-immolation was aired live on TV, politicians of every colour scrambled to brand it a Telangana suicide. However, many photojournalists who were present near Yadaiah recall he was shouting, “Save me, please save me” rather than “Jai Telangana”, as the TRS claimed.
Students from Telangana are often the first in their families to reach college and have a steely resolve to succeed. Take Meegada Sai Kumar, son of a marginal farmer and a second year chemical engineering student, who was paying his way through college by giving private maths tuitions. He hanged himself to death on 7 November 2010. “Kumar was frustrated that exams were not being postponed despite a shutdown of classes at OU, and feared he would fail because of the time he lost participating in the Telangana movement,” says Kumar’s close friend.
Few people have seen this frenzy at such close quarters as Diana Monteiro of the Hyderabad Institute of Psychology. Diana admits there has been a spate of ‘copycat suicides’, with students emulating what they see on the television. Within 12 hours of Yadaiah’s suicide, three other students committed suicide after watching the footage on television. Many students have got their friends to visit Monteiro for counselling when they saw suicidal tendencies in them. “The glorification of suicides by politicians exacerbate the suicidal tendencies among students from Telangana. The OU is an unpredictable place where the situation changes from calm to volatile in a matter of seconds. It can be shut down a day before exams and this really scares poor students, who are the only hope for their families,” says Monteiro. “The Telangana agitation reinforces these fears, and students are pushed to the brink by the propaganda of a doomed future without a new state.”
Yet, not many are willing to question the leaders who brand every suicide a contribution to the political goals of the Telangana movement. Till date, the TRS has not issued any directive calling for an end to suicides. “It’s not as if students are not bothered by social issues. The only way to stop these suicides is to form Telangana,” says M Kodandaram, Convener, Telangana Joint Action Committee.
There are no signs that the suicides will stop. Farmers are still consuming pesticides when they cannot afford one square meal a day. Weavers are committing suicide when they cannot bear the daily humiliation by their creditors. Dalit students are ending their lives when they fail to extricate their families from a life of misery. Opportunistic elements seem to have hijacked a people’s movement, ensuring that even if Telangana becomes a new state, it will only be a mirror image of what it is as part of AP. The suicides reveal what pushes people to the edge: feudalistic mindsets and perennial problems, both of which won’t go away anytime soon.
While Finance Minister of India P Chidambaram played the knight in the shining armour role to the hilt, going all out to woo the Indian woman – with an all-woman bank, the ‘Nirbhaya’ fund and an empathetic lecture on the girl child- after the shock value wears out, we are only left with measures which at best might only scrape the tip of the iceberg that is women’s development and security in our country.
Firstly, the all-woman bank. Chidambaram himself acknowledged in his speech there are women at the helm of several national and international banking operations. So, what exactly is the need of an all-woman bank?
It’s definitely to fund issues related to safety of women . Like the FM pointed out, it will create employment for women and help fund enterprises floated by women. However, there is little that the budget had to encourage women to turn entrepreneurs.
Kavita Krishnan of the AIPWA pointed out: “The idea of the bank is too unclear right now. He said nothing about what exactly the bank is supposed to do, apart from making a feel-good statement that is.”
“Women in India don’t have the basic health facilities. Thousands of villages don’t have a single primary healthcare centre, there are no gynecologists, pregnancy deaths are so common, how will the bank help all these women? We immediately need a facility that helps detect the various forms of cancer women are susceptible to… women in villages don’t have any facility to detect the disease till it has spread fatally,” she said.
The FM must have hoped to make just the right noises with announcing the Nirbhaya fund. However, not everyone is flattered. Doubts that the Rs 1,000 crore fund will just rot in the ministry coffers as a lazy bureaucracy takes ages to implement existent laws and tighten security measures seemed to have marred the declaration.
“How is the Nirbhaya fund supposed to make me feel safe when I step out at night when I know it’s just a lot of money resting with people who have done little all these years,” said Delhi resident, 25-year-old Arpita Chakraborty.
Krishnan says that the Nirbhaya Fund seems more like a corpus fund meant to be utilised when needed. She might be right, given what Chidambaram said during his speech was, “I urge the Ministry for Women and Child Development to figure out strategies to utilise this fund and make the country safer for women.”
He didn’t specify and ‘strategies’ that the ministry wasn’t possibly sitting on all this while, waiting a Rs 1,000 crore fillip to arrive, right?
Twitter was abuzz with suggestions that the fund might just turn into another opportunity for a scam.
“Let them implement the Justice Verma report first. What about setting up the shelter homes and the safe houses. What about revamping the shelter homes which as as bad as jails for women already? What about trauma care centres for rape victims, acid attack victims? Is the Nirbhaya fund going to address all those needs?” asks Krishnan.
She also points out that the Rs 200 crore allocation for ‘vulnerable’ women is also not very promising. “Vulnerable women aren’t essentially widows and sexual assault victims. There are so many middle class and lower middle class women who are the sole breadwinners for the family, what does the budget have for them?”
Clearly, the FM has a few more questions to answer and this budget didn’t even address them.
Here come the creepy crawlies of P Chidambaram’s budget, which painted a rosy picture about expenditure controls and his fiscal deficit targets for this year and the next.
One fudge brought to Firstpost’s notice by Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta, a columnist, is what looks like under-provisioning for subsidies.
According to the subsidy numbers put out in the Expenditure Budget, the three big F’s – food, fertiliser and fuel – are shown to be capped at Rs 2.2 lakh crore.
So far, so good.
But look closer, and this is what the numbers look like. The food subsidy, estimated in 2012-13 at Rs 85,000 crore, is up to just Rs 90,000 crore despite the addition of Rs 10,000 crore for the Food Security Bill.
There are two problems here. One, since there is no way minimum support prices (MSPs) are going to be less in 2013-14 than this year, overall subsidies will rise even without the Food Bill’s additional Rs 10,000 crore charge.
Two, costs of food storage and movement are rising due to the reduction of diesel subsidies and increasing transport charges. So the bill will be higher even without a MSP hike. So how did the FM arrive at the mere Rs 5,000 crore hike in food subsidies, especially when fertiliser prices may be hiked, too.
Next, fuel – diesel, LPG and kerosene. The subsidy bill in 2012-13 is taken as Rs 96,880 crore (that is, only the centre’s share, excluding the subsidy paid by ONGC, Gail and Oil India). This number is down to Rs 65,000 crore next year.
Again, there are two problems. One, since diesel prices are barely being raised this year beyond the usual 50 paise a month, it is highly unlikely that full provision has been made this year. If this is true, part of the payments will shift to 2013-14, impacting the subsidy bill for next year.
Secondly, a lot depends on the crude price assumptions made while earmarking these subsidies. Unless the finance ministry has assumed fairly high prices (say, $110-120 a barrel), the estimates could go wrong. At current crude prices, diesel subsidies of Rs 10.27 a litre will take 20 months to end at the 50 paise a month rate – which will take us well into 2014-15. At the end of March 2014, only Rs 6 of the subsidy would have been neutralised. Rs 4 would still be left, assuming crude prices stay where they are now. But will they, if the world economy recovers?
Last, we should look at fertiliser. This year’s subsidy figure is Rs 65,974 crore. Next year’s is practically the same.
This can mean one of two things: there will be either a cap on subsidies (no such decision has been taken yet), or imported fertiliser prices will fall. There is also the issue of demand: assuming we have reasonable monsoons, usage may go up. This will increase subsidies even if prices fall.
Has Mr Chidambaram got his sums right?
Indian Finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has become a victim of his own image and track record this time round. A budget that would been hailed as very good if delivered by his predecessor, has now sent the markets into a sulk for not being Big Bang enough. It would have been okay for the Big Bong, now in Rashtrapati Bhavan, but not Chidambaram.
Having managed expectations and built up hopes of reviving the economy after he took charge again as FM in September 2012, Chidambaram’s Budget 2013 turned out to be somewhat of a dampener –- a ‘boring Budget’, as fund manager Samir Arora said on CNBC-TV18.
The Budget, which came against the backdrop of a few key major reform announcements by the government, some tough decisions on fuel subsidy and some plainspeak by the FM himself on how the growth momentum needed to be brought back, did not have that ‘awe’ factor which the markets and Corporate India had come to expect of Chidambaram. To be fair to the FM, however, he did attempt to address the key concerns in his speech, whether it was the need to create employment or bring in greater foreign investment or spur investment activity. But the measures announced in the Budget were clearly not Big Bang.
The best thing that can be said about the Budget, of course, is that it does nothing to unsettle the markets or corporate India – despite the 10 percent surcharge on the super rich (those with taxable incomes above Rs 1 crore) or even the higher surcharge on the dividend distribution tax. He plays with a pretty straight bat and delivers on his broad promise of keeping the fiscal deficit under check – at 5.2 percent of GDP for FY13 – and targets 4.8 percent for FY14. He has cut expenditure to Rs 4.29 lakh crore in FY13 and talks of redeeming the promise of bringing down the fisc to 3 percent by 2016-17.
Whatever the shortcomings, this Budget speech will get high marks for candour. The Finance Minister makes it clear that food inflation is the real worry and he would take all steps to ease the supply-side constraints to meet the growing demand for food items. The FM also made no bones about the fact that getting in foreign investment is a priority at this point, and India cannot choose between welcoming and spurning foreign investment.
“In the budget for 2012-13, the estimate of Plan Expenditure was too ambitious and the estimate of non-Plan Expenditure was too conservative. Faced with a huge fiscal deficit, I had no choice but to rationalise expenditure. We took a dose of bitter medicine. It seems to be working. We also took some policy decisions that had been deferred for too long, corrected some prices, and undertook a review of certain tax policies. We have retrieved some economic space,” Chidambaram says.
The Budget does focus on a few areas: an attempt at employment generation, some moves to please the capital markets, some steps which will make the small and medium enterprises and those who fund them happy. Equally important, he does not tinker with taxes much and keeps the base rates unchanged.
On the other hand, if you add up the measures, there’s probably enough to keep the political constituency happy with several steps aimed at the farm sector and the rural population. The interest subvention scheme for short-term crop loans will continue, and there are a slew of steps on education and health, with Rs 37,330 crore allocated to the health ministry. Almost Rs 66,000 crore has been allocated to the HRD ministry, and Rs 80,000 crore for rural development. There’s even a whole new bank for women.
Some concrete steps have been announced on the infrastructure front. Infrastructure debt funds will be encouraged, there will be a regulatory authority for the road sector and there will be tax-free infrastructure bonds to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore. On the investment side, an important move which could be good news for smaller and medium companies is the investment allowance of 15 percent on companies investing over Rs 100 crore in plant and machinery between 1 April 2013 and 31 March 2015.
The Budget also aims to bring in a greater proportion of household sector savings into financial instruments and hence proposes to liberalise the Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme, introduce inflation-linked instruments and give additional deduction of interest upto Rs 1 lakh for a person taking the first home loan of upto Rs 25 lakh, during 2013-14.
Though the capital market isn’t enthused by the Budget – the BSE Sensex is down about 92 points as this piece is being written – the Budget does attempt to appease the markets by giving it some sops.
Markets regulator Securities & Exchange Board of India (Sebi) will be strengthened further, designated depository participants can register different classes of portfolio investors subject to KYC and a major simplification is being worked on to ease the entry of foreign portfolio investors into the markets. FIIs will also be allowed entry into the exchange-traded currency derivatives segment.
In a proposal which is aimed at making the stockmarkets happy, the Securities Transaction Tax (STT) has been reduced for certain categories, and a Commodity Transaction Tax, introduced in a limited way for non-agricultural commodities, will try and bring in a level playing field between the two markets.
On the direct taxes side, the FM did admit he had very little room to give away tax revenues or raise tax rates in a ‘constrained economy’. However, the Budget gives a wee bit to the lowest tax bracket by way of a Rs 2,000 tax credit to every person with total income upto Rs 5 lakh. There have been no broad changes on the indirect taxes side, with the normal rate of 12 percent for excise and service tax being retained and the peak rate of basic customs duty for non-agricultural products retained at 10 percent.
But despite all these measures across a host of areas, where the Budget fails to score is in the Big Picture. There are no clear roadmaps on how the 4.8 percent fiscal deficit figure will be achieved, nothing really big to ensure investment activity gets a quick leg-up. Besides, whether the numbers will actually add up will remain to be seen, given the 30 percent increase he has announced in Plan expenditure for FY14.
After the fineprint is read, Chidambaram’s Budget 2013 will probably go down as a sincere attempt, but one which lacks the power which was required to get an economy seriously in need of some energy. It is on this count that the FM scores lowest. With a Budget which is good, not great, he has lost a vital opportunity.
If Palaniappan Chidambaram’s eighth budget has not set the markets on fire, it can be easily explained: his first goal was to avoid doing damage to investor confidence, which is what his predecessor managed to do. And unlike his own 2008 budget, which set the stage for the economy’s long-term slide and made inflation intractable, Budget 2013-14 has taken the middle path of low ambition and low risk.
There is thus nothing in it to excite anybody, not even his own party. He has delivered on his promise of providing a “responsible” budget, which the markets misunderstood to mean something that will send the adrenalin pumping. That was not on, and the FM restrained himself from any dose of excess populism.
If the markets are moping right now, with the Sensex and Nifty heading south, it’s because Chidambaram has already given them enough room for optimism before the budget. The markets wanted more of the same, but he could not oblige.
A lo-calorie budget is not meant to energise anybody. It is meant to get the fat down.
Before we rush to condole those left out of accessing the meagre basket of goodies, it is worth summarising the core proposals made in the budget. Chidambaram has raised Rs 18,000 crore of additional revenue through direct and indirect taxes, the former mostly by taxing companies more. Excise and customs remain more or less the same, with no changes in base rates.
The concessions, both to populism and the middle classes, are minor: there is a token Rs 10,000 crore additional provision for Sonia Gandhi’s Food Security Bill, some very small personal income tax reliefs, and an additional deduction of Rs 1 lakh for interest paid on first home loans (over and above existing Rs 1.5 lakh). Plus there are promises on new savings instruments sold through post offices that will be inflation-indexed. But these will not be more than sideshows to the main avenues currently available for savings.
On the corporate side, while the surcharge on income-tax is up from 5 to 10 percent for companies with taxable incomes above Rs 10 crore, this blow is balanced by giving manufacturing companies that invest more than Rs 100 crore in plant and machinery over the next two years (2013-15) a 15 percent investment allowance.
To be fair to Chidambaram, his only real promise was to deliver a 5.3 percent fiscal deficit this year and to stick to prudence next year. He has cut the 2012-13 deficit to 5.2 percent, and stayed with 4.8 percent in 2013-14.
The story lies in how he has achieved this miracle. Basically, what he did was to stamp hard on all capital expenditure in the last quarter of 2012-13, which is why the plan expenditure is down by 18 percent from the budget estimate of Rs 5.21 lakh crore to Rs 4.29 lakh crore. He has stashed the savings away for a better splurge in 2013-14, with plan expenses up to Rs 5.55 lakh crore, a near 30 percent jump.
This is good for near-term growth, for it means that the government will start spending from 1 April, pushing investments in the economy.
But where Chidambaram’s numbers start to look shaky is, as usual, in his assumptions.
The budget assumes a GDP growth of 13.4 percent – which is almost the same as in 2012-13, where the government came a cropper. The Economic Survey put out GDP figures of 6.1-6.7 percent, and if we assume average inflation of 6 percent in 2013-14, we will end up with a GDP growth projection in the range of 12.5 percent, or thereabouts.
Thus 13.4 percent is a bit of a stretch, even given the higher outlays for plan expenditure next year. Unless, inflation rips again – which cannot be ruled out.
More doubtful are the figures for revenue growth. The budget projects a sharp 21 percent growth in revenues, aided by a 33 percent rise in non-tax revenues. Capital receipts, which include earnings from disinvestment and spectrum sales, are more than double, up from Rs 24,000 crore this year to Rs 55,814 crore. The core tax revenue is the slowest-growing part at 19 percent.
Put another way, Chidambaram is budgeting for a 21 percent growth in overall revenues (tax and non-tax) on the back of 13.4 percent growth in GDP.
Also unrealistic is the meagre 4 percent growth shown in gross borrowings at Rs 5,42,499 crore. This could mean that a lot of the redemptions of existing loans will be paid out of the cash he has stashed away since December by not allowing ministries to spend, but this number will need more detailed scrutiny.
But for the ordinary man on the street, Budget 2013-14 is unexciting because there is very little in it for him.
Chidambaram’s concessions to middle class taxpayers and the capital markets are mere tokenism. There is no increase in the basic tax exemption limit, but taxpayers with incomes upto Rs 5 lakh get token tax credits of Rs 2,000 each.
The super rich, those 42,000-and-odd people who declare incomes above Rs 1 crore, will face an additional surcharge of 10 percent. Property buyers (for properties valued at more than Rs 50 lakh) will have to deduct one percent TDS from what they pay to sellers. The rich will also have to pay more for buying SUVs (30 percent excise).
It will irritate, but it’s not quite a deal-breaker for the rich.
More neutral between rich and not-so-rich is the surcharge on the dividend distribution tax, which is up from 5 to 10 percent for next year. Sin taxes on cigarettes are also up.
While the securities transaction tax (STT) is cut for equity derivatives, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, it is now applicable to the non-food commodity futures.
The Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme, a flop show in its first avatar, is being pumped with steroids by raising the income limit for first-time investors from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 12 lakh. The scheme is supposed to be liberalised, but it is still colourless. Rajiv Gandhi would hardly want to be associated with this loser.
The budget’s real weakness is that it is not decisive enough in any direction.
Chidambaram’s budget is safe and sensible for the kind of times we are living in. It has not lived up to expectations primarily because the FM wanted to be safe rather than sorry. His risk-taking instincts were not in evidence today. He wants to live to fight another day.
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