YSR : The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

This was put down months back at snail pace, but got overtaken by the latest events. I was half minds on whether I should post this or leave it, but sometimes, our thoughts have a new meaning when seen in retrospect. So am still putting it out there, with the caveat that it was put down sometime in Sept-Oct, 2009.

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I will use a few of my personal exchanges with folks to build this post. Not surprisingly things aren’t the same on ground.

THE GOOD :

Pension Scheme

The case used to be that older people were at the mercy of younger offsprings or relatives for support. Some unfortunate elders have suffered a horrible fate and turned to homelessness and charity in their last days. 

While previous governments had some kind of assistance or other for the needy, YSR had maintained clear focus on this front. One of my granddads in the far-extended family, aged 70+, (living on his own in a remote village) used to receive regular financial support from his nephew. After YSR’s pension scheme took effect, the granddad conveyed to his nephew that YSR takes care of him and the that its ok if he can’t send the support as often. The amount of pension would seem miniscule to a lot of folks, but in the remote village, this was a good complement.

Health Care

In all my life in India, I have seen one ambulence respond to an emergency. Even that was too late for the sick person. 

My home town had moved ahead since then in this regard, to a large part due to the YSR’s attention to Healthcare. Now, there are ambulences responding to “104” and “108” calls. And the last time I paid attention, I counted 3 ambulances responding to emergencies in one week. AP Government also reimburses up to 2 Lakh Rs. towards treatment of chronic illnesses in either corporate, public or private hospitals. By any measure that is a considerable improvement to a vast number of people who could not afford quality healthcare on their own, especially in a timely manner.

Education for Low Income Group

While the AP voters have witnessed several populist electoral policies ranging from free electricity to free TVs, this is as close as it gets to getting my approval, even if reserved. This got wide and silent appreciation from folks who qualified that would otherwise disapprove YSR’s governance. 

While the fees in government institutions have always been subsidized, private institutions were previously required to offer half of seats for a subsidized fees leaving the rest to be offered for a premium fees. The fee scheme has since been restructured and the subsidy was taken even further now. For economically backward students, Government will reimburse the fees (whether subsidised or premuim).

Low Income Housing

In an effort to get rid of the slums in the cities, YSR kicked off a very ambitious project of building low-income apartments and give them away at a highly subsidized rates. This has increased the quality of life of countless poor people who were otherwise living in horrible conditions with little or no sanitation available.

Leadership

YSR ruled the AP Congress with an iron fist. He suppressed dissent mercilessly and navigated his way around the obstacles in a patient and assertive manner. He single-handedly gave Congress leadership its plum state of Andhra Pradesh.

Though there is little evidence in terms of lot of successful industries, investors feel that they have YSR’s ear and have respect for the prompt approval of some projects. Note that, even the ones with direct approval of YSR have to go through the customary “hand wetting” of various layers of the beuracracy and politicians to eventually fructify.

Telangana Embroglio

After long laying idle, Telangana was raked up again in the past decade. In my opinion, this is a good example of the political thought “If I cannot become CM for the large state, let me liberate the part I am popular in and become CM of that state”. At some point, grievances may warrant a drastic measure, but Telangana has long been exploited for whims of few leaders. YSR played a pretty savvy game by initially supporting the TRS, but staying non-committal until he gathered steam. Once TRS outran its utility, YSR buried the TRS and in his own way helped to keep the state united. Ofcourse, due credit needs to be given to the people of Telangana, because, in the end, it was them who shut the door on TRS.

THE BAD

NGOs (Non Gazetted Officers) 

Teachers and Non-Gazetted officers have received a healthy hike in salaries with an eye on the elections. Looked in isolation, it is important to keep earning parity of the employees intact. However, note that these employees form the largest human resource for Electioneering duties. If an old or illiterate voter needed help with operating the Electronic Voting Machines, guess who helps them, its the teachers and NGOs who owed YSR.

Increasing Expenditure, Falling Income

Imagine a case of a family of husband-wife, two kids and some grandparents. For the kids to be nurtured and older grandparents to be well taken care of, a lot depends on the earning potential of the husband/wife or both. If family earning falls below the family spending, family accumulates debt.

Extending the above analogy to a state, the poor and economically backward needed to be taken care of. On the other had, the earning members are the big factories and businesses that generate services/commodities to create profit. While the profits provide Government with taxable income, they also create jobs directly and indirectly. This would in turn increase the number of people paying income tax to the Government. In the end, the industries/businesses and profitable farming are the sole sustainable contributors to the State’s funds. 

However, YSR’s government has cultivated the dependants, but failed to bring in the breadearners. This would mean that all the money spent on social welfare will result in debt, and will burden the subsequent governments later, when YSR gets all the goodwill now.

While YSR (and Congress) in general flaunts the poor and economically backward and exploits them for votebanks, very little is done to make them self-reliant and contribute towards a econimcally viable apparatus. This is the same irresponsible and descructive monetary policy that kept India in debt until the 1990’s, when PV Narasimha Rao brought on Beurocrat Manmohan Singh into politics and shielded him from the deep rooted resistance all around. Y2K and subsequent IT rush saved the nation and all the states that caught the train. The next train is “Solar and Green” technologies and current Government support for these technologies are best described as “token measures”.

Neglect of Industrial Growth

Compared the to the zeal with which the previous government has went after investors, the YSR government has fallen short by miles. With little worthwhile investments coming from outside, YSR  is increasingly dependent on the non-sustainable sources of income like Property registration fee and sale of Government lands.

THE UGLY

The Cudapah beginnings

In a flight to Malaysia, I was sitting next to a muslim lady. She seemed sad and aloof initially, but we started chatting midway through our travel. It turns out the lady is going to her city, Bangalore, to attend to a family emergency. To my surprise, she was speaking in my native tongue, and after listening to my rant on general state of things, she opens up and starts narrating her story. They are a wealthy family from Cudappah who are now settled in Bangalore. 

A group of local influentials (including the leader in focus) apparently had an knack for accumulating assets in the following way. They would approach somebody with a desirable property with a minuscule amount (she quoted Rs. 10,000 not sure when) and ask nicely to write the property on their name. If property owner refuses, they loose the property by force along with the paltry amount that was voluntarily offered. A lot of people simply took the offer and left to never return back! The lady belongs to one such family.

Institutionalized and Rewarded Corruption

In the process of arresting corruption in lower rung of the Governance, Chandrababu Naidu antagonized Government employes of all kinds including teachers. He went even further by demanding that they volunteer their weekends and other spare time for communiy activities. Even though it was for the larger good, the government employees who were long accustomed to corruption and getting paid for inefficiency, shafed under the TDP administration. Not that CBN and his associates were any clean at the high level, but the mid-level administration that deals with people on a day to day basis were kept tightly under control.

The sea of disgruntled employees heaved a huge sign of relief when YSR took the power. YSR, as somebody aptly put it, offered a free-for-all system. He let the system slide into older ways where corruption became a way of life. Everybody takes their cut, in turn helping YSR and his associates take their lion’s share. Everybody is happy. Infact, all the social policies highlighted above have contributed in a large way towards corruption. 

Housing : Most congress workers could get a low-income house assigned which could then be traded away. The several needy people from slums would accept the allotment, make profit by selling it away and return to the very slums that it was supposed to replace.

Hospitals : The primary goal of Government Hosptals was to provide almost free health care to the patients. However, the corruption and sad state of affairs have left the caretaking in a mess. Instead of making the Govt. Hospitals meet their mandate, YSR provided blanket reimbursement of expenses in any hospital. Consequently, it provided unregulated corporate and private clinics with a steady stream of income for treating the needy folks.

Private Collages : Government universities provide highly subsidized education for everybody through what were referred to as free-seats. Previously, a certain amount of seats in the private institutions were needed to be available as “free-seats” and the rest could be charged a far higher fee (paid-seats). Those who excelled in entrance examinations ended up grabbing the free-seats and rest had to settle for paid-seats. However, with the new policy anybody who can show low-income in paper can avail of free-seats or paid-seats at Tax-Payer’s expense. While helping the poor, it also helped any rich person who could prove low income by keeping money off the books etc. (traders, landlords etc).

Robbing of Resources

In the past decade, there were several proposals about an upcoming international airport in my home city. At various points, three possible locations have been rumoured to be indentified for this purpose.

Some of my relatives owned pretty much all the very fertile lands in a small village bordering the one possible location. Their lands were forcibly taken over by the government at exorbitantly low government price on the name of a still imaginary International Airport. In the end, the existing old airport was further developed to accommodate larger flights, making a new airport unnecessary. Government then turned around and marketed the acquired fertile lands to aspiring industries at 10 or 20 times the procured price. And most of these arable lands lie barren now.

The income thus obtained from playing a real-estate mediator has resulted in a enormous income to the government. This along with increased registration fees have to some extent financed the grand spending schemes of the government. Needless to say, such measures are one-time chances and are not sustainable. They have also resulted in severe loss of fertile lands, when our population and demand for food is only growing.

Disproportionate Wealth and Surplus Land

In order to prevent legacy of feudalism, where a few big-fish controlled all the lands, AP Land Reforms Act 1975 was implemented restricting the amount of land of an immediate family to anywhere between 10 to 54 acres. (link). Anything a family owns beyond that would be considered surplus land and is illegal.

The YSR family has accumulated vast wealth to the tune of 618 acres in surplus land. He claimed to have surrendered all the land after becoming public. However, he surrendered only a 310.57 acres and not 618 acres as reported in the media. YSR later claimed it to be a slip of the tongue.

This was not the sole prerogative of the current government. With the implementation of the Land Reforms Act, 1975, total of 7,99,663 acres were surrendered to the Govt. The distribution of this land to the landless has been a still ongoing process with little tranparency.

Temple Neglect and Church building

All temples in AP are controlled by the “Endowment Ministry” in the Govt. of AP. This means that any donation temple-goers make to the temple goes to the government and the government to a large extend decides how this money is spent. Since there is little transparency, it is not clear how these funds and spent, but the fact remains that the priests remain utterly underpaid and temples do not get to perform much charitible activities as they may want. So temples income goes to the government and the responsibility of their maintainence also falls on the government.

However, no such income comes to the government from the churches and churches do not fall under the purview of AP Govt. However, YSR has approved GOs to donate money to churches. This benefited a total of 258 churches (2.63 Crores). (link)

Real Estate bubble, or is it?

A lot of people are surprised at how, a new crop of investors established businesses worth 1000’s of crores in paltry 5-10 years, when likes of TATA and Birla had to sweat the hard way for over a 100 years. 

In 2004-2005, YSR’s government gaveaway contracts worth 20,000 crores ($4 Billion). This covered 18 huge irrigation projects, but were given to select 9 contractors. (link). Releasing even a fraction of that amount as advances to the contractors would create tsunami in the markets and that is exactly what happened. Anybody with that kind of windfall would reinvest while the projects progress. 

This provided a lot of INC politicians and investors with seed capital for real-estate development when the real-estate returns were sky-rocketing at insane pace. Imagine a 10 Crore advance from the Government, that one invested in developing real-estate in 2004-2005. This helped raise incredible amount of funds for the 2009 elections and made YSR the blue-eyed boy of INC.

Luckly for the investors, the worldwide property boom masked the contribution of these artificial funds to the Hyderabad boom. 

This doesn't absolve TDP, as it had its own share of the pie in the 10 years of the rule.

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YSR elicits pretty strong feelings, either of love or hate, there is little middle ground. 

But nobody can deny that YSR was the most popular and charismatic leader with mass appeal that AP had seen since the times of NTR. He knew the pulse of the people and generated a groundswell of support from the very hardworking souls of the villages. The door to the hallways of power is in the villages and he knew that more than anybody.