On September 14, the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone of projects worth over ₹50,700 crore in the election-bound State of Madhya Pradesh. This included a petrochemical complex and 10 new industrial projects. He emphasised that this investment would boost the State’s development. Just a few days later, on September 18, a major Opposition party announced “guarantees” for the people of Telangana ahead of the Assembly elections. These include ₹2,500 a month financial assistance to women, gas cylinders at ₹500, free travel for women in State transport buses, schemes promising an annual financial assistance of ₹15,000 for farmers, a housing scheme with a piece of land and ₹5 lakh for construction of house for homeless poor, 200 units of free electricity to each poor household, health insurance cover of up to ₹10 lakh and ₹5 lakh financial assistance to students from a poor background to pursue higher education. Both these announcements in conjunction show that ‘development and populism’ gain wide circulation before elections and that these two are pitched as poll promises with a call to evaluate the gains emanating with respect to short-term versus long-term benefits. The most common narrative is that development is the long-term ideal and populism is dubbed as myopic, with development-retarding effects.
The development obsession
There are no two arguments on the need to achieve higher and better development outcomes. However, there exists a need to assess its trajectory and inclusivity to understand the implications for welfare and sustainability. While the need for accelerated development is sold easily as a poll promise, the need to take stock and address unevenness in welfare gains is neither mentioned nor taken up in the post-poll time period. An easy route to make development as an appealing proposition for voters is to define it narrowly in terms of visible physical infrastructure. The advantage of such a narrow definition is that it can be easily showcased and achievements can be quantified. This in turn would give an advantage to the incumbent governments if the scale of physical infrastructure creation is high. The opposing political parties would then be left with three options: promise an even higher scale of infrastructure creation if voted to power; highlight the unsuitability of the created infrastructure and dub it as failure, and/or address welfare of some section of the population that is left out through economic populism.
