114. Direct Cash Transfer Subsidy aimed at enriching banks. P S Remesh Chandran

114

Direct Cash Transfer Subsidy aimed at enriching banks

P S Remesh Chandran

Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
 Article Title Image By Ahobbit. Graphics: Adobe SP.

1

When rich people go to a bank and ask for withdrawal of, say, 5 lakhs or 50 million, no one in the bank will ask, what you are going to do with this money. It is taken for granted that if they deposit money, they will withdraw it also and they needn’t give any explanations. If anyone in his ignorance dare to ask, that account is lost, and that employee his job. But that is not the case with a low amount depositor. When he goes to a bank for his small withdrawal, the full power of the bank will work on him. From the clerk, teller and cashier to the bank manager and director will ask him what he needs the money for. If it is subsidy money from government, withdrawing it will look like a shameful act and the bank will have and show all the heavy responsibility of saving the government by any means from bankrupting by preventing the person from withdrawing his little money. If he replies that it is meant to pay his daughter’s tuition fees or for purchasing medicine for his ailing wife, there will be all kinds of objections and rules and regulations. The listeners to these conversations standing there waiting to conclude their businesses would exclaim, this teller when poor in his youth was fed free from the tea shop of that subsidy man but now he is behaving like governor of the Reserve Bank! This is what is going to happen to those poor people whose subsidies are forcefully flowed into the arrogant banks of India. Banks are rich men’s, owned by them and run for them; not one among the millions of poor people in the world would disagree. It is the same in every country in the world, in every century. Every penny in every bank in the world is already taken by the rich to run their business, industry and to speculate on the share market which nearly emptied all banks, the only reason behind the collapse of hundreds of famous banks around the world. Therefore they want the money of the poor man also to exist, to breathe, to live. That is why, governments run by the rich men and the corrupt of those countries introduce new schemes fast to divert all money entitled to poor people to banks. Even though these poor depositors are treated ignominiously by these banks, these poor people’s money is the only life blood for the existence of these banks. Take the example of any famous bank in India or abroad; they are all actually sick and collapsing. The attractive figures in their profit columns have an all-time-present if. They are all profits, if, those rich borrowers repay, which they never will and never have. Each year they write off unbelievably huge amounts of rich men’s borrowals, to balance their books. So, they need capital to continue to exist and write off more of the rich men’s borrowals. So they open their ugly mouths and swallow poor men’s money. Government has become their obedient servant, not only in India but everywhere. Even the American, British and French governments diverted people’s national money to save banks from crashing. 

2 

When people go to the bank for subsidies and they are informed that their subsidies have not yet arrived in their accounts, they will run to where, nobody can say. Even when they have arrived, the bank managers won’t release them, saying a thousand of technical reasons. People will go to see the politicians to recommend them to the bank manager and the politician will become again a very important figure in making possible the release of subsidy amounts to poor people which is exactly what the government wishes by this project. The politician who is now a little lower in value and esteem due to exposure of his corruption should regain his importance among people. Once they become able to accept bribes from people to recommend them to the bank manager, he can once again become an essential figure in the local community and his everything will be looked after by the bank manager. When we are eating something delicious and our dog barks, we will throw crumbs to it. Whole billions of rupees vanish into the pockets of the political leaders in the government and they throw kind of crumbs to the greedy local politicians so that they will stop growling. When Panchayat Raj was introduced, all public works in the local bodies were taken away from the qualified Works Departments of state governments and assigned to ward members of local bodies, thereby giving them also a chance to make some money. Now, regardless of belonging to ruling party or opposition party, all ward members of local bodies and local politicians are staunch supporters of the government in whatever it introduce. When roads, culverts and canals are built in the local area, sixty percent of the money goes to these local politicians and thirty five percent is shared by the works contractor and the officer deputed from the government’s works department. Only five percent of the amount is actually put on the work. If anyone in India has a doubt, go see the works done in local bodies since this system was introduced. National level politicians, stained and steeped in horrible corruption which made the Indians’ heads bow before the whole world, are generous in throwing away greasy pieces to state and local level politicians so that all will be contented and there won’t be any grumbling. Every new scheme introduced by government during the past a few years has the only objective of making themselves richer and appeasing the grumbling local politicians. It is why local politicians are contented that great scams and corruption in higher government levels become possible and they have no shame. Every project and scheme formulated, which ought to have been prestigious landmarks in India’s progress such as the National Rural Health Mission and Genrum became scenes of the greatest of scams in the national level as well as in the state and local levels. Their only purpose is abating the unrest of lower level politicians.

Article Title Image By Steve PB. Graphics: Adobe SP. 

3

A poor agricultural laborer, house servant or street vendor works from morning till evening, collects his day’s earnings and run to the ration shop for obtaining his rice, sugar, wheat and cereals before the shop closes. It is all a rush act, unknown to bosses lolling in state assemblies and parliaments. He gets the ration at subsidized prices and he is satisfied. The Food Corporation of India, the wholesale depot and the retail ration depot may steal something from his ration but he is still satisfied, because he can get it within the limited time available to him and with his limited cash. The government says this price of ration shall not be less than the market rate, and the difference will be paid to his bank account as subsidy which he can encash at the bank. Where do they think he will get the time to go through all the humility and shame of standing before an arrogant bank officer for the whole day, waiting for his name to be called, told at last that there is a technical error or that the computer system is down for a few days? How can he spend his days at a bank for fear of loosing his actual employment which helps him to win his daily bread? It is that person’s ballot that made the assembly member, parliament member, finance minister, prime minister and president. Who is there to speak for him or is he to speak through megaphones and press releases? Ingratitude is something a man recognizes easily and that is what the thought that passes through the tired mind of that person waiting at the bank for his ration subsidy is. Subsidy is what this poor man’s representatives sitting in assemblies and parliaments receive as free house, water, electricity, car, driver, servant, security, protection, air travel, train travel, treatment expenses, constituency allowances and perks, for boycotting assemblies and parliament. Enjoyed by sitting members and thousands of ex-members, they are what ruin the country of its economy, not this poor man’s ration subsidy for rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene. Ingratitude has its bounds, and no representative shall jump boundaries. They only represent people, don’t own them; if they think so, that’s a great mistake. A people’s representative will not loose his daily wages for collecting his subsidies from bank because that poor man via state pays salaries to staff for attending such chores. But who pays that poor man for attending bank for one day and loose his daily wage, or if his employer is infuriated, the job itself? If every people’s representative in India paid for his house, water, electricity, gas, petrol, car, driver, servant, travel and treatment inland and abroad, and was paid no pension but salaries alone, there would have been no need for subsidies, for India would have been a very rich country. The poor people know this while shouldering the present and future of all these representatives for taking decisions to destroy them, wondering all the while ‘which people they represent’. 

4 

A state cannot go on continuously giving out subsidies but if it has to, the state has the only option of reducing administration expenses and curtaining corruption. In India, the total amount spent on state subsidies is only a fraction of the total amount involved in scams each year and the amount siphoned out to foreign banks by those few persons who directly take part in the government. Calling out all illegal and unauthorized secret bank accounts abroad alone will make up for the amounts the country needs to continue giving out subsidies to the poor. India ranks number one in stashing black money abroad. Failure of the government in returning all this money to India was what necessitated the withdrawal of state subsidies on food ration, petrol, gas and kerosene. These people who took away the money which rightly belongs to the people of India might be favourites, pets and sons and daughters of the government but the people who need these subsidies to continue are the actual owners of the country. Taking away their essential subsidies to compensate for this stolen money is not what a government is authorized to do. There is an easy explanation the economists and finance ministers of India give for curtailing subsidies- they do not want their nation to become like paupered Greece, Mexico or Brazil. The explanation is relevant, only in the fact that along with India, these were the countries money colonialists like Wal-Mart flowed billions to buy governments to set their foot on those countries. Every Indian economist and finance minister in his day time and dream time remember that they were accessories to heavy corporate bribing and fear when the amounts each received would be revealed to the American government and Congress by these companies. Examples of what happened in Mexico and Brazil are live and vivid in their minds, a terror on their political security. No countries they mention to have introduced Direct Cash Transfer has as much amount of black money stashed abroad unable to be brought back by government as India. If they want the example of another nation to reiterate, the apt one is the smallest welfare country in the world, the 18 mile island of Nauru, between Australia and Philippines, which subsidized even the foreign studies of its children on the power of its phosphate which would have sustained them through centuries. Like India, their greedy rulers allowed foreign countries to loot their minerals freely which soon exhausted. When the people of Nauru thought they could still sustain themselves through their National Phosphate Welfare Fund, international auditors showed that 95 percent of it had been stolen by their rulers and their island had been heavily borrowing from international banks and consortia. What difference is there in the fate of this smallest of nations and that of the largest democracy of India with this kind of greedy and corrupt rulers? 

[In response to news article ‘Subsidies through direct cash transfer a blow’ on 14 January 2012]