Who says running a government requires money? Karnataka’s dangerous innovation

 Karnataka today is offering India a new, unsettling lesson: a government does not need funds to survive. It only needs political arithmetic, disciplined MLAs, and a steady supply of announcements. What it does not need, evidently, is money to pay salaries on time, clear contractors’ bills, fund hospitals, run universities, or honour commitments to its own workforce.

This is not a conventional fiscal crisis. It is something more perverse. At the top, there is no shortage. Ministers draw salaries and allowances as expected. Official travel, entourages, and discretionary power remain intact. Cronies manage. Political life goes on uninterrupted. Scarcity, where it exists, is carefully rationed downward.

The state functions through postponement. Bills are delayed, arrears pile up, institutions limp along, and contract workers wait for years without pay. A recent survey pointing to over a lakh contract employees unpaid for long periods should have triggered outrage. Instead, it barely caused a ripple. Silence has become the lubricant of this system.

Announcements substitute for action. Recruitment drives are declared but never executed. Large projects with budgets running into hundreds of crores are announced and sometimes unveiled with fanfare, knowing well that execution can be deferred indefinitely. Permanent employment is avoided.  Governance is reduced to optics; administration is outsourced to patience.

Where does the money go? Largely into guarantee schemes—freebies designed to produce immediate political returns. These schemes lock up most flexible revenue, leaving little for the everyday functioning of the state. Even here, reality intrudes. Payments under flagship programmes like Griha Lakshmi and unemployment support stall midway when funds dry up. Yet new promises continue, because promises cost nothing upfront.

Corruption thrives in this environment, not merely as moral decay but as economic adaptation. Delays create discretion; discretion creates rent. For many, informal payments replace salaries, commissions replace interest on unpaid bills, and patronage replaces policy. Protest is muted because the informal economy cushions the blow—until it doesn’t.

This is the art and science of running a government without funds: protect the politically powerful, starve the institutions, and vulnerable, pacify citizens with cash transfers and announcements, and rely on silence to hold the structure together.

Karnataka is indeed “showing the way.” But it is a warning, not a model. A state can survive like this for years, but it does so by hollowing itself out. When governance becomes theatre and money becomes optional, democracy does not collapse in anger. It decays in quiet acceptance.