Self interest only serves a few people.

To win elections in 2009 the Congress resorted to bribing its " vote bank " through various cunning schemes, dressed up as economic stimulus to mitigate the negative effects of the sub-prime crisis on the economy. Sadly, bribery is a crime whether practised by an individual or by the government. Thus the Sixth Pay Commission, which increased salaries of useless civil servants by 80%, was supposed to increase sales of companies by increasing demand. However, it also increased the bribe price of these fellows and helped to increase fiscal deficit to 4.8%. The MNREGA scheme was supposed to increase rural purchasing power but resulted in a rural wage inflation leading to food inflation at 18%, causing even more hardship for the poor, and the waiver of loans to farmers has caused bank NPAs to rise. For the elections in 2014 the Congress is banking on the Food Security Bill which will provide rice at Rs 3 a kg and wheat at Rs 2 a kg to 75% of rural and 50% of urban population. The hype is that by spending less on food the poor will have more money to spend on other essentials thus helping the poor will lead to increased growth of the economy. To make this a success the government has built up stocks of food grains more than double of what is required. India does not have enough capacity to store so much grain so, a lot of it is lying out in the open, being eaten by vermin or rotting in the rain. Since the government pays a Minimum Support Price, which his higher than the market price, farmers will naturally divert land to growing grains rather than vegetables which have very short shelf lives. As everyone knows the price of vegetables has risen to unaffordable levels. Not just that it seems that such massive subsidies on food may fall foul of the WTO. The Doha round of trade talks have been stalled since 2001, mainly because rich countries are asking poorer countries to open their markets while providing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies to their farmers. India was one of a group of countries standing up to bullying by the rich countries but by passing the Food Security Bill India will now be in a defensive position. Western countries could challenge the law at the WTO and obtain permission to levy extra taxes on our exports. Imagine what that would do to our meager exports.