Hey, you just ate my Future: Yoginder K. Alagh

October 10, 2008: The Indian Express

A brand new five-year plan is out. The production of five-year plan’s copies is now by Yojana Bhavan (private-public) Ltd and thus it costs a thousand rupees; so, scared of the Lady of the House and lectures on being careful with pension money, I laid off, even though it meant that my collection of all the plan documents of the last sixty years would be incomplete. But this being India, a buddy in Yojana Bhavan avoided the IPR security controls and sent me a free copy. Once upon a time lakhs of copies read by Planning Forums all over the country, were sent free, but they were printed in a Sarkari press and, honestly, were not particularly sexy. But we would read our future in them.

The World Bank as you know told us recently that half a billion Indians are poor now, so you can imagine how poor we were then. (Until recently the World Bank had told us that there were more poor Indians till 1992 than Chinese, for they listened to the Bank earlier than us, but now that we listen as well they say that there were more poor Chinese until 1992 than Indians.) All my Chinese friends above sixteen, born before 1992 must be very unhappy now. Again maybe not, for my Canadian friend John Helliwel who specialises in measuring happiness tells me we are reasonably happy, even though we are poor. But we were poor and happy and a part of the reason was that we had a Future.

We were living hungrily from ship to mouth, were without jobs and were booted everywhere for being a basket case. But we had a Future and we loved it. Not that we ever believed in the Yojana Bhavan future, but the ¶Perspective¶ chapter in the plan gave us an opportunity to invent our own Future. So around the Plan we built a million Futures – and of course we were all right and the planners and the Sarkar were all wrong. It was not a public or a private Future, but a social Future, one all fun and games without paying the price of a movie or even buying a paan. If we could afford it we saw Bollywood movies on our Futures. I would leave the government and go back to academia and say that the Sarkari Future is all wrong and then they would call me back and I would invent Sarkari Futures again. My favourite take on this is that every time I went back to Yojana Bhavan, from the adviser who built the Fifth and Sixth Plan in the mid-seventies, to the member who built agro-climatic planning and early reform in the late eighties and then minister in the mid-nineties I was higher in the hierarchy but in a real sense less powerful.

Now after sixty years and ten plans we have a plan without a ¶Perspective¶ chapter or even a Future. We are still poor and unemployed and now occasionally terrorised, but the biggest blow is to be Defuturised. Yes, I recognise that Montek Ahluwalia and Kirit Parekh are great modellers and when I am not in a megalomaniacal mood I would say for inventing Futures as good or perhaps, just sometimes, a tad better than me. It was a mistake to send P. Sen to Statistics for he is younger than them and has more energy, but the skills are there. Futures are not just a Nehruite pastime. The preferences the planners have for the Tata-Birla plan as compared to the national planning committee’s ideas at the time of Independence have been publicly acknowledged at the highest level in the government but even the Tata-Birla plan included a vision of the future. I am not quite sure why India today deserves only an astrological future. Laxmandas Madan and Bejan Daruwalla should be looking for alternatives. (They should know that the RBI frowns upon derivatives right now.)

There are more mundane reasons. A lot of the material in the plan is promising. But the chapters on the long haul on water, energy, skills, employment, poverty, family welfare and urbanisation would make more sense and also be mutually reinforcing if we were given an interconnected view on income, population, work force, nutrition, employment and non-renewable resources, rather than a few random mutually contradictory numbers strewn in (fortunately) only occasionally. Also the plan would re-endorse the stand on issues like the nuclear deal and a consistent international worldview on the economy. The world is saying India will matter in its Future. But we also need a national perspective on the world’s future. Yojana Bhavan, would you please consider regurgitating and restoring my Future?

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