The gruesome tragedy in Nepal and the excitement of the Indo-Pak summit have pushed other potentially far reaching developments from the front pages.  The 9-member committee report on Congress Fund Raising by Dr Manmohan Singh is of fundamental importance to the polity.  The Singh Committee recommended raising a corpus of Rs 50 crore to meet the recurrent party annual expenditure of about Rs 5 crore.  The Congress Working Committee accepted the suggestion and decided to raise money only by cheques hereafter.

For a few fleeting days after the Tehelka revelations, our somnolent political class actually raised some hopes of reform. There were early signs of responding to people’s urges to cleanse the system.  With a few resignations and some withdrawals of support the government seemed shaky.  The prime minister characterized the episode as a wake-up call. He pleaded for electoral and other reforms.   And then, as suddenly as it all began, the issue got sidetracked. Our politicians promptly went back to what they are good at – petty power games.

Tarun Tejpal, Aniruddha Bahal and Matthew Samuel of Tehelka.com have done a great national service by exposing the pervasive corruption in the establishment. But it will be a great national tragedy if these exposes are regarded as a juicy scandal to embarrass the ruling combine or promote the prospects of the opposition. That was how the political establishment responded to the Bofors revelations in 1987. Fourteen years later the system reeks of corruption, and none of the culprits have been brought to book. Jain Hawala and other scandals followed the same pattern.

Ballooning fiscal deficit is the major problem plaguing the minds of policy makers, economists and thinking citizens.  Shorn of all jargon, fiscal deficit is nothing but the excess of government expenditure over revenues. The finance ministers of the past effortlessly bridged this gap by resorting to two ‘simple’ measures – deficit financing or borrowing.

The problem of corruption enters every citizen’s daily life. Almost every interaction with the government — be it for a birth certificate or ration card, electricity connection or water supply, for filing a police complaint or approval of a building plan – requires a bribe. All the eloquent sermons on the scourge of corruption by every party seeking power have provided no real relief to citizens. If anything, both the scale and spread have escalated.

EXCLUDING the local governments’ expenditure and inter-governmental adjustments, the combined total expenditure of the Union and state governments, according to the Budget estimates for 1999-2000, is a whopping Rs 524,000 crore.

The actual expenditure was in excess of Rs 550,000 crore. Judging by past experience, next year it could well be Rs 600,000 crore. This amounts to Rs 1,644 crore a day, or in terms of purchasing power it is equivalent to $2 billion a day!

The beauty of a democracy is that every election gives us an opportunity to reexamine policies and change course. The agriculture sector which was untouched by economic reform, is now in grave crisis. The recent electoral reverses in most states has forced governments to focus on agriculture.

One of the great challenges in a democracy is how to reconcile the long term public good with the short term political price to be paid. Most major public policy decisions have a slow rate of social pay off, and involve instant political losses.  Leadership is essentially the ability to persuade people to accept the temporary pain for long term gain.  While there is no substitute to visionary and inspiring leadership, the political culture of a society and electoral system have a  profound  impact  on this ability to reconcile public good with political costs.

Once again, the budget season is upon us. For years budget speeches have been romantic exercises with grand gestures and sweeping policy announcements. Sadly, there were no fiscal or monetary incentives to promote desirable goals and pursue worthy policies. And without such incentives, and given the inertia of the political system, most grand gestures remained pious proclamations. The two recurring themes over the past 12 years of budgeting have been reduction of fiscal deficits and the health of capital markets.

Often I am troubled by the lackadaisical deployment of certain words. Recently, I attended a small get together and as the discussion veered around to state of politics and corruption, the language that was used to explain various corrupt practices surprised me. For instance, many found Telgi, the kingpin of stamp scam, a very intelligent person! To my surprise I found quite a few using similar language to describe various corrupt practices.