Middle class India must pay higher food prices
It’s the biggest issue in the country at this moment. Yet instead of discussing ways and means to restrain spiralling price indices in a calm, rational and constructive way, Parliament has (as usual) been reduced to an unruly brawling arena with opposition members storming the well of the house shouting street-style slogans, preventing reasoned debate and prompting prolonged adjournments. Well aware that rising prices, particularly of food items, within an economy in which the great majority of the population endures a hand-to-mouth existence  according to World Bank data over 700 million Indians subsist on less than $2 (Rs.80) per day  can topple it from its high and mighty pedestal, the Congress-led UPA coalition government at the Centre has announced a slew of measures to control inflation which for the first time in four years has crossed the 5 percent threshold of the WPI (wholesale price index) to close at 7.33 percent on April 25. Thus exports of wheat and rice have been banned; raids and searches under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 have been conducted against suspected hoarders and black marketers; alleged steel and cement manufacturers’ cartels are being threatened condign punishment, and the decks are being cleared for foodgrain and edible oil imports.
Yet all these belated initiatives are likely to prove to be mere short-term palliatives  if at all  because the current inflationary spiral is being fuelled by basic supply-demand imbalances stemming from structural iniquities of the Indian economy which have remained unaddressed for far too long.
The plain truth is that none of post-independence India’s governments at the Centre and in the states have done anything significant to improve the terms of trade between rural and urban India. Under the perniciously unjust and inequitable Soviet-influenced economic development model engineered by the country’s central planners, agriculture produce prices continue to be artificially depressed while prices of agriculture inputs  seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, water and transport (petrol/diesel)  have been permitted to rise vertiginously.
Now the time has come for urban, middle class India to come to terms with paying substantially higher prices for foodgrains and farm produce. This will require middle class India, which has grabbed most of the gains of economic liberalisation and deregulation since 1991, to readjust its expenditure priorities to pay fair prices for agriculture produce. Higher farm-gate prices will automatically improve the abysmal productivity of Indian farmers and set in motion a new virtuous circle of rural-led anti-inflationary growth and development.
Inevitably a hue and cry will be raised about the fate of the urban poor and landless labour in rural India in an era of sharply higher food prices. Such concerns are justified. But they need to be directed at tightening the country’s moribund and corruption-ridden public distribution system (PDS) to reform and enable it to provide subsidised foodgrains and farm produce to carefully targeted poor households in urban and rural India.
Legal reform: Moral failure of epic proportions
The recent gabfest at the conference of chief ministers and chief justices held in New Delhi on April 19, highlighted all that’s wrong with 21st century India’s legal system which is  as it has been for several decades  on the point of collapse. If it isn’t quite dead yet, it is because of the forbearance of India’s aam admi (common man) and his endless capacity to endure open, continuous and uninterrupted injustice.
The statistics tell it all. Currently, because of inadequacy of infrastructure, shortage of advocates ready, willing and able to don judicial robes, and archaic procedural laws which govern courtroom processes, there’s a pending backlog of 24.8 million cases in the subordinate courts; 3.7 million cases in the country’s 21 high courts, and 40,000 in the Supreme Court, awaiting hearing and disposal. This mountainous backlog of judicial arrears has reduced the country’s economic super-power aspirations to a laughing stock in the global community. Except citizens suffering the arrogance, unapologetic delay  and dare one say it?  corruption, of the legal system aren’t laughing: it hurts too much.
The chronic ills and ailments of India’s judicial system which are a matter of common knowledge to the long-suffering public were as usual discussed threadbare at the chief ministers-chief justices’ conclave. For a start there’s a huge shortage of judges in this country’s legal system. Whereas in the US there are 107 judges per million population and 51 per million in the UK, in fast-track India where the economy is growing at 8 percent plus per year (which means legal transactions and disputes are growing commensurately) the ratio is 12 per million. Quite obviously this also means there aren’t nearly enough buildings, courtrooms, law libraries, etc either. And the country’s existing, crumbling, minimally furbished courtrooms functioning in Dickensian gloom are testimony to the sordidness of the legal system rather than majesty of the law which is proclaimed from the roof tops by the judiciary.
Who’s to blame for reducing the justice administration system of this country which once used to be proud of its independent and fearless judiciary? Quite obviously the political class cutting across all parties and ideologies for whom a strong and efficient legal system dispensing swift and stern justice is anathema. A speedy and efficient justice delivery system would put paid to the millions of rackets, scams and associated shenanigans they run countrywide.
But wait, their lordships of the bench and legal practitioners at the bar are also to blame for running the system into the ground. Despite being an independent estate in its own right and equipped with formidable contempt powers, the higher judiciary has consistently failed to direct the Central government to fill up judicial vacancies and legislate meaningful legal reform. Moreover the leading lights of the lawyers’ community have remained content to feed off the ailing legal system rather than use their formidable powers of analysis and persuasion to resurrect the system to restore the majesty of law. It’s a collective moral failure of epic proportions.