The Curious Case of Indian Federalism

Event : The Curious Case of Indian Federalism

Article: Deccan Chronicle

Article Date : 2 November 2021

Article Link : https://twitter.com/DravidianForum/status/1455770967288868868

Centre not sharing vital data: Fin min

OP ARULNI DC CHENNAI, NOV 2

The Union government does not share vital data like Central government schemes like vaccination data and Aadhaar, with the states for better implementation of the schemes, said Minister for Finance and Human Resource Management Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan.

Addressing a webinar on “The Curious Case of Indian Federalism: from Cooperative to Centralised organized by Dravidian Professionals Forum on Tuesday he said the Centre violates federal principles enshrined in the Constitution in the use of the data. The Union government owns bulk of such data and it uses it in whichever way it wants. It feeds it to corporates like the Jio Phone Company in ways that are questionable about public versus private entities and yet states don't have access to this data like the private entities do, he said. 

The state government do not have access to data like Aadhaar and Cowin portal. "We didn't have any access at all to Cowin portal and when we asked repeatedly, we were given at a city or district level data. But that does not help us in the state government's massive vaccination programe.” he worried.

He noted that for a pandemic kind of countering, we need to know street by street and block by block in vaccine penetration. "We  need that data for sampling models to find where the high risk groups are,”  he said.

He said it is hard to implement one nation, one ration card scheme in the

country and hard to standardise across the country when the state itself has different types of cards. He elaborated that for  example in Tamil Nadu has seven tiers of PDS and very few of them get items like wheat in the PDS outlet. Whereas most of the migrant workers, who come from the Northern States, eat very little rice which is the biggest component of the public distribution system in Tamil Nadu. However, most of  the migrant workers eat a lot of wheat, for which we normally don't have adequate supply. There are many examples like this," he said.

Federal principles have been violated in the financial side also. The GST which effectively removed the power of taxation or the bulk of the taxation from the states. The shift to centralisation of taxes has been accompanied by deep intrusion into the delivery of benefits as well.

The Union not only takes away 100 per cent of the petrol and diesel taxes and the bulk of all other taxes and the 23 percent of total revenue in cesses and 58 per cent or 59 percent of income taxes and the GST but also bypass the states and the local bodies and directly go to the people as possible, he said.

The online meeting was organized by Madras High court advocate P. Puhazh Gandhi and S Dharanidha ran of DPF Among others Derek O'Brien, MP, Trinamool Parliamentary Party leader RS, Prof John Grring. University of Texas at Austin, Associate Professor, Dr Nikita Sud, University of Oxford spoke in the online meeting.