(Image Courtesy: taxindiaonline.com)

 

Is India's first electric typewriter (ET) show-cased in any museum as a symbol in Self-reliance? Does the company that produced it exists as a public enterprise now? 

The answer is No. And there hangs countless tales of self-reliance (SR) goals that failed or fizzled out for different reasons including shifts in political perception of SR. 

Before latching on to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s SR vision, we should understand why our quest for SR has been a mixed bag of failures and successes. SR has never been addressed as a complex challenge, requiring initiatives at all levels of economy, governance and society. It thus often gets reduced to a mere political slogan spun in a challenging situation or at best a burst of disjointed initiatives.  

The sweet, sour and bitter lessons from the past right from British India’s days of Swadeshi should lay the foundation for PM’s “clarion call for Atmanirbhar Bharat”. 

Mr. Modi has actually pitched for self-reliance ever periodically ever since he became PM. Recall his speech captioned “Self-reliance (aatma-nirbharta) in defence offsets essential for the security (aatma-raksha) of the nation” delivered on 4th July 2014.

Before discussing SR’s complexity & disconnect between slogan & actions, we need to recollect SR tales. They can serve as the building blocks for a wholesome aatma-nirbharta.

Revert first to ET tale. On 9th May 1975, Communications Minister Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma, presented to Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, India’s first ET. She described it as “a small but significant step in our progress towards self-reliance”.

(Dirty Water From Choked Drainpipe Mirrors Lockdown Economy)

 

How should Modi Government mobilize resources for the economy’s revival after phased lifting of unprecedented lockdown of Indians?

This issue has assumed special significance due to three reasons: 1) India is exploring all options to take loans from multilateral financial institutions (MFIs) 2) Finance Ministry has purged Indian Revenue Service (IRS) Association’s 44-page report titled Fiscal Options & Response to Covid-19 epidemic from official domain 3) Prospects of Centre ordering Financial Emergency to garner & control resources to manage lockdown-accelerated economic crisis are jaw-dropping.   

Take the last first. Financial emergency (FE) has never been invoked in Independent India. It has political, fiscal, monetary and other economic implications that can only be speculated at present.

News reports show that finance ministers (FMs) of opposition parties-ruled States & other leaders voiced grave concern over imminent risk of imposition of FE. 

They foresaw FE while addressing a webinar organised by the Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation on 27th April. They focused on mounting GST compensation dues, state revenue drying up due to lockdown and mounting debt burden on States.

1918 Flu Pandemic Image. Courtesy: influenzaarchive.org

 

 

"Following every widespread epidemic or pandemic of influenza, the contemporary literature becomes virtually flooded with reports of scientific studies on the etiology and the epidemiology of the disease. By the time that recrudescences have ceased, interest has usually lagged and eventually research in this subject has practically ceased, only to be revived with the development of the next extensive epidemic”.

Dr. Warren T. Vaughan made this observation way back in September 1920 in preface to a Monograph captioned ‘Influenza - An Epidemiologic Study’. 

This classical study traces history of influenza right from BC era to the 1918 one- a fact that might be disliked by climate change theorists. The 1918 infection is commonly referred to as Spanish flu- the most disastrous one in modern history. This flu wiped out 2% of British India’s population. Monograph notes that first “true pandemic” happened in 1580. 

Dr. Vaughan observed: “To one who has had occasion to review the extensive literature of the last pandemic, it becomes apparent that many of the recent writers are uninformed, or at best only partially informed, regarding the rather extensive information accumulated during the 1889 epidemic. The longer one studies the observations made in 1889-93 the more firmly convinced one becomes that the recent pandemic was identical with the former in practically all of its manifestations”.

He added: “It is desirable that, following each epidemic prevalence some individual or individuals review the literature of the preceding epidemics, acquaint himself with what has been written regarding influenza in the intervening time up to the epidemic prevalence and correlate the work done in these two periods with the various reports regarding the latest epidemic”.

Dr. Vaughan’s observations are extremely relevant to Covid-19 pandemic from the standpoint of governance. The unfolding disaster reflects the same mistakes that the regimes & the public repeated in the past till a flu outbreak turned into pandemic.