 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. The DMK government, after taking part, completed its first assembly session recently. There were a lot of announcements and amendments and bills which were passed in the assembly session. To discuss more about the achievements and the shortcomings of the DMK government, we have with us senior journalist and political analyst Mr. R.K. Radhakrishnan. Welcome sir. Sir, to begin with, what is your evaluation of the newly elected DMK government? I think the government has been doing a fantastic job. What we have seen is right from even before they actually assumed office, this was on May 7th, Stalin was interacting with the officials and the officials were actually reporting to him on the problems posed by the coronavirus. You might remember that the second wave was in full force and corona doesn't stop just because there is an election somewhere or if something else is wrong or right somewhere, natural calamity or whatever. In fact, some people including me were telling the election commission that the results have to be declared earlier and a government should be in place to tackle the second wave. But as you would know, the election commission these days does not even pretend to understand the problems that this country is facing and they went by the original schedule, which meant that Kerala and Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry had to wait till such time that the election commission completed its completely ridiculous eight phase four poll in Bengal before the results actually came out. It is squarely on the election commission that a government could not do much. In fact, even after making several appeals to Edapati Pondicherry, the former chief minister, he actually did not do much when it came to active control of COVID. Primary among these is to make sure that people stayed home and that enforcement of that rule was done. I do understand that people were extremely agitated over the fact that they have been in home for several weeks and months from the first wave itself, but then during the second wave, it was imperative that people stayed at home and it didn't happen. So it started there. Stalin who initially did not want the closure of business establishments and a general lockdown went back on that stance and actually concurred with the officials saying that let us have a lockdown. I think that is a pragmatic decision not standing on what you said earlier, but doing what is important and necessary for the people of Tamil Nadu. I think that was his first major victory. If you ask me, of course, you couldn't prevent this. And we saw the manner in which the entire ADMK, sorry, the DMK administration as soon as it came to power reacted when the oxygen problem arose in the state. I know personally that when Sterlite despite all its promises and whatnot, the oxygen plant there broke down and they had told the Tamil Nadu government that they will not be able to do anything. And the plant, the new machinery for the plant has to come down from Germany. It was a series of small repairs that had to be done and we know for a fact that Kanimuri MP, the member of parliament from Tutukorin, the DMK's intervention secretary who happened to know people in the Indian Space Research Organization and Thangam Karnarusu, who later became the industry's minister, talked to ISRO officials in Mahendragiri and brought technicians from there and reactivated the situation in about three, four days' time. And we Tamil Nadu finally had some relief in oxygen and whatnot. Starting from there to this day, to the turning of the word, only RSI, union government, instead of calling it the central government, I think is a significant shift in attitude of how the central government, how the state government, the DMK government will deal with the center. And it is very clear that this is a need of the R, given the fact that the union government has been more or less behaving like it's a central government and has been usurping all powers from the state government, including recently that of minor courts, which has again gone into the central list from the state list on education, which was on the concurrent list, of course, during the, which was a change that was made during the emergency. And cooperatives of all things, cooperative banks were taken over, were supposed to report to RBI. And now we have Amit Shah loading our cooperatives. How does Amit Shah know what is required for a village in the tail end of the Cauvery, Delta and Nagapattanam were sitting in Delhi? It's impossible. It is the same problem that the entire union government will face when it comes to centralizing all the powers and making some kind of a rule that one size fits all, or one nation, one Russians, or one nation, one tax, any of those one nation, one everything, one X, as what PTR Pallani Mel Rajan called it. And you see through the, in a few months, whether it is the excavation at Kedadi, which is now established that the Tamil civilization was as old as 3,200 years, which, of course, is not as old as the Intas Valley civilization, which is about five years and years old. But then we see the shift. We see that every single minister has been working extremely hard. The administration is working at its most efficient. And we also see a chief minister who is with it, who is willing to engage with people, who is willing to connect with the masses, and at the same time, do the job that is assigned, which basically is to govern the state to the best of its ability and make sure that people are not put to undue hardship. Stalin government constituted the AK Rajan committee to go into the social justice aspects of need to figure out how the socially and educationally backward classes were fearing when it came to need. And its report has been fascinating and at the same time extremely revealing to tell us that the state government students are losing out on because there is something called the need. Yes, there were promises on need and a couple of other things that the state government is not able to keep yet. But the discussion on need, if you have read in the press, has already started. Maharashtra has started questioning why we need need. The Supreme Court has to re-examine this issue in the light of new evidence and overwhelming evidence that the oppressed classes are suffering and whatnot. I think that is one of the major achievements of this government and the fact that it is being looked at by other states, I believe, is reason enough for Mr. Stalin to feel good. And then again you have a series of measures be it in the field of education or health. Health we have this Makalai Thedi Maruthuam, which basically is taking medicine to the those steps of the client, which is a laudable initiative especially for those people who are unable to approach the primary health center or approach a health outpost because they are not able to do so because of their ailment. And then there were several other ordinances which were, no, sorry, bills which were introduced in the assembly to give life to many of the projects that Mr. Stalin had promised. In his own words, about 202 promises have been fulfilled so far off, they find out that he had promised. And I think the government is on the right track to fulfill as many promises as possible. And despite all these things, I think everything gets washed out by just one promise that he made and which he partly kept that he will bring down the fuel prices. Of course, the promise was that they will bring down the petrol price by rupees 5 and the diesel price also to a large extent. But finally, what the government did was to reduce petrol price by rupees 3. And according to the government itself, it has resulted in a huge optic in the fuel consumption. And I think the people across the state welcome this move. And that's possibly the only reason why petrol prices are still within rupees 100 in Tamil Nadu. You can go to travel to Karnataka or Telangana or Andhra and see what the fuel prices are. And 3 rupees is a huge saving if you ask me. Per liter is a huge saving if you ask me also. And we see that the central government, the union government is completely refusing to withdraw the tax. It has been coming up with some ridiculous explanations such as oil bonds, where the reason why we are not able to reduce taxes on fuel. This has been debunked by scholars and people who understand the numbers, whereas oil bonds were only under 2 lakh crores. The government has already mopped up about 22-25 lakh crores by way of the SIS. And the SIS is also another way out for the union government not to give that money to the state government. Obviously, the Tamil Nadu government has also released a white paper to show where the state finances stood so that we have an idea as to where the state is progressing and what state we are when it comes to fiscal deficit and what not. I think overall they have laid an extremely good groundwork. Now they have to build on that groundwork. And apart from delivering on promises also show the way that the state has to progress at a time of severe climate change, at a time of hundreds and thousands of people losing their jobs because of COVID and also at a time when the teaching learning experience has been completely disrupted over the past year and a half. Yes, sir. You referred to the fiscal deficit and the white paper published by the government of Tamil Nadu. So in the recently concluded session, the Finance Minister submitted the revised budget also. Do you think the government has done enough to think about ways to improve the revenue generation, the state's own revenue generation so that the losses by the GSD or other factors are compensated so that they can continue their work or fulfill their promises? I think given the fact that the state is very hamstrung in the avenues in which it can raise taxes, I don't think the state can do very much. Like for instance, you have the tax on petrol and diesel, which ends up being a major revenue earner. I hope that land registrations pick up, which has been a huge revenue earner, but there was no movement during the past year and a half. And obviously the tax that is imposed on alcohol is also contribute a significant amount to the state, etc. So you look at the and of course the taxes that come from other sources, the commercial taxes and the sales taxes and all of that. So that is the only scope for the government. There is really not much scope to expand because everything else comes under the GSD. Now GSD is extremely flawed and there needs to be huge relook into the entire system, which is what PTR has been demanding. They have instituted now the union government and they have instituted a committee with Ajit Pawar at the head and PTR is one of the members. Now I don't know how much of the recommendations will bear fruit because they just want to keep the noise down from the opposition rule states. And now the opposition rule states cannot actually make much noise because they have been part of the committee, which is supposed to make a series of recommendations on one particular topic. Now that being the case, we have to also look at the fact that we do not, that Tamil Nadu or any other state government do not get much in way of GSD returns also. The compensation element is said to be, it is being withdrawn and also the GSD arrears itself has not been given. It is in these circumstances that the union government is taking over minor ports for instance, which is also another small revenue source but still a revenue source and the government will have to necessarily consider all these revenue sources. I also have been thinking about the question of raising revenue and obviously you cannot raise revenue without a basis so to speak. So there are very few avenues and I think auctioning of bus routes, we have these Omini buses running across the state and they probably are 10, 15,000 Omini buses in Tamil Nadu itself. Yes, they are all under distress right now and they may not be able to afford if you are going to price the routes right now but maybe the state government should bring out a transport policy and make it very clear that there will be no Omini buses in future because Omini bus means that it is a contract carriage. It basically is that all the 40 or 70 people in a bus are travelling from point A to point B and they are all going for one function or the other and that is not the case and the state actually has been underwriting the Omini buses by building bus stands and facilities both in Chennai and other places and I don't think that it can be given away free. So all the bus routes should be auctioned that will be a method to raise revenue and of course there are various other out of the box ideas also to raise money obviously. One will be bringing in labour industries back into Tamil Nadu and skilled industries back in Tamil Nadu and also try and engage with the Tamil diaspora and see how much they can contribute to the progress of Tamil Nadu bringing in their own units or industries or software firms or whatever back into Tamil Nadu something some kind of giving back and maybe obviously the government will have its own idea there is a committee looking into it you have the committee on economy also which is chaired by Raghuram Rajan. I am sure they will also give a lot of suggestions as to how this can be worked out and at a practical level also there are enough and more suggestions that a lot of people have been given and including the what is the new state planning commission is also attempting to do. So there are lots of ideas the only thing is that the government should be receptive to those ideas and try and implement some of those ideas at least because when it comes to a lot of these basic questions like raising taxes or raising revenue and whatnot all governments are extremely wary because there are elections around the corner every second year third year but I hope better sense prevails and we can strike a balance between the need to get votes and the need to actually raise revenue for the greater common good. Thank you so for joining us. Thank you so much. That's all we have time now. Thank you for watching Newscript.