North-South divide: The elephant in the room

The debate over the alleged North-South got shriller,Chief Minister Siddaramaiah terming, in a speech last week, the Centre's release of funds to states as "akin to feeding an elephant with half-a-penny-worth of buttermilk".

- Ringside View x Jayanta Roy Chowdhury

For long the southern states have been citing what they claimed was a discriminatory attitude towards them by a central government, which was seemingly giving away more money to north Indian Hindi heartland states than to those south of the Vindhyas. divide has just with Karnataka Last Friday was not the only occasion when Siddaramiah had bitterly complained of "discrimination". Some four years ago, he had claimed that for every Rel that Karnataka gave as taxes to the Centre, it received just 42 paise as its share of funds devolved to the state, whereas Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in the country received 198 paise for every rupee it paid as tax to the central kitty.

Tamil Nadu's finance minister Thangam Thennarasu similarly reportedly claimed last week that the Centre used different yardsticks to divide funds among states and that his state received only 29 paise for every rupee it sent to the Centre as tax.

Earlier this month, on two consecutive days, the chief ministers of both Karnataka and Kerala hit the streets of Delhi to protest what they termed as fiscal "injustice" to their states in devolution of revenues from the central pool of taxes. They were of course following in the hoary traditions set by the late chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, and his eventual successor and bete noir Mamata Banerjee, both of whom have voiced similar grievances.