New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi completes its first three months in power on May 14. Member of the party’s national executive and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia talks about the need to increase the devolution of central taxes to Delhi and the state government’s plans for education. Sisodia is minister for education, finance and planning, urban development, land and building, and revenue. Edited excerpts from an interview:
What are the key achievements of your three-month government?
Participatory budgeting is one of the biggest things that’s happening. It has never happened before in India and as a finance minister, we have started this. People are very happy that instead of scheme rule, people’s rule is coming. We want to take this forward.
We have digitized the records of villages. They will be online soon. Five of our districts are revenue districts. We wish to put the records online so that if there are illegal constructions they can be caught immediately.
How important is it for you to get statehood for Delhi?
This entire fight that is going on is for statehood only; about anti-corruption branch, funds and the 14th Finance Commission.
We (Delhi) have given a central tax of Rs.1.37 lakh crore (trillion). In return, from the share of central tax, we only get Rs.325 crore. This has been happening since 2001. So who will speak to us about this? According to the 14th finance commission, we should be getting 42%, but that is not applicable to union territories. But that should be applicable to Union territories (UTs) with special status. Puducherry and Delhi are UTs with legislatures. It’s not a small amount of tax. If you don’t put Delhi’s share of taxes back it will destroy the state. We should get around Rs.5,000-6000 crore per year. In the next five years, if you include UTs with legislature, along with states, we should get around Rs.5,000 crore a year which comes to roughly around Rs.22,000 crore over five years. Right now it’s around Rs.1,500 crore for five years, which is nothing.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has recently said that Delhi will have a school board. Is it feasible?
When a student joins a school, he doesn’t come with the hope that there would be CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) written on his certificate. He and his family come with the hope that at the end of 20 years of education he will have skills and confidence. That is quality education. If you don’t have the skill or confidence then you compromise and beg for jobs. Secondly, becoming a good human being is important. Value education is driven by the confidence that he doesn’t feel the need to take a bribe, misbehave with colleagues, indulge in sexual harassment. If even after 20 years of education, he has racism or regionalism left, his education is a waste. I am not blaming CBSE—they have done a wonderful job. The entire education system is putting us in an unending race which means that everyone is unsatisfied in their jobs, family, doesn’t contribute to the environment, only looking for money in jobs.
Is it possible to bring this change?
It is the need and we have to do it. We have no other option. If we have to stop rapes, racism, crime in our society, there is no other option left. The only way we can solve it is through education.
What about the shortage of teachers?
We will give maximum priority to teachers appointments. By the end of this year, we may get 20,000 teachers.
When we talk about expansion, the question of shortage of land in Delhi comes up.
Don’t we need land to make a smart city? Did we ever ask that question to those who said that they will make a smart city? It means that the land exists. It’s the land of the people of Delhi.
What are the challenges that the government is facing and how are you tackling them?
In the last two-three months, our confidence has grown considerably. The last (government of) 49 days (in 2013-14) had also given us a lot of confidence but we felt that there is a lot of work and (the question was) how we could get that work done, in the sense that who will be the officers who will work and how to get expert viewpoints. There were these nitty gritties in our mind. The two-three month experience has given us quite a nice exposure. We have met a lot of officers... if you start talking to them and assign them some work, after two days they will come with solutions that are completely out of the box and innovative. Outside the government too a lot of people are working. We are open, that’s our philosophy. Some people say we are pro-privatization, some say we are against privatization. We say prove the model, whatever it may be, old or new, we are for it. It should just benefit the public, you have to convince us.
The bottom line is that our confidence has increased that things can be done...
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