Vote on account or budget?

A vote on account is Parliament’s permission to the government to use money from the exchequer to pay for essential expenditures for a few months, usually three to four, during a period when regular permission to use the money, through budget, is not available, as happens in an election year. It also allows the government to collect taxes from the people and businesses beyond March 31 in the absence of any law governing taxation during that period.

Every budget is a law, whose validity exists from April to March for a year. Budget becomes a legal instrument only after Parliament gives its approval of the proposals - of taxes to be levied on the people and businesses and expenditure made for welfare and security of the nation - contained in it.

In the election year, the government or Parliament is not authorized to propose or vote for a revenue collection or expenditure plan beyond March 31 due to absence of sovereign mandate, i.e. authorization from “We, the people of India”. People vote for a Lok Sabha for a period of five years. The Members of Parliament (MPs) cannot vote for a period beyond their tenure or loosely said validity. So, a regular budget is proposed and approved by those comprising freshly elected MPs of the Lok Sabha.

Vote on account is a provision devised for interim period like this. However, the first vote on account was not presented in an election year. It was presented in 1948 by then Finance Minister RK Shanmukham Chetty, who followed it up with a regular budget. The practice continued since then.

Going by the logic of democracy, a vote on account should not alter tax regime or make fresh policy decisions for the next fiscal. But in recent times, the outgoing finance ministers have not strictly adhered to this principle.

In 1991 before Manmohan Singh announced his economic reforms as finance minister of the PV Narasimha Rao government, the outgoing Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha of Chandrashekhar government made the policy announcement of 20 per cent disinvestment in certain public sector units (PSUs). At that time, India was facing its worst balance of payment crisis. This was the first policy on disinvestment. Manmohan Singh followed it up with more nuanced liberalized economic policy of India.

In 2004, Jaswant Singh allowed Indians travelling abroad or returning home from abroad to carry up to Rs 25,000 as baggage allowance. It was a major policy decision of the time. He also reduced certain customs duties – peak duty on non-farm goods slashed to 20 per cent from 25 per cent, special duty on customs duty of 4 per cent was abolished. He also merged dearness allowance of the central government employees with their basic salaries. The government was going into election equipped with a feel-good factor for its employees.

In 2009, Pranab Mukherjee, as finance minister, revised fiscal deficit target from 2.5 per cent to 6 per cent. He presented a vote on account in February but before that in January he had announced tax cuts worth Rs 40,000 crore.

In 2014, P Chidambaram, then finance minister, altered indirect tax rates related to capital goods and consumer non-durables. Excise duty on small cars, special utility vehicles (SUVs) and two-wheelers, and mobile phones was slashed.

In 2019, the stand-in finance minister Piyush Goyal does not have much elbow room to maneuvre as indirect tax rates, the large part of taxation, can now be altered only by the Goods and Services Tax Council (GST Council). What all he may announce include income tax concessions, customs duty, special agriculture or farm package, stimulus to employment generation or a special provision similar to one promised by Congress president Rahul Gandhi for minimum income guarantee to unemployed youths – the scheme was originally proposed by former chief economic adviser to the government, Arvind Subramanian.

There could be another scenario should Goyal decides to make some policy announcements. He may do so expressing confidence that the government would be voted back to power and under the circumstances, the general elections cannot be considered as a disruption or obstruction in the path of government’s welfare or corrective/reform policies.

10 per cent reservation for general category poor untenable

Neo-poor among the middle-class may soon, if Parliament and half of state legislatures give their nod, get 10 per cent quota in jobs and educational avenues. Photograph shows fliers waiting to board their respective airbuses at Terminal 2 launge of the IGI Airport, Delhi. (Photo ©Sindhustan)

India devised a unique way of dealing with social inequality with the adoption if Constitution. It implemented a policy to economic empowerment of thosefound to be weak in their social status. It provided for reservation in jobs and education to those found to be socially and educationally backward. It was the time when only a few Indians were earning enough to sustain themselves. A handful had the resources to run businesses and business houses. Less than 12 per cent Indians were educated to take up government or corporate jobs. 

Practically the whole of India could easily have been categorised as socially and educationally backward. 

Economically, per capita income of an average Indian was less than Rs 250 in 1947. Economic backwardness was as universal throughout the country as illetracy and social backwardness. The framing of Constitution saw intense yet open minded debates. The result was provision to give economic power to those socially and educationally backward. It was considered okay for a period of 15 years to rein in talent and power in the matters of jobs and education. 

But who should be given this benefit? The whole of India was backward and upbeat after Independence. The British were there earlier to be blamed for all the ills and ailments. Providing earning through jobs or private vocation was the most difficult task. A commission called the Kaka Kalekar Commission was set up by the government in 1953 to decide who could be considered socially and educationally backward. The commission had to evolve its own criteria for identifying the people who could be classified as backward. 

Identifying individual backwardness would have been a mammoth task only to be matches by an honest conduct of census process. Not possible in 1953. Focus, that's why, must have shifted to community identification of backwardness. India's old communities had already classified itself in castes and the boundaries were invisibly thick. Kalekar Commission couldn't have pierced through these walls and formed new communities or future caste groups of people suffering from backwardness. Team Kalekar, hence, proceeded to identify 2,399 castes who could be termed backward.

But Kaka Kalekar was not happy with the findings. He penned a letter to the President of India requesting him to look for other alternative for economic empowerment of socially and educationally backward people. He argued that caste-based reservation in jobs and education was not in the interest of the nation. Incidentally, the government, too, didn't find the report convincing and it was rejected.

But those running the government were convinced that Indians needed protection and should be given concession in jobs and educational avenues as the topmost political leaders of the time were from socially and educationally forward class and also had relatively better economic background, they believed the have-nots were not capable enough to make a mark for themselves in generally backward society of India despite having seen the likes of BR Ambedkar establishing themselves as stalwarts of the same society. The problem was that the decision makers were not confident of their own ability to work for creation of enough jobs, education and earning avenues. 

Fearing a backlash from society, well-trained, by now, in Gandhian way of demanding rights, in the same way as against the British administration, a formula for reservation was enforced. Needless to state that only the forwards among the declared backwards benefitted from the limited earning and learning avenues that India has generated under the guidance of the government. 

There has never been enough in India, at least in the living memory. Population growth was organic due to societal belief and lack of other entertainment alternatives. This theory doesn't need any further authorisation after recent experience from Nepal, where massive power outages a few years ago coincided with unusually high number of pregnancies and child-births. 

While population kept rising, the penetration of scientific temper eroded people's belief in the theory of karma. Globalisation and internet fuelled their aspirations further. Money, muscle, sex, youthfulness and remaining central in and under all circumstances became the focal points of life. This aspiration was not compartmentalised by the invisible thick walls of castes. The cumulative effect is putting pressure on the government to provide for everything that the people can't get themselves. After all, the freedom was won in the name of prosperity, now better worded as achchhe din. This achchhe din is missing from everyone's life, almost everyone. 

If SC/ST or OBC individual gets an earning or learning avenues and a person from the other community sees this happening, she feels strongly agitated. Then she learns that it is the government which facilitated it. She first rallies for abolition of inequal rights failing which she demands such a right for herself. 

If elections are to be won to run government, people need to be on the side of ruling or aspiring to be ruling group, the party. Jobs and educational avenues are not enough to be offered to every desirous individual. So, what should a government do. Offer equalising proposal of reservation.

The government announced 10 per cent quota I'm jobs and education for non-reserved category aspirants. This means the offer is valid for all religious grouping, a secular offer. But this offer came on a ground that was first rejected, by virtue of its omission, by Constitution and then by the Supreme Court.

Nearly 25 years after the Kaka Kalekar Commission report was rejected, another commission came up in 1979, called BP Mandal Commission to decide on the proposal of provding reservation. 

Mandal commission reported in 1980, an election year, that caste-based reservation should be given to uplift socially and educationally backward people. For 10 years, the report was wrapping itself in dust before VP Singh facing threat to his PMO chair and a certain loss of power, brought the quota report out and issued an Office Memorandum to implement reservation for identified and declared OBCs. Reservation, 27 per cent, to OBCs failed to save Singh from losing power. 

The next in line, PVN Rao tried to counterbalance it in 1991 by giving another 10 per cent quota to the poor from general category people. 

Both the decisions were challenged in the Supreme Court, where Indra Sawhney case of 1992 still Stan's out as a landmark judgment. The court herein rules that caste-based reservation is constitutional, quota on the basis of economic backwardness not valid under constitutional arrangement and that total number of reserved seats can't breach the ceiling of 50 per cent. 

The new proposal, the 124th Constitution Amendment Bill, provides for raising the ceiling to 60 per cent. It is bound for a test in the Supreme Court. 

The Bill, interestingly, proposes to declare those having annual income for their nuclear family less than Rs 8 lakh may avail this quota benefit. Commensurate arrangement has been prescribed for land and property ownership. But taking one earning person per family, the Rs 8 lakh cap translates into asalary/income of Rs 65,166 per month. Compare this criterion of economic backwardness with the existing cap for BPL identification, just for fun 😊

It wouldn't take a genius of Chanakya to understand that the target community of this reservation scheme is a major chunk of middle-class, who is said to be angry with the government. In any case, if jobs in public sector are dwindling, what good use this 10 per cent cap can bring to the neo-poor community of the general category people?

When women used to visit Sabarimala temple

Woman protesters at Sabarimala temple. (Photo: Twitter/@iamsrp007)

Huge uproar followed today after two women aged below 50 years reportedly entered the Sabarimala temple. Identified as 42-year-old Bindu -  a CPI(ML) worker from Kozikhode and Kanakadurga – a Kerala governemnt employee from Malappuram claimed to have entered the Sabarimala temple at 3.45 this morning.

Protests erupted in various parts of Kerala with the BJP joining chorus. The BJP has called a shutdown in Kerala on Thursday to protest entry of women in the Sabarimala temple, which was allowed by the Supreme Court last year in a majority judgment by a bench led by then Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

The full ban on entry of women aged between 10 and 50 years was enforced after a Kerala High Court judgment in 1991. The order came on a petition that was filed after Devasam board commissioner held traditional rice feeding ceremony for his child at the Sabarimala temple in 1990. The ceremony was attended by women of the family and also some relatives. 

The petitioner challenged that entry of women in the Sabarimala temple for which there was a law passed by the state assembly. The law was not strictly imposed and women used to visit the Sabarimala temple, sometimes raking up controversy while at other without much notice. 

The first documented record of ban on entry of women in the Sabarimala temple is found in a survey by two British officials. They conducted the survey in 1820s but the report could only be published in 1890s and 1900s in two volumes. 

The report talked about the belief that Lord Ayyappa should not be visited by women of menstruating age. However, the belief did not necessarily translate into a complete ban on entry of women. 

Records have it that women from the Travancore royal family visited the Sabarimala temple. The queen of Travancore visited the Sabarimala temple in 1940s. It continued, though sporadically, till 1991. 

In 1986, a Tamil film was shot at the Sabarimala temple where actresses including Jayashree danced on a song. It led to a controversy and a fine was also imposed both on the film shooting party and the Devasam board. 

Former Karnataka minister Jayamala later claimed that she had visited the Sabarimala temple the same year. In 1995, a woman district collector visited the Sabarimala temple in order to gather first hand information from the priests and officials of the shrine. 

The matter of entry of women into the Sabarimala temple started making national headlines after a group of activists filed petitions seeking lifting of ban and quashing of the Kerala law that prohibited women from offering prayers at the Lord Ayyappa shrine.