The worst flooding in more than a century has left hundreds dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, billions of dollars of losses and the lingering risk of disease in Kerala, southern India. Blame the monsoon, or rickety infrastructure?
Pinning down the cause of the disaster is important in assessing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's spending priorities as he heads into an election year. Government's budget certainly needs an overhaul.
While the Kerala downpours were unusually heavy, most of the damage was done after the sluice gates of brimming dams were opened to release water into parts of the southwestern coast that were already on the verge of inundation. The flooding itself is no surprise: Almost 15 percent of India's land mass is prone to floods and every year, on average, as many as 2,000 lives are lost and up to 8 million hectares (20 million acres) affected, at a cost of 18 billion rupees ($258 million).
Tragic as the Kerala floods are, they help underline how PM Modi's largess can divert spending from necessities like infrastructure toward populist causes, especially agriculture. For example, the national budget for fiscal 2018-19 pledges a minimum price for farm products that is 50 percent more than the cost of producing them. The central government has forgiven billions of rupees of farmers' loans in several states.
All told, the government spends five times more on items like subsidized credit to farmers and crop insurance than it does on water resources. Only 3 percent of water spending is on flood management, and an even smaller proportion of that is in capital outlays. In this year's budget, the government made no allocation at all for flood forecasting and management.
The consequences of this neglect will broaden. In Kerala, the flooding is likely to wipe out many farmers and small businesses, and will hit banks' ability to recover loans. Nationwide, banks' exposure to the state is about 3 percent of total lending, according to Jefferies analysts, though it ranges from 41 percent for South Indian Bank Ltd. to 4 percent or less for the likes of ICICI Bank Ltd. and HDFC Bank Ltd.
For all the talk of infrastructure spending increasing by one-fifth in the budget, new project announcements declined more than 20 percent in the fiscal first quarter, led by an almost 80 percent drop in the government's portion - in turn a reflection of slowing completions of earlier projects. Institutional investors are pulling back, despite PM Modi's globe-trotting roadshows when he was elected in 2014.
Bold handouts may please the voters, but if the cost is measured in lives, it's time for a rethink.
(Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Asia. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal.)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same
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