Sugar Export To Foreign Countries

The export of sugar has given rise to a ‘crisis’, as it is called in government circles. It is not a crisis but a shame. Our sugar is to be compulsorily exported, maintaining a high internal price in spite of surplus- and in spite of, be it remembered, land going under this money crop, which should otherwise have been under rice or cereals to reduce the food deficit. This exported sugar is to be sold abroad necessarily at a big loss, because there is a lot of cheaper sugar available elsewhere, with which we must compete, the loss being put on the heads of sugar consumers in India for a third part; and for the rest, it is to be put either on the cane-growers who will get less price to that extent, or on the sugar manufacturers who put it again on the consumers or on the general taxpayer, if finally the Government generously gets out of the mess, agreeing to give a ‘subsidy’.

     Let us never forget the big truth that what the Central Government agrees to give as a ‘grant’ or a ‘subsidy’, or some other variation of it, is in reality an additional tax on the people. Nothing can be got from governments (be they at the Centre or in the States) except from what the people pay to one or the other. These tempting gifts and grants and subsidies are all transfers from the till into which A to Z of all grades of taxpayers pay. No grant or subsidy comes from the skies. It all comes from the people and lowers their ‘standard of life’.

     The formulae in which the financial operations of governments are clothed are all deceptive sugar-coating of the bitter pill of taxation. In the process of transfer from the general taxpayer to the subsidy-receiver, a big fraction goes down the drain in administrative charges, wastage and pilferage involved in all such circuits of money among a money-hungry people.

     The story of sugar is the story of every export at a loss, more or less. And this, not to speak of the difficulty of finding a market in advanced countries for our generally inferior articles. Imagine our trying to sell our aircraft assembled in Bangalore, or our watches assembled in Bangalore or elsewhere. It would be a grand achievement to sell a Vizag- made ship to the British or the Americans.

     The world is one and we should submit to a division of labour and skill, based on long experience and patient practice, and available nearby resources. If we try to disregard the law of division of labour in a unitary world, in our ambition to do everything that everybody does, and call prudence by the name of reactionary backwardness, we arrive at taxation and yet heavier taxation and a lowering of standards of life.