Taking Bharat Nirman and India Shining further.

After a suitably long time, i watched The India Sri Lanka cricket tie on Doordarshan National yesterday. Of the advertisements being aired, i couldnot miss the "Bharat Nirman efforts" TVCs. There is nothi9ng special about the ad. It speaks of the gigantic strides made by India in the recent years in the background even its imagery revoves around how development has touched people's lives. Circa, 2004 and a similar ad campaign comes to my mind: India Shining. That one also spoke about the developments made by the country in those years.


Interestingly India Shining did not deliver! NDA did not return to power for the next term inspite of a good campaign. The analysts felt that India Shining was mostly restricted to Cities, Metros and Tier A urban strata. The real fruit of the governance did not reach the majority who live in Semi Urban and Rural centres. Also India Shining was a poll campaign and not a "Business plan" as Bharat Nirman which was announced in 2005 is. Bharat Nirman is thus a business case with performance metrics on areas such as Roads, Telecommunication, Irrigation, Water Supply, Housing and Electrification. So instead of poll promises, Manmohan Singh stuck his neck out on a time bound plan to deliver goods for the rural infastructure. That was brave, serious and required lot of guts.


Over the next 4 years, there have been strides made, some significant and some not so. Planning Commission has now caliberated the performance against targets, and some aspects are badly off. Bharat Nirman, from its first day has been more of a subsidy scheme where the government makes you good roads, it provides you better water, telecommunication and electricity and houses. Tomorrow if the new government is not willing to spend on the project, then the assets so diligently put on ground will whither erode and depreciate away. Essentially, my arguement is that, the government is catching all the fish for the people hoping in its hears that the rural economy will learn how to fish by watching government fish! Not quite the best solution... the idea should be to make the rural economy learn fishing, hook line and sinker!


Towards this there should be a participation involved between private companies, and instead of the public private relationship being a contractor client relationship, one could look at a partnership based ventures. To put down an example or two, the partnership in investment can be shared between ITC and Government for areas growing wheat, between Lays and Government for areas growing Potato, for Adani and Government for areas growing oil seeds and so on. Thus the goverment would provide all the Bharat Norman elements, the private player would provide schools, dispensaries, vet hospitals, agricultural yield increase know hows and a uniform rate exchange in return of the harvest and certain tax reductions! This would be the SEZ model for government in rural areas. A self sustaining body that, after the initial "Bharat Nirman" push would not require any more proding from the government.