Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must have observed that with each day in power the honest academic and economist in him is becoming a clever politician adept at vending half-truths to confuse his audience. This is what he did at FICCI's Annual General Meeting, blaming the NDA Government for depressing the growth rate between 1997 and 2002. For sure, he was distorting facts -- all of them repeated in Government's annual Economic Surveys.

Facts speak high of the economic management under the NDA regime. True, in the last three years of the PV Narasimha Rao Government, in which Mr Singh was the Finance Minister, growth rate had crossed the seven per cent barrier. The credit for that must go to Mr Singh who dumped the license-quota raj in favour of economic freedom to enterprises. Credit must also go to Rao who, as a Prime Minister from the Congress, dared to dump Nehruvian Socialism in favour of economic liberalism.

Lately, the Congress does not want to give credit where it is due. So there is a deliberate attempt to underplay Rao's courage and even claim that the growth rate began to rise in Rajiv Gandhi's time. Obviously, the Congress does not want the country, deemed a jagir of the Nehru-Gandhis by the party, to be impressed by anybody else. Hence they must downplay Rao, who took charge at a time when the economy had already touched rock bottom.

Contrast this with the Chinese economy that reached nine per cent growth in the 1990s after recording steady growth for the previous 15 years, mainly as a result of Mao Tse Tung's successor Deng Xiaoping dumping Maoist Marxism in favour of the market economy. The Chinese example should remind us that it was the Congress under the Nehru-Gandhis that was responsible for the crawling growth rate of three to five per cent all the years from the 1960s to the 1990.

Back to the NDA regime, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee's coalition Government took charge in March 1998. In 1998-99, the GDP growth rate was 6.5 per cent. Next year when that Government was toppled, but continued in power after a fresh general election gave it a new mandate under a new coalition, the growth rate was 6.1 per cent. Subsequently, a new series of GDP measure was introduced for which reason the figures of growth after year 2000 are not exactly comparable to those before it. The next four years based on 1999-2000 prices saw GDP growth rates of 4.4, 5.8, 3.8 and 8.5 per cent.

Of these years, 2002-03 was vitiated by the global meltdown due to the 'dotcom' bubble bursting. The buoyancy of the economy during these years was quite evident and has been repeatedly acknowledged in the Economic Surveys.

Now take the other indicators of healthy growth. Between 2001-02 and 2003-04, the last three years of the NDA regime, domestic savings rose from 23.5 per cent to 29.7 per cent and capital formation increased from 22.9 per cent to 26 per cent. All through the NDA years the percentage of irrigation for cereal crops was around 50 per cent. What is significant is that it was during these NDA years that food grains procurement shot up from 30 to 42 million tonnes while the demand for public distribution fell except in 2003, indicating better economic conditions at the lower level of the pyramid.

Central Statistical Organisation's figures for 1995 to 2004, too, reveal that the level of poverty went down substantially from 31 to 26 per cent.

Almost every other indicator of these years speaks of rising growth and greater public confidence in the economy. Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav is fond of drumming his 'achievement' of taking railway revenue earning from freight beyond 600 million tonnes. What he would like us to forget was that the NDA regime, too, had taken the railway freight up from 347 million tonnes to 557 million tonnes.

Moreover, it was during the NDA regime that foreign exchange reserves rose from $21 billion in 95-96 to $112 billion in the last year of the Vajpayee regime.

Even the Economic Survey under the present regime acknowledges the 1999 New Telecom Policy as a "watershed event" that boosted the total telecom subscriber base from 20 million to 76 million and paved the way for the subsequent years of bumper growth. In the last four years of NDA rule, telecom tariffs came down substantially with a call from Delhi to Mumbai being priced at only Rs 3.60 from what it was at the beginning -- Rs 24 per minute.

India took a huge step forward in building modern infrastructure during the NDA regime when then Prime Minister Vajpayee came up with his National Quadrilateral and North-South, East-West expressway programmes. For the previous 50 years, mostly under the Congress, there was no road-networking programme that could match the sweep of the grandeur and imagination of this modern expressway scheme. The Prime Minister should recall that under his regime the national highways programme has suffered immense damage: NHAI chairman has been changed four times in a single year but that has not helped reviving the pace of implementation.

Governments in a democracy win or lose elections for many reasons -- not all of them due to performance or lack of it. For instance, West Bengal has had more than 30 years of Marxist rule but that has not meant that the people of the State think that the Left Front Government has delivered them from economic and social depression. In fact, in the last few months we have seen food riots taking place in that State and even some coalition partners organising demonstrations against their own Government.

We have Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav getting re-elected three times spanning 15 years as Chief Minister of Bihar while the State wallowed in the worst type of misgovernance and scams even as it registered the lowest level of human development indices in every sphere from literacy to infant mortality. Mr Yadav managed was getting re-elected at a time when Bihar's literacy level was less than 50 per cent, infant mortality was as high as 61 per 1,000 births (against the national average of 58:1,000).

It does not behove an eminent economist and academician like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to fudge facts and blame his predecessor. At least the NDA Government did not fail to give due credit to Mr Singh for initiating the process of economic liberalisation in 1991 that lifted the country from the dark ages of the license-quota raj and brought surplus situation in several key products and services.

By Mr Singh's own confession, the Government he heads cannot go ahead with the badly needed reforms because it depends on the support of the Marxists. But he dares not go to the people to win a fresh mandate for the reforms he wants to initiate. If his Government has been such a grand success, why this hesitation? And if he knows that Governments are not always re-elected on the basis of their performance, why is he trying to shift the blame for slower than expected growth on the NDA regime that ended in May 2004? Talk about your present performance, Mr Singh.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, February 22, 2008