As I am writing, the newly elected BJP chief minister Rekha Gupta has announced a scheme to give Rs.2500 a month to women whose family income is less than Rs.3 lakhs a year.
Obviously, the Delhi Model (DM) that the author offers as “ a bold road map building a developed India” is prevailing as opposed to the Gujerat model that has delivered more headlines than real economic and social benefit to the people in that state.
In short, though the DM has failed to deliver electoral success to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Arvind Kejriwal who is the prime architect of it, we all know that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won partly because it cleverly adopted the DM. There are other well-known reasons for AAP’s electoral defeat but we need not go into them for the purpose of this article.
Jasmine Shah, vice chairperson of the Dialogue and Development Commission in Delhi government from 2018 to 2024 is a Fullbright scholar from Columbia University where he did a Master’s in public administration.
Though the author is open about his intention to get votes for AAP from his readers, this is a serious contribution to the literature on the development conundrum facing India and the author gives useful insights.
We say ‘conundrum’ for a reason. India, China, South Korea, and Malaysia were roughly at the same level of economic development in, say, 1950. China went through Mao Zedong’s atrocities , South Korea went through a ruinous war, and Malaysia went through a civil war from 1948 to 1960. These three countries have a much higher per capita income than India.
As per the World Bank 60 % of Indians live on less than$3.10 a day- the median poverty line. About 250 million Indians live or rather survive on less than $2 a day even as India is hailed as the 4th largest economy destined to be the 3rd largest by 2028. Unfortunately, those who get obsessed with the pecking order do not care about the bottom 90% of the population.
The Delhi Model is based on the axiom that we should care more for the people than the pecking order or the headlines.
The book with its eight chapters expounds the DM, supports its conclusions with comprehensive arguments and data. In his preface the author says he wrote this book for two reasons. First, the DM is often misunderstood. The second is “to inspire hope among all those Indians, especially the youth, who have grown up believing that governments and politicians are no good.”
In my opinion the author has succeeded to a remarkable extent on both counts.
When Kejriwal took charge as Delhi’s chief minister on 14th February 2015, neither he nor his cabinet colleagues had “any grand plan or a five-year blueprint to deliver the transformative change they had promised.”
Hardly anyone thought it might be possible to make government schools better than private schools, provide primary health- care free of cost to all citizens, or provide electricity 24/7 and provide it free to the poor households.
The DM is “often caricatured as an exercise in freebie politics by political opponents, yet nothing could be further from the truth.’
We might dwell for a second on this word ‘freebie’ so often used in India. It originated as an Americanism around 1925-30. What is striking is that the incentives given to the corporates are not referred to as freebies whereas the food given to the starving is an instance of freebies.
It is equally striking that in the recent Delhi election the BJP and the Congress took a leaf out of the AAP book and included a spectrum of freebies in their manifestos.
The beginning of the DM goes back to September 2015 when countering Prime Minister Modi’s call to global investors to set up manufacturing units in India, the Delhi CM shot back on Twitter : the goal cannot be achieved without ‘Making India’, “first by investing in education, health, water, safety, justice and infrastructure for all citizens.”
The DM consists of three principles. “First and foremost, prioritize investments in building human capabilities and improving the quality of life of the aam aadmi -the lower and middle classes.” Second, declare a war on corruption. Third, make a firm commitment to fiscal prudence.
As vice chairperson of the Dialogue and Development Commission of the government the author played a leading role.
The story of government schools overtaking the private schools is well known. The reader might recall that the Union government through the Lieutenant Governor put obstacles in the way when the Delhi government wanted to send teachers to Finland to improve their teaching skills.
In fact, the AAP government would have done even better if the Union Government had not stood in the way.
Let us dwell on the war against corruption, almost as universal as gravity, not only in India. The Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) revived by the AAP government had a brief life thanks to the Union government.
Kejriwal “encouraged the citizens to take sting videos or audio recordings of any government official demanding bribes and the ACB would respond within 48 hours” he promised. Soon there were 3000 calls a day.
Within 2 months the ACB arrested 35 and suspended 152 officials. On 8th June 2015, 2 months after the ACB was revived the Union government sent “ paramilitary forces to ACB’s office to snatch its authority away from the Delhi Chief Minister for the first time in 22 years.”
The ACB under the Union government has been less active, arresting only 2 per month as compared to 17 under the Delhi government.
There is a whole chapter on fiscal prudence explaining how the government revenue was raised.
Contrasting the DM and the Gujarat Development Model, the author has given a plethora of statistics to prove his point. For example, the total debt to state GDP ratio is 18.6 for Gujerat as compared to 3.9 for Delhi, the lowest.
There is one matter on which the AAP has not given a proper response. The BJP has accused Kejriwal of spending a huge amount of money for his official residence and the Accountant General has pointed out how the actual expenditure exceeded the estimate. I myself asked a few AAP supporters only to find out that they wanted to remain taciturn.
The author has complimented the set of young professionals from London School of Economics, University of Cambridge , IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Kharagpur , Delhi School of Economics ,TISS and elsewhere who contributed to the success of the DM.
It is heartening to know that the Vishwa Guru is willing to teach and learn.
This book has been translated into Hindi. It will make good sense to get it published in other languages too as the DM can be a pan India Model.
The book has been well brought out by Penguin. I have seen only a hard copy. A cheaper paperback will be in order. An index will be a useful addition.
Ambassador K.P.Fabian has retired from the Indian Foreign Service. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
The Delhi Model
Jasmine Shah
Penguin Random House.