Unfinished Business

You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

At Forbes India, several months before our launch, we promised ourselves that we’d live by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s immortal words. For the very first time, our editorial strategy has been put to test. And despite all the saturation coverage around the Union Budget, we really do have something to say. And it starts with the cover.

There’s a good chance that many of you picked up this issue intrigued by the stunning image of Indira Gandhi at an AICC meeting in the capital in 1967, by the country’s most celebrated photographer Raghu Rai. We reckon it does the job of setting up our cover story brilliantly.

For the most part, our budget package steers clear of the well-trodden path. We’ve tried to fulfill two important objectives. One: offer a clear historical perspective of how the Congress Party evolved and honed its current strategy of inclusive growth over the past three decades. As they say, understanding the past is sometimes the best way to figure out the present and the future. Simply put, think of it as the politics behind the economics. And to my mind, the real story is about a fascinating journey: one that started with Indira Gandhi’s first cautious steps in 1980.

Part Two of our package gets down to brass tacks. Even before this budget was delivered, it was clear that the government would focus its spending on a host of critical areas, including education, health, transparency in government, rural employment and the national identity card plan. For the past several years, successive governments have thrown big money at improving our performance in these areas, though we’re still not sure how much of that money was well-spent. Yet somewhere deep inside Maharashtra, a doctor has the answers that can reform our public health system. In a village in Rajasthan, a sarpanch has raised the bar in almost flawlessly executing the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme across his panchayat. A highly motivated team in Uttarakhand has mounted a successful school voucher programme that could help get back thousands of disadvantaged children to school.