A Revolution Called Mudra

MEDIA HAS BECOME MIDDLE CLASS. This might have been funny were its consequences not so smug. Print still retains an upper middle-class sense of itself but it is still some ladders below the khadi-nationalism aristocracy that was its high plateau. Dates are always going to be challenged, and my suggestion will certainly be contested, but if one had to select the moment when the process became lodged in media consciousness then it would be from the time Madan Mohan Malaviya bought the paper and GD Birla found a way to sustain it finan­cially and grow its circulation without compromising on nationalist credentials. This does not take anything away from its seminal inception during the historic Akali reform movement, and the great role played by its editor KM Panikkar. Appropriately Mahatma Gandhi performed the opening ceremony of its rebirth on September 26, 1924. Panikkar and Devdas Gandhi not only challenged the British but also the colonial media aristocracy headed by the imperial Statesman in Calcutta and Bennett & Coleman’s Times of India in Mumbai.

The great quality shared by any aristocracy, whatever its allegiance, is an ability to view its class-and-cash netherlands occasionally with a touch of arrogance but never with contempt. Contempt is crass, not class. This media nobility was well-read. For decades after indepen­dence, it could legitimately claim to be an—an, not the—academic wing of public policy. Think Sham Lal or Girilal Jain or Dileep Padgaonkar of the Times of India; a robust communicator like Frank Moraes of the Indian Express; or a mind of many parts like Sardar Khushwant Singh. In Calcutta, Evan Charlton, Pran Chopra, Surendra Nihal Singh. Their salaries might have been upper middle-class; their intellect was noble.

Sham Lal might have considered it infra dig to leave his intellectual den but he, his immediate successors and leaders like Frank Moraes believed that it was their duty to check street-reality and tell the government, in polite but unmistakeable language that the cops were on the take or the traffic lights were defunct. They sent, possibly at arm’s length and through their chief reporters, typewriter commandos into the rural hinter­land, for their realm of reportage was the world of India, not just the preening urban Englishwallah sliver which constituted its readership. They were confident intellectuals, quite content in the tiny cubicles which the Times of India provided for their professional habitat. It was a prison cell, not an office; but since they were media monks, it did not matter. Their egos were devoted to higher concerns. The Statesman’s office contours were a little grander, but the self-confidence was equivalent. Editorials used to thunder because editori­als used to be read. Advertising always had its place, as it always must; but advertising was not treated as content.

The trouble with contemporary middle-class mentality is that it is so trans­fixed with upward mobility that it looks down only in the pejorative sense. The high point is indifference, the low point contempt. There is so much judge­mentalism that a Supreme Court might feel jittery. These media magistrates are too busy with their proclaimed audience numbers to waste any time on reflective evidence before they condemn the poor for their poverty: implicitly when not explicitly. Since the underprivileged are not part of the consumer base which brings in advertising, it does not deserve to be in the news. Their en­try into the news bulletin can only be through sensation. Die in an earthquake and they will rush the cameras. Murder is good; mass murder, better. There is no reportage. There is always a hunt. Hunger is never news, because the pictures disturb an environment conducive to revenue.

What greater evidence can we possibly have for this phenomenon than the startling media indifference to the 10th anniversary of one of the great events of the 21st century—MUDRA, or the rather laborious Micro Units Development & Refinance Agency? I would go further. In conjunction with the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, this massive government effort to eliminate the curse of India, hunger, must constitute one of the historic achievements of modern India. When the history—history, not biog­raphy—of Narendra Modi’s tenure as prime minister is written, this must be rated as his greatest contribution to his country.

For seven decades since 1947 poverty has been demarcated by statistics. Economists found it useful in policy formulation and the management of monies for economic upliftment; bureaucrats pretending to be economists measured decisions through politically illiterate numeracy; there was generous self-congratulation and much clamour for Padma Shri awards when any statistic showed that

the poverty line had shifted from 35 per cent to 30 per cent. No one ever had a human face in focus in the safe sanctuaries of gov­ernment Bhavans. No one understood that 30 per cent of a billion Indians meant 300 million human beings trapped in uncertainty over their next meal, counting the days of life as nothing more than moments of survival, dying early of disease and malnourish­ment. Their political masters never devised a separate language that might better reflect the cruelty and impossible pain of hunger that had emaciated a child, killed the child.

It took a prime minister who had suffered hunger to under­stand the true meaning of hunger.

MUDRA, launched on April 8, 2015, was never a rash handout. It was an affordable means of economic empowerment in which the responsi­bility for success lay with the recipient, not any government agency. It was in concept finance-neutral since those who received the loans had to repay them. Collateral-free financial support went to the poor, not to fat cats or the middle class; it went to women selling vegetables on a mat outside a market, to a man with a cart. Sixty eight per cent of the beneficiaries were women; and this more than anything else in my view was a primary reason for its as­tonishing success for women are more industrious, more responsible and more fiscally honest than men. It gave women the dignity and self-respect of economic advantage. In 10 years, 520 million loans were given, so that on a rough count, this means that 300 million women have achieved greater financial independence. Half the loans went to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes; 11 per cent of the beneficiaries were from the minorities: if this is not financial in­clusion, I would like to know what else is. One state which used MUDRA to splendid effect was Jammu & Kashmir. This surely contributed significantly to the economic upsurge we have seen in J&K in the last decade. `33 lakh crore was disbursed in loans. There were no processing fees. There was no collateral required. The repayment terms were kept.

And much to the shock and horror of those who live and die by statistics, the economy of India did not collapse because the banks of India were forced, by diktat, to pay attention to the poor rather than to fattening themselves by fattening the rich. I recall the cries of shock and horror led by Congress that echoed through the media when such schemes for the disadvantaged were unveiled in early 2015. Notice the complete silence about MUDRA from those who thought MUDRA was an obituary notice of the Indian economy. One of the privileges of a democ­racy is a fundamental right to dislike any prime minister. If that is your preference, please do so. But this does not give you any right to challenge a policy that has used the banking system so creatively to challenge what I continue to describe as our his­toric curse, for no other phrase can begin to delineate the harsh, extreme poverty of an empty stomach.

The PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana was a logical bookend to this objective. The cries were a trifle more muted when the bud­get of 2022-23 allotted `2 lakh crore for the allotment of five kilograms of rice or wheat and one kilogram of lentil to the Garib mentioned in the nomen­clature. This Zero Hunger Programme now reaches over 800 million Indians. It has rescued India from the stain of food anxiety. In all probably no statis­tician was asked about viability, or it might never have happened. Econo­mists told a previous government that all it required to solve the problem was to enable the poor to earn `32 a day. Congress, which obeyed such statistics, crashed to such an abysmal defeat in the consequent elections that it has not yet recovered.

We must pay tribute to Tamil Nadu, where a limited midday meal for the malnourished was started in 1925, but became a substantive reality only through the efforts of Kamaraj in 1962, and then the phenomenal MG Ramachandran in 1982. They knew the meaning of hunger. No one had even conceived that a partial allevia­tion could be converted into a national fact until the Modi Budget of 2022-23.

The Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana was a revolution because it em­powered those who were not consid­ered worthy of being included in the banking system. The media went hysterical with jeers when it was announced. Check the audio-visual record. It is all there, lying in now some conveniently forgotten corner. The Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana will place Modi on a pedestal of history.

No chief minister, however hostile to the prime minis­ter, can dare challenge the distribution of food for the poor, although some try to obfuscate the accompanying message. Guess the names of the states where MUDRA fared worst: Bihar and Bengal. There is little more to be said.

eliminate hungerempowermentmedia indifferenceMUDRANarendra Modipoor