Getting priorities right: Fund the rights first

One of the first things that became apparent when the pandemic hit is that our public health infrastructure was totally inadequate to respond. Within a short span, ICU beds filled up and supplies of drugs ran out. The scenes of desperation witnessed at many medical centres around the country were the direct result of low investments in healthcare all these years.

To respond and cope in whatever limited way was possible, governments needed to rapidly scale up the public health system. This required large amounts of money. But with the economy tanking, especially under the impact of the pandemic, funds too became scarce with the government. Throughout the last year, both central and state governments have faced a shortfall of tax revenues as the pandemic has dramatically hit economic activity.

Moreover, it was not only the health system that had collapsed; many other things were also staggering under the weight of the situation. Schools were shut down, and while private schools tried to cope in different ways, more than 150 million children in government schools were simply told to stay home and wait, putting their education on hold. Millions of people needed livelihood support after their jobs disappeared. Factories and businesses found their finances pushed to their limits.

It seemed that all at once, there was a need to make up for decades of neglect, and many things that had not been funded and put in place for so long were now unavoidable but also un-fundable. In this crunch, some things had to be prioritised, and their funding maintained or increased. At the same time, other things needed to be temporarily de-funded or cancelled altogether to make room for urgent needs.

Which things would remain, and which things would have to go? Governments don’t like this question, pandemic or not. They would prefer to be able to simply go from one year to the next, with slightly more funding for everything that is already funded more or less retained. They can explain small cuts occasionally to some group that really wants it, and they can tom-tom some new commitments of funds for pet schemes they’ve thought up, but apart from this, public funding runs inexorably on the track it’s already on.

But this question should concern the public nonetheless: What should governments be funding? At the end of the day, we’re the potential beneficiaries of the right answers, and the victims of the wrong ones, as the pandemic has glaringly pointed out. Perhaps, if this question were asked more frequently, and the answers discussed and debated, we could be on a very different trajectory of development.

In fact, this question should have been answered long ago. The Constitution already provides very good pointers. Throughout its early pages, a number of ‘rights’ of the people were enshrined right at the beginning, and in the decades since 1947, Parliament and the Supreme Court have identified and recognised more rights as well.

From a funding perspective, it seems logical that once something has been identified as a right, it must be fully funded. The ‘fully’ is also important, because what we now see is a lot of partial and incomplete funding for things that are declared to be rights.

Public education is a stark example of this. The right to education has been recognised. But in most states now, the expenditure per student is nowhere near what it needs to be to provide children a fair education. This is despite the fact that large numbers of children -- sometimes more than half -- are now not in public schools, and are instead getting their education elsewhere, and their families get no financial support from the government for this.

The ‘right’ of children to a government-funded education thus exists in theory but is far from met in practice. There are other examples. Right to Information Commissions are understaffed, with poor infrastructure. Local elections are often not held on time. Metropolitan Planning Committees mandated in the Constitution are either not established at all in most states, or not funded when they are. The right to speedy justice is gone, because the courts are under-funded. The protection against hunger is minimal. This list is long, and weighty.

At the same time, many other things get funded that are not linked to rights. In every department of every government, it is possible to find projects going on that are unrelated to any right of the people.

But even expenditure that is not linked to rights has value, doesn’t it? Yes, of course. But that’s not the question we face. What we have to decide is, which things have more value? And we mustn’t ignore the answer we already have. By enshrining certain things as rights, we are affirming to ourselves that these are the more important things. Having done that, we should have the conviction to follow through on those by funding those rights properly.

We’ve been making false starts in the Olympics of development. We tell ourselves that we are going to build the next Singapore or London or whatever else, when we’re still struggling to build the next Bengaluru and Kolkata. As a result, we are off the blocks and running, we think, towards these impossible goals. Quite quickly, however, we find the whistle blowing against us, disqualifying us from the race altogether.

The pandemic will pass, and the fiscal crunch it has put governments in will also lift. But we must not forget what it has revealed. In our democratic republic, we have given ourselves rights. These are not like other choices, they are special because they are the chosen anchors for many of our aspirations. But for that to have meaning, our public expenditure must recognise and fund them. A broad spectrum of social progress, economic growth and resilience will all then become possible.