This topper is a fake

The president should not have given India Today’s first prize to Punjab which has failed to score even pass marks

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

There is something not quite right about newspapers and magazines giving awards to states as if it were a beauty contest. It is the job of the media to inform and even make comment, leaving the judging of performance to the people. Besides, it is downright unethical if the awards are dished out just before the somewhat less objectively chosen state went to the polls.

This is what India Today has done in the case of Punjab when it ranked it as first among Indian states. To compound this, the president of India was the one who handed over the award lending it an official imprimatur. This is indeed unfortunate and it is best that constitutional authorities like the president, who should be well above partisan politics, kept away from such beauty parades where the criterion can only be subjective.

If the governance of a state has been good, the people of that state have seldom failed to reward the ruling party, as we see in the case of West Bengal which has posted the highest growth in incomes over the last decade. It was in another such India Today beauty contest that

VS Naipaul castigated Marxism for ruining West Bengal, when the facts are quite contrary to that.

There is about as much Marxism in West Bengal as there is in Punjab, thank God for that, as the practice of Marxist orthodoxy is not possible under our constitutional arrangements. What you have had in West Bengal is just better focus on the core issues, which is why West Bengal was the fastest growing state after the advent of liberalisation. This is despite no great leap forward in industrialisation.

With Rs 30,701, Punjab has the highest per capita income in India in 2004-05. Almost 85.15 per cent of all land is arable with 89.72 per cent of it with irrigation. More than half of this is due to the huge central government projects, Bhakra Nangal being the most notable among them. Punjab has benefited by a disproportionately large recruitment into the armed and paramilitary forces giving a good many rural families a second stream of income.

I have no intention of provoking acrimony on this score. But the point is that the large contributions of such employment to general prosperity by way of salaries and pensions cannot be overlooked any longer. If there was a more equitable basis of recruitment, rather than on the British bequeathed notions of martial races, then either we would have a much larger military or recruitment from Punjab would be down to a trickle. It is not without reason that the annual pension flows to ex-servicemen in Punjab is considered classified data.

Punjab has had the highest per capita income in India since 1950. However, what should cause concern is that this growth rate has now slowed down considerably. In each of the last five years, Punjab’s growth has been well below the national growth rate. Even if just the performance of the financial year gone by was employed as the criterion, the growth was 5.9 per cent at 1993-94 prices as opposed to the national average of 7.7 per cent.

Surely this should weigh as much as the actual placing when what purports to be recognition for good governance is handed out by the president of India?

While the growth of income is probably the best indicator of the success of a government, there are other criteria that need to be considered. It has been said that prosperity is the best contraceptive. But this is apparently not so in Punjab. With the highest per capita income in the country one would have thought Punjab’s population growth ranking would have been commensurate with its income. That honour must go to the state with the second biggest per capita income, Kerala.