India does not have the money to spend on statues

The Statue of Unity - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

IN his first Budget, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pointed at India’s poor performance in the Human Development Index survey. 

He said India’s performance continues to be below the global average in most of the HDI indicators like life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling. 

Yet he chose to allocate Rs 200 crore for the Statue of Unity, a figure of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel while he sanctioned Rs 100 crore for girl child education.

Such allocations are unusual in developing nations where elections are still being fought on issues of bijli, sadak and paani. 

Political parties including the BJP had targeted Mayawati for building the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal in Noida at a cost of Rs 685 crore, but now it is okay to construct a statue and spend crores on it while children starve to death in a country grappling with poverty, sluggish growth and a daunting deficit. 

Jaitley’s allocation would certainly not be enough since the actual cost of building the statue is pegged at Rs 2,500 crore. 

So what does Prime Minister Narendra Modi plan to do apart from asking people to donate funds? 

Does he expect states to follow in the steps of Gujarat and make a provision for a Rs 100-crore fund for the statue in their budgets? 

And why only blame Modi or Jaitley, the Prithviraj Chavan-led Maharashtra government recently sanctioned a budget of Rs 100 crore for a Chhatrapati Shivaji statue. 

While millions of people in India are still uneducated, don’t have homes to stay in, sleep on empty stomachs and die because of unavailability of medical aid, a substantial amount of the nation’s money is being used to build sculptures. 

No matter which way I say it, the fact remains that it’s a top-down expenditure of public funds and it isn’t unpatriotic to question its usefulness, especially at a time of economic anxiety.

© 2014 Nasreen Ghani

Published in Daily Mail and Mail Today
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2690777/India-does-not-money-spend-statues.html