Chennai: Seeking to carve out a national role for himself as a worthy successor to his nonagenarian father M. Karunanidhi who had played vital part in rallying a Third Front in the national politics, DMK working president M.K.Stalin has written to the Chief Ministers of 10 non-BJP governed states urging them to join him in demanding immediate modifications to the “undemocratic and biased terms of reference (ToR)” for the Fifteenth Finance Commission (XVFC) that reduced the distribution of central revenues to the progressive states “by a very substantial margin”.
The terms of reference were drawn without consulting the states and the “ill-conceived effort to systematically divert resources to states, which have never made serious attempts at population control” (he could be meaning U.P) could affect the “very fabric of equitable and just devolution of central tax revenues to the states”, Stalin said in his letter sent to TN CM K. Palaniswami, Puducherry’s V.Narayanasamy, Andhra Pradesh’s Chandrababu Naidu, Telangana’s K. Chandrasekhar Rao, Karnataka’s Siddaramaiah, Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan, Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik, West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, Punjab’s Capt Amarinder Singh and Delhi’s Arvind Kejriwal.
These states, “which perhaps not co-incidentally have been governed by non-BJP parties for almost our entire history”, had already achieved great objectives such as universal power and road connectivity, “well before the Government of India’s schemes were even proposed in such areas, let alone implemented with any success”. Yet now the Centre, without consulting the States, had chosen to insert an incentive proposal to reward the States implementing the Centre’s flagship schemes, which went against the spirit of cooperative federalism, Stalin told the CMs.
Hitting out at the Centre for this ‘travesty of justice’, Stalin told the CMs: “These two ToRs will negatively impact the allocations to many progressive states like ours in a compound way. On the one hand, we will be losing disproportionally by the use of 2011 census data as the basis; and on the other, we will also be deprived of any incentive under Term #4, as we achieved (or exceeded) the neutral net reproductive rate target long ago. Taken together, these must be construed as the most counter-productive measures taken hitherto with regard to population control incentives provided by the Central government”.
