Articles by B M

B M NEW DELHI presents a picture of utter confusion these days precisely when important and one might even say critical decisions are required to be taken. So many lobbies are at work; even the various ministries and departments are themselves tending to function more as lobbies on their own or as representatives of other lobbies. The result is that there is hardly any kind of coherence or direction on the part of the government as a whole. The discussions on the annual plan for 1978 79 in Yojana Bhavan were a good indicator of this state of affairs. They became an occasion for staking large claims for financial allocations on the part of state governments as well as the Central ministries and for horse trading over these claims. In the process the Planning Commission was put in a rather awkward position. Its main function became one of pruning the claims made, mainly on the ground that resources were not in sight for higher allocations, especially as there was no assurance from either the Centre or the states that they would make the requisite effort to mobilise additional resources. It then began to be said in the corridors of the ministries and also in the state secretariats that, far from being an agency for growth, the Planning Commission was being ultra-conservative and was holding back growth.

be enforced vis-a-vis individuals and newspapers and other organisations' Also radio and TV bring controlled entirely by government, the jurisdiction of the Council should extent to these media besides the government advertising agencies like the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity and the Publicity or Public Relations Departments of state governments. These advertising outfits are qualitatively different from private advertising agencies in that public funds are in volved and government, of all agencies, should not use advertisements as an instrument of pressure on newspapers. 'The practice of the DAVP deciding the rates (which in turn determine the rates fixed by the state governments and public sector undertakings) is exceptionable; the papers should be tree to determine their rates and it should be open to the government agencies to accept them or not.

NEW DELHI More Flexible Than Ever B M GEORGE FERNANDES has at last found the way to present his much- promised industrial policy statement. He laced it with repeated assertions of a break with the Nehru legacy and the denunciation of the poor performance of the previous regime. But even a cursory reading of the lengthy statement shows that it hardly squares with all the hard-sell advance publicity for the "new" Janata industrial policy. For one thing, Fernandez was hard put to it to explain why he failed to come forward with a brand new industrial policy resolution in place of the much- maligned 1956 Resolution. He merely asserted by way of explanation that it was always open to him to convert his statement into a full-fledged resolution. That, of course, may be readily conceded. But, as the Secretary to the Industry Ministry in briefing the press admitted, the 1956 Resolution stands and has not been rescinded and, further, there was hardly anything in that re- solutfon to which serious objections might be raised, Fernandes' broadsides against the industrial policy of the previous government thus has no particular significance except as a currently fashionable, posture.

NEW DELHI Free-for-All Economic Policy B M AT a special press conference called to answer criticisms of the Janata party's economic policy statement, adopted by its working committee last week, Chandrashekhar, president of the party, said that much of the criticism was 'sheer cynicism' born of a 30-year history of unfulfilled promises. How far the Janata party itself will fulfil its promises and dispel this 'cynicism' is yet to be seen.

NEW DELHI Plan-Making Exercises B M IT was easy enough to talk glibly of reorienting development planning and giving it a new content by large-scale generation of employment and meeting the essential needs of the mass of the people, especially in the rural areas. But getting down to planning in the concrete on that basis has proved to be a more complex and demanding task. The planners are finding this out in the course of their preliminary exercises for the drawing up of a plan for the next five years under the new rolling plan system. Incidentally, the term 'sixth five-year plan' still gets mentioned in the course ot tins work, probably out of sheer habit or because that is an easier way of presenting their problems to the political leadership and the press.