It is an open question as to whether that will help the party in its effort to build a consensus to dismantle, say, the self-defeating subsidy empire or the resource-gobbling public sector. What it will do though, is to make our youth aware of the magnitude of the follies we've committed in the past. And awareness as we all know, is the first step towards action. If we can succeed in doing this, it will be a fitting tribute to a nation which is just about concluding celebrations for completing 50 years ofindependence.

If a class of citizens is well-educated about important issues, it's difficult for self-serving politicians to fool them all the time. Consider just a few of these distortions of the past.

We've invested around Rs 100,000 crore in the public sector, but get just a pittance in return. In the last seven years, for example, profits-after-tax were stagnant for the public sector, but grew by 20 percent each year for the private sector profitability for the public sector (profits upon sales) is, in fact, around half that for the private sector. According to senior BJP officials who are, in fact, contemplating coming out with a Discussion Paper on the public sector, over the past 50 years, that means we've lost close to a full year's GDP.

According to data collected by the World Bank, if we were to stop all subsidies to the public sector, the Central government could increase its health spending by close to six times! By the same token, expenditure on education could have been increased 5.5times. Now surely, if the figure is put like this, we'll have few votaries of the public sector among the youth.

Or let's take the power sector. Commercial losses of the state electricity boards (SEBs) are estimated at Rs 12,000 crore this year, or an amount enough to finance the installation of around 3,500 MW of additional power plants. That means, in the last five years alone, if the commercial losses had been wiped out, we could have financed the installation of around 18,000 MW of additional power. That's around a 20 percent addition to existing capacity! That's right, an increase of a fifth in just five years.

Explain the concept of losses in such terms to the country's power-starved citizens, and there'll be a sea-change in the attitude towards subsidies and other such issues which contribute to making SEB's sick. Explain to citizens that roughly 10 percent of the power generated is stolen with the help of SEB officials, and the opposition to privatisation should get watered down.

Or look at itanother way. In the case of Haryana alone, between 1991 and 1996, the state transferred around Rs 2,000 crore to its electricity board -- an amount which is four times its total revenue expenditure on medical, public health and family welfare. It's also Rs 500 crore more than that spent on irrigation and flood control in this period, and around the same magnitude as the total expenditure on education, sports, art and culture.

Nor are the country's schoolchildren, or those budding bureaucrats in the academy at Mussoorie, taught much about the impact of the great bureaucratic structure we've built up to speed up development and the elaborate checks and balances to prevent corruption. Frankly, the losses due to the delays caused by this system put even scandals like Bofors to shame.

The total alleged payoff in the Bofors gun was around Rs 64 crore. While that does seem a lot, it does pale into insignificance when you consider the fact that the cost over-runs in projects currently being executed by thegovernment is a whopping Rs 45,000 crore. That doesn't include the cost over-runs in private sector projects as a result of bureaucratic delays, and nor does it include the over-runs in projects which have already been completed. In which case, the overall cost hike due to bureaucratic indecisions is anybody's guess. But hasn't all this been done before? After all, as finance minister, P. Chidambaram had also come up with a Disussion Paper on subsidies which had pointed out that the government was spending roughly Rs 100,000 crore per year on `non-merit' goods, or those that didn't deserve to be subsidised. To put that in perspective, the figure's around 11 percent of current GDP. The point is that if nothing changed after this, and subsidies remained unaffected, why should the BJP's `new history' change anything?

While it's difficult to counter this logic, it's clear that there's a huge difference between a paper, such as Chidambaram's, which was really circulated only among a few thousand individuals, andissues which are part of a syllabus for lakhs of children. In the immediate short-run, the government may also consider using some of these facts for a well-executed advertisement campaign along the lines of that carried out for last year's VDIS scheme. The common ad-line, through all such facts about the waste we incur each year, to borrow a concept from each year's Union Budget, should be "Where the Rupee Goes"!