India has been a functioning democracy since the last 70 years and is among the world’s fastest growing economies. And yet, it has been struggling with basic issues of quality health and education. An efficient welfare system, certainly not of the Left kind, is needed.
Despite our ‘deepening’ democracy and record economic growth since the 1990s, human indices in India have remained dismal on most counts. While about a sixth of our population remains close to the starvation line (of $ 1.25 per capita, daily consumption), as much as a third of our children appear stunted and about half of Indian women are anemic, in the National Family Health Survey of 2005. No doubt, life expectancy has doubled in the country since independence. Yet, morbidity is rising as pollution and contaminated food and water are unleashing diseases like asthma and diabetes on an unprecedented scale.
Contradictory trends are evident in Indian education too. While, on paper, 60 per cent of our enrolled children are now completing primary education, only half of these can read sentences in their mother tongue and less than a third can do two digit multiplication, according to a survey conducted by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development last year. Also, in 2014, for example, 14 per cent of our Legislators had heinous criminal cases pending against them even as bail, parole and case-closures are available to dangerous criminals. Pendency in courts has crossed the three-crore mark and crimes against women are growing in brutality as well as frequency.
In such a scenario, the mass of our population is forced to live in harrowing insecurity compounded by low wages, harsh working conditions and little insurance against illness, old age or accidents. It is this nine-tenth of population living in villages and slums that faces the brunt of health risks (including the presence of fake medicines and doctors), economic failings (including immense underemployment and poor infrastructure), and communal tensions (including riots over music, stalking and cricket) too.
This brings us to the riddle as to why a country that has been a functioning democracy for 69 years and is seen as the fastest growing large economy, a country that has an active civil society (including two million non-Government organisations) besides a long history of welfare and social reform movements, remains such an underachiever on development and governance indices? More strikingly, why has our Human Development Index (HDI) rank, among 190 odd nations remained stuck at 130 when even late developers like Malaysia and Thailand were ranked at 64 and 83 respectively by the UN in 2015.
Scholars have cited a number of factors to explain India’s baffling underachievement on the development ladder. These include: Steep social hierarchies and continuing caste barriers; the semi-feudal character of our ruling class and its iron grip on the state; the stranglehold of rigid customs and cultural prejudices specially on our middle class and finally, the deep influence of dynastic loyalties and caste and communal identities on our electoral politics. Some of these constraints, like sharp inequalities seem clearly overstressed, in accounts of underdevelopment, in light of the communist collapse (even after abolishing private property) on the one hand and evolution of welfare magnets, in highly inegalitarian countries like Canada and the UK, on the other.
While generations of Left analysts diverted public attention to pointless discourses on mode of production, internal contradictions of capitalism, imperialist hegemony etc, real constraints hampering our development like falling standards of governance, over-regulation of private enterprise, paralysing laws (epitomised in our harsh and counterproductive rent, labour and dowry statutes) and chimeras spawned by pseudo-socialists and anti-developmentalists (regarding self-sustained growth, cottage industry, taxation etc) remained under-attended for long among dominant segments of Legislators and intellectuals too.
Fortunately, stifling controls on trade and industry were dismantled partially after the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1990s. Yet, new controls reappeared as reckless ‘green tape’ spun by the United Progressive Alliance regime (specially through rigid new provisions in land, forest and environment clearances even for essential infrastructure and defense outlays) in the preceding decade.
The recurrence of such administrative and policy fiascos in India indeed point towards some deeper factors which generate quasi-immunity even for poorly performing parties and criminal politicians in country’s electoral arena. Among these constraints, the dominance of money and muscle power, identity politics and of the nexus between populist leaders and utopians and pseudo-socialist ideologues are especially noteworthy. It is also ponderable that the success of Asian ‘tigers’ like Japan and South Korea could have a lot to do with the marginalisation of Leftist hegemony in their public spaces. In India, on the other hand, policy discourses were long dominated by imported visions of ‘proletarian dictatorship’, centralised planning and class struggles on the one hand and utopian expectations from gram swaraj, garibi hatao and the handloom etc on the other
In this scenario, shackles of staggered development in India would not be broken without combining rapid economic growth with improved governance and comprehensive social security for all. In all these realms, the state, civil society, local communities as well as the private sector need to act jointly and in a coordinated fashion. Indeed, by becoming less obstructionist against the private sector, the Indian state would be able to focus better on its core functions too.
This is not to say that the state should confine itself to a night watchman’s role. Not only welfare services but infrastructure growth and saving private enterprise itself (from its profiteering impulse) would remain critical for any developmental state. But the liberalisation of the economy needs to be carried forward in areas like labour and administrative systems also.
Regarding welfare, it cannot be disputed that entitlements to quality education, health and economic security for all helps in promoting productivity too. Despite an overwhelming consensus in this regard, multiple ills plague public welfare in our country related to funding as well as design and delivery. Clearly, the Union as well as the State Governments in India need to raise their welfare commitments specially in sectors like health and pension support for the needy.
Any raise in welfare spending would, however, end up in a leaky bucket unless design and delivery problems are also addressed. Unfortunately, public services in India suffer not only from rampant corruption but also misplaced priorities and needless policy conflicts. Acknowledging that the larger aim of welfare ought to be enhancement of capabilities rather than citizens’ dependence on the state, greater weight ought to be given to quality education (including skills for making a living and for daily life too).
As far as the delivery apparatus is concerned, one measure that cries out for attention is a better carrot-and-stick policy for improving work culture in Government departments.To tackle corruption and pilferage, the institution of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (independent of the executive) are welcome moves. They need to be given an impetus wherever the thrust is lacking.
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