A Tale of Two Numbers; India's new budget reveals a party still in love with bureaucracy.

Byline: Gurcharan Das (Das, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble India, is the author of "India Unbound.")

On Feb. 28, India's ruling congress party-led coalition introduced its latest budget, aiming, according to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, "to lift the poor" and close the income gap. The new plan, however, is no more likely to succeed than past efforts. The problem is best understood by focusing on two numbers hidden in the document. One represents a promise to hire 200,000 new schoolteachers; the other, to grant 100,000 scholarships. These two figures underscore both what is right and wrong with India today, and why its leaders fail to help their neediest constituents.

India as a country is getting richer at a bewildering rate. Somehow this chaotic, billion-person democracy has become one of the world's fastest-growing economies, expanding 8 percent in the past three years and 9.2 percent this year. Since 1980, per capita income has tripled. Some of this progress has trickled down: 1 percent of the poor have crossed the poverty line each year since 1980. That adds up to a total of about 200 million people. But it still leaves 220 million Indians living on less than a dollar a day.

To enjoy the benefits of high growth, India's poor also need good schools and health clinics. The problem is not a lack of spending; India devotes a respectable 4 percent of GDP to education, and the new budget increases money for education, health care and rural-employment schemes by 35 percent.

The trouble is how that cash is spent. India's public schools are in woeful shape. Surveys show that on any given day one out of four primary-school teachers is absent; of those present, one out of two is not teaching. The picture at health-care centers is similarly grim: two out of five doctors and one in three nurses is generally missing. India already has more than a million primary-school teachers. Adding more may help, but the real trick is getting the approximately 670,000 of them who don't do their jobs to start performing.

That will require greater accountability. At the moment, teachers and health workers are employed for life, answerable (if at all) not to parents or patients but distant bureaucrats. And they're hard to discipline: many health and education ...