HARYANA

Crack the whip, Hooda
The Haryana Chief Minister must show toughness and deliver on several major fronts
Yoginder Gupta

After having formulated several schemes in various fields for people’s welfare during the last six years, now is the time for the Hooda Government in Haryana to consolidate these schemes and their gains.

In 2005, when the Congress Government was formed in the state, Haryana was awfully short of power. To meet the bulk of its needs, the state had to depend upon sources outside the state. The increasing demand for power, an indicator of development, forced the state authorities to buy power from the open market at exorbitant rates, particularly during the paddy season.

The efforts of the Hooda Government to make the state self-sufficient in power have started yielding results. Several generating units would go on stream in the next one year, considerably reducing the need to buy power from open market.

While highly subsidised power to the agriculture sector has now found almost universal acceptance among politicians of all hues, no one can deny the desirability of the need to make the consumers pay for what they are consuming. In Haryana, particularly in certain rural pockets, a large number of power consumers consider it as their birthright not to pay to the electricity companies even the subsidised charges.

The non-payment of electricity bills in the rural areas is a chronic problem. Its genesis lies in the call given by a political party to villagers not to pay the electricity bills as these would be waived off when that party would come to power. Even strong-arm measures by successive governments failed to persuade the defaulters to pay the bills. Later when the party, which had given the controversial call, came to power, it denied that it had made any promise to supply free power.

On becoming Chief Minister, Hooda realised that rural consumers owed about Rs 1600 crore to the power companies. He could not go against the national policy of his party of not supplying free power to any sector. At the same time he felt morally committed to give some relief to the defaulters, for whom he had undertaken a long walk to Delhi to protest against the police firing on the agitating farmers during the INLD regime. It was also true that the arrears of individual consumers had accumulated to the extent that they were now in no position to clear their dues.

Hooda came out with a scheme, which many economists described as the best in the situation. In lingua franca, it could be described as Bhaagte chor ki langoti hi sahi. Since there was no hope of recovery of these Rs 1600 crore, a book entry as good as a bad debt, it was thought that a scheme should be devised so that the defaulters at least developed a habit to pay in future. They were given an option to pay the next 20 bills, and their corresponding arrears would be waived off.

Now the government must show the political will to take on the defaulters, who must be told in clear terms that the subsidised power is for agriculture operations and not for domestic use.

The last five years have seen a phenomenal growth of institutes of technical education in the state. The prestigious Rajiv Gandhi Education City is being set up, where reputed institutes of higher learning are likely to come.

The government must concentrate on improving the quality of education in its schools. Unless a sound foundation is laid in schools, students of Haryana would not be able to avail themselves of the opportunities being offered by the new institutes of higher learning. Experiments like Edusat or computer labs have not yielded any desirable results. Many a time press notes issued by trade unions of the teaching fraternity provide sufficient evidence of the quality of education these teachers must be imparting to their pupils.

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