Austerity and simplicity- Congress generates debate

At least in one sense, the bane of drought has become a boon that has spurred the austerity drive. The pontification of the Congress high command saw the two reluctant ministers leaving their cozy suites of five-star hotels in the capital. Pranav Mukherjee and Sonia Gandhi led the government and the party by flying in economy class to enforce the ascetic discipline. Writing on his twitter, Shashi Tharoor justified his stay in a five-star hotel on the ground that he did not squander public money, but spent his personal savings. The two ministers did not find their plush bungalows worth living. Spending own money is fine, but it stares in the face of the principle of voluntary poverty enunciated by Mahatma Gandhi whose ideals his party professes to propagate. Gandhi, a hugely successful barrister, whose income, at the present rate of exchange, as estimated by Rajmohan Gandhi, was Rs. 1 crore per month, preferred to wear a langoti in order to identify himself with the masses. Moral foundation of the society collapses if physical comforts are taken to be the end, rather than the means of living,
It is amazing that austerity has become such a major issue in a country like India which has a tradition of monarchs prostrating before hermits. The Congress party followed this tradition of simplicity assiduously till late 1960s. Every year, there were three sessions of AICC and one general session of the party in different cities, and even the Prime Minister and the Congress President stayed in camps. Leaders were supposed to lead lives of sacrifice and austerity. In 1937, when the Congress party formed governments in provinces, ministers travelled in the third class of trains.
Somehow, the ideal was forgotten. Bureaucrats led luxurious lives right from the beginning, and slowly, even ministers took to it. Since the British came to rule over India, they introduced a flabby administration in which doing job was a luxury. The Regulating Act of 1773, the first essay in constitution-making for India by British Parliament, established the new concept of partnership between the Crown of England and the East India Company. It created a Supreme Council in Bengal comprising a Governor-General and four councilors. Exorbitant salaries were attached to these posts, the Governor-General receiving 25,000 pounds a year while Councillors were paid 10,000 pounds each. It was repulsive, to say the least, in a poor country like India. No wonder, Mahatma Gandhi, in a letter to Viceroy Lord Irwin, dated March 2, 1930, wrote that he held the British rule to be a curse which had impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration. Then he wrote about the inequality in income, “Take your own salary. It is over Rs. 21,000 per month, besides many other indirect additions. The British Prime Minister gets 5,000 pounds per year, i.e., over Rs. 5,400 per month at the present rate of exchange. You are getting Rs. 700 per day against India’s average income of less than annas 2 per day. The Prime minister gets Rs. 180 per day against Great Britain’s average income of Rs. 2 per day. Thus you are getting much over five thousand times India’s average income. The British Prime Minister is getting only ninety times.” Later, on 29 March at Bhatgam, he said, “How could he probably do justice to that salary? And how can we tolerate his getting salary out of all proportion to our income?” Again, addressing the Chatham House meeting (London) on 20 October 1931, he criticized the civil expenditure citing the Viceroy’s salary: “From this one example you can work out for yourselves what this civil expenditure also means to India. India cannot support this service, however efficient and able it may be. It is quite likely that I could send medical experts to every village in India, we should have no disease whatever, but since we cannot afford medical experts for every village in India, we have to be satisfied with quacks that we can get in our own village.”
Even after independence, the expenditure on the establishment is so huge that hardly any money is left for development. How can we justify this hefty hike in salaries of government employees when, according to the Report of the Committee on the Unorganized Sector headed by Arjun Sengupta, 77 per cent people are living on Rs. 20 or less per day. The government must make endeavours to reduce disparity and raise per capita income for inclusive growth which the government keeps talking about. Per capita income is misleading when the disparity is so horrendous. Raising the per capita income was foremost on the agenda of our national leaders from the pre-independence days. Planning occupied the centre stage of Indian thinking as the Second World War neared its end. A Plan of Economic Development for India, prepared by a body of distinguished industrialists, was published in 1944. More popularly known as Bombay Plan, it envisaged an investment of Rs. 10,000 crore spread in three successive five-year stages. It said that only through heavy investment in the economy and through a concerted drive to raise the living standard of the people could the challenge of the appalling backwardness of the country, the indigence and illiteracy of its people and the high mortality rate be combated. They estimated that a per capita income of Rs. 74 at pre-war prices was essential to secure a minimum standard of living. It was a modest goal and yet it was so arduous, for the per capita income in British India at the time was Rs. 65. A comparison of this figure with that of other countries in the same period throws adequate light on our condition then: USA Rs. 1406, Canada Rs. 1038, UK Rs. 980 and Australia Rs. 792.
It is good that Congress President Sonia Gandhi is trying to revive the legacy of simplicity but it is to seen how long it continues.