IT takes a child to tell an emperor that he is not wearing any clothes. My seven-year-old grandson made me realize that the Planning Commission and the Government of India were not listening to the people. Driving with me in New Delhi, in my government car with a red light atop, past beggars at traffic crossings, he exclaimed, “What’s the government doing? Counting daisies?” The Planning Commission, of which I was a new Member, was trying hard in those days to prove, with statistics, that poverty had greatly reduced in the country since the liberalization of the economy.
I explained to Viren that evening what the purpose of the Planning Commission was, and I brought him the next day to the Planning Commission to show him my big office and to introduce him to the many personal staff attending to me, who spoiled him with biscuits and sodas. When Viren returned to his school in the US, he had to write an essay, like other students, on what he had done during his summer holidays. Viren wrote a 14-page book on the Planning Commission of India, with sketches he had drawn too.
At the end of his book, he referred to the Planning Commission as the “Planning Community of India”. There was a picture of a man in a big office behind a big table, across which sat a skinny man with folded hands. Viren wrote below it, “The Planning Community is a place where all the poor people of India can come, and there will be someone there to listen to them, and then they will not be poor anymore.” That’s how the Planning Commission should function, he implied. But it wasn’t. We were analyzing statistics and arriving at conclusions about the economy the ‘scientific’ way. We were not listening to real people to understand their real problems.
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