Fact-Check on Modi-Arnab Interview: Some Undue Credit Yet Again!

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Times Now, his first TV interview since taking office, on 27 June 2016. As with his Wall Street Journal interview the month before (critiqued here),

Modi covered a lot of ground, from economic reform to domestic politics to foreign policy. Here we specifically examine some of his claims regarding his ambitious development agenda.

Modi has developed a flair for presenting evolutionary policy steps, built on his predecessors’ work, as revolutionary and original contributions to national development. Take his repeated

claim regarding the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY):

Very moving, but it’s a bit much for Modi to hog the credit. It is true that the PMJDY has accelerated the spread of basic savings bank deposit accounts (BSBDA), and increased their

usefulness by adding life and accident insurance. But the entire architecture of financial inclusion (BSBDAs, Aadhaar, electronic payments, RuPay cards) was created and implemented long

before Modi took office.

In the two years before Modi, the UPA opened 44 and 61 million BSBDAs respectively, which under Modi jumped to 147 million in 2014-15 and 67 million in 2015-16 (see the table below).

Assuming conservatively that another government would have opened 61 million BSBDAs per year (as the UPA did in 2013-14), the Modi effect looks something like this:

To be fair, Modi isn’t claiming exclusive credit here, and he is right to highlight the importance of behavioural change in his adivasi mother example. Open defecation in rural India has

dropped much more slowly than in, say rural Bangladesh, partly because Bangladesh has targeted social norms in addition to building toilets. The UPA’s Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (launched in

2012-13) and the current Swachh Bharat Abhiyan both recognised this reality, and Modi’s vocal advocacy could play an important role here.

That said, reports still suggest that behaviour change is lagging behind (here, here and here). The important point is that toilet construction is necessary but insufficient by itself to

reduce open defecation.

These claims work well on Twitter and Facebook, but are mostly meaningless in the Indian context.

Yes, Mr Prime Minister, if we pretend that the following two things never happened: the NDA’s 1999 National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and the UPA’s 2013 National Crop Insurance

Scheme (NCIS — which clubbed the 2010 modified NAIS, the 2007 Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme and the 2009 Coconut Palm Insurance Scheme). And the NCIS’ Hindi name has a familiar ring to

it: the Rashtriya Fasal Bima Karyakram. The one time the UPA manages to institute a programme without a Gandhi name attached to it, Modi replaces “national” with “Prime Minister”.

Another unfortunate exaggeration. Soil health cards have been in use since 2003, and even the UPA issued around 2.8 crore cards in its final three years, bringing the total in circulation to

around 6.8 crore (source here). Modi relaunched the scheme on 19 February, 2015, promising to issue 14 crore cards over the next three years, but progress has been slower than expected. The

number of cards issued as on 28 June, 2016 is 2.1 crore, short of the required pace but faster than what the UPA achieved.

But before you break out your gau-champagne, one reason is that farms were earlier being individually tested. Soil samples are now being taken from 10-hectare (in rain-fed areas) or

2.5-hectare (in irrigated areas) zones, which in effect, clubs several farms together. This has speeded up the process of issuing soil health cards, but has made the results potentially less

relevant to individual farmers.

The Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) Bank certainly sounds like a good idea. But there are literally dozens of financing schemes for micro, small and medium-sized

entrepreneurs.

The MUDRA Bank, currently a unit of the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), appears to be a supercharged version of SIDBI’s Credit Guarantee Scheme that over about a decade

until 2014 had given Rs 76,650 crore in guarantees to 1.6 million small entrepreneurs (as this Business Standard article points out). And the wisdom of dishing credit out via “mega credit

campaigns“, which used to be called “loan melas” in an earlier era, will only be known over time.

The bottomline: Mr Modi is overseeing a range of policy initiatives, many of which could well bear fruit. But as his good friend Barack once said: “You didn’t build that.”

(The writer is a political analyst. The article appeared originally here as a blog on chunauti.org.)

(This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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