Open Forum
New Delhi, 7 April, 2017
India’s Development
VISION NEEDS
REALIGNMENT
By Moin Qazi
India is now poised at a critical
junction in its development history, and needs a new vision for the emerging
challenges. Gloria Arroyo, former President of the Philippines, in a scintillating
address to her countrymen, once said: “We have to be bold in our national
ambitions. First, we must win the fight against poverty within the next decade.
Second, we must improve moral standards in government and society to provide a
strong foundation for good governance. Third, we must change the character of
our politics to promote fertile ground for reforms.”
We need to renew our commitment to all
these three issues underlined by the Philippine statesman. Her clarion call to her nation is quite
relevant to our own society in the present times.
Nobel Laureate and India’s most
accomplished economist, Amartya Sen has consistently struck with his stand that
“growth rate is a very daft—and a deeply alienated—way of judging economic
progress.”
Sen and Jean Drèze, a Belgian born Indian
economist, had warned as early as 1995 that reforms that boost growth, though
important, were not enough to improve the living conditions of the poorest, let
alone dismantle caste and gender hierarchies and generate employment. They
“have to be supplemented by a radical shift in public policy in education and
health.” they wrote. Bangladesh,
which is only half as rich as India
measured by per capita income, now exceeds India in, among other social
indicators, life expectancy, child mortality, and immunisation.
For human development to reach everyone, growth has to be
inclusive, with four mutually supporting pillars—formulating an employment-led
growth strategy, enhancing financial inclusion, investing in human development
priorities and undertaking high-impact multidimensional interventions (win-win
strategies).
The growing inequality in India is very
stark. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014, the share of
wealth of the richest 1% in the country has been rising, in contrast to the
rest of the world, and it now owns nearly half the country’s wealth. The wealth
share of the top 10% has increased by a tenth since 2000. The CEO of Oxfam India has pointed out that just a 1.5% wealth
tax on 65 of India’s
super-rich could lift an astounding 90 million out of poverty. If the country
could reduce inequality by just over a third, it could eliminate extreme
poverty. According to the National Council for Applied Economic Research
(NCAER), which incidentally doesn’t subscribe to socialist ideology, only 12%
of the population can comprise the middle class.
Impoverished populations desperately require lighting, fuel
for cooking, affordable and accessible health care, clean water, elementary
education, housing and sanitation, and financial services. Government programmes
to supply these needs are plagued with corruption (by some estimates 50-70% of
all welfare spending in India
is soaked by the administrators in the form of bribes). It is estimated that up to 85% of government water subsidies go to
private taps, yet 60% of poor households collect water from public taps. Or
electricity subsidies — 67.2 % of Indian households are connected to the
electric grid, most likely representing some of the wealthiest households in
the country. Out of the population with connectivity to the electric grid, the
top income quintile consumes 121 kWh per month on average (37% of the subsidy)
while the bottom quintile consumes only 45 kWh on average (10% of the
electricity subsidy).
Many of India’s
anti-poverty programmes end up feeding the rich more than the needy. India has
eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension
and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts, in a bid to prevent
corrupt State and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own
pockets. A
whopping Rs 36,000 crore (Rs 360 bn-5.5bn$) have been saved by the government
through cash transfers through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme.
More than 1,200 government schemes were examined for
coverage and about 550 of them could be immediately taken up. More than 320
million beneficiaries are being provided various aids by direct credits to
their accounts. A full coverage has been achieved in 84 schemes, including
Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and Mahatma Gandhi National
Rural Employment Guarantee Act where wages are being paid into accounts without
the intervention of the administration. Similarly, subsidies for liquid
petroleum gas (LPG) are also going directly into the account of beneficiaries.
Now these programmes have the potential for making a serious
dent in poverty in India.
Under the acronym JAM -- Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile -- a quiet revolution of social
welfare policy is unfolding. Jan Dhan is Modi’s flagship programme to give poor
people access to financial services, including bank accounts, credit and
insurance. Aadhaar is the initiative to issue unique biometric identification
cards to all Indians. Together with mobile money platforms, they will enable
the State to transfer cash directly to those in need -- without the money going
through intermediaries that might take a cut.
The government will also take a radical relook at grassroots
development apparatuses. The current approach of India seems to miss the holistic
nature of sustainable development, allowing the goals and targets to be divided
up between different ministries and departments without identifying the inter-linkages
that exist between the different goals, and this risks working in silos – which
is unlikely to deliver.
The best approach to local development is to tap into the
knowledge already available and think of ways it can be leveraged to achieve a
more appropriate, locally useful and sustainable development. Approaches to
rural development that respect the inherent capabilities and native of rural people and that systematically
build on experience have a reasonable chance of making significant advances in
improving those people’s lives. A critical success factor is creating organisational
capabilities at local levels that can mobilise and manage resources effectively
for the benefit of the many rather than just the few.
It is important to reaffirm that significant advances are
attainable for the hundreds of millions of households who constitute “the rural
poor.” They are a potential source of great knowledge, wisdom and creativity
that have to seek first and foremost their own survival. Their poverty deprives
not only them but also the rest of us of the greater value they could generate
under more supportive and enabling circumstances.
In a country as large and diverse as India, it makes
sense to connect those who live in similar climates and by tracking the
effectiveness of the projects they manage and making appropriate, informed
changes to those that aren't working. People who pioneered successful social
programmes recognised this potential and sought to evoke. It is possible if we
imbibe the true spirit of Modi’s oft repeated mantra: “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” (partnership of all, development for all). ---INFA
(Copyright, India
News and Feature Alliance)
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