On may 14, the bjp-led national Democratic Alliance government at the Centre completed four years in office. This is a good time to assess its performance and make a judgement of the extent to which it has redeemed its promise made in the run-up to General Election 2014 of radically reshaping the Indian economy. In particular, the extent to which the pre-election resolve of sab ka sath sabka vikas (unity and economic development for all) which enthused the electorate to vote the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi to power, has been fulfilled.
The popular belief is that BJP is an ideologically right of centre political party committed to private enterprise and free markets. However, during the past four years, its leadership has done little to justify this belief, and differentiate itself from the Congress party whose uniquely self-serving brand of neta-babu socialism has transformed high potential India of 1947 into one of the poorest and most iniquitous societies of the contemporary world. In its four years in office, the BJP/NDA government has done precious little to privatise even the worst performing PSEs (public sector enterprises) or cut government red tape which is discouraging foreign investment and indeed, prompting flight of capital and an exodus of entrepreneurs from the country.
Yet perhaps the most unkindest cut inflicted upon this country’s faltering national development effort by the BJP leadership is its signal failure to fulfil its manifesto promise of increasing the annual budgetary expenditure (Centre plus states) on education to 6 percent of GDP. On the contrary, the Central government’s budgeted outlay for education in 2018-19 — a mere 0.45 percent of GDP — has barely crossed the budgeted (but not spent) outlay of the Congress/UPA-II government for 2013-14. Moreover, the eminently rational new education policy (NEP) recommended by a high-powered committee chaired by the late T.S.R Subramanian in 2016, which inter alia recommended raising the national outlay for education to 6 percent of GDP “without further delay”, was transformed into an “input” for a new committee under space scientist K. Kasturirangan to draft a new NEP which is still in the making. Meanwhile, instead of reforming and repairing the country’s severely dysfunctional 1.20 million government schools, BJP governments in the states are rigorously implementing several deeply flawed, constitutionally questionable provisions of the RTE Act, 2009 while simultaneously imposing tuition fee ceilings on private schools, endangering the financial viability of these islands of excellence in K-12 education.
In sum, the great faith reposed by the electorate in the BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi has been belied. With a general election due next summer, the world’s most populous democracy which also hosts the largest child and youth population worldwide, faces an uncertain present and future.