Analysis of Politico-Economic Situation of India - Where Did It Go Offtrack

In the previous post on this blog, a synoptic view of the politico-economic situation of contemporary India was presented. The prevailing situation in respect of morality in politics as practiced in India, corruption in public life, social unrest and insurgency in the country and poverty and economic disparity was discussed and was shown that, taking the situation prevailing in India at the time of its independence in 1947 as a reference point, these problems have progressively gotten worse over the six decades since then. There is also a general perception that the rate of decline in the situation in all these aspects has been rather on the increase over the period in spite of efforts having been made to arrest the decline. If this is so and there is no real ground to suppose otherwise, all concerned with and for India should really be worried about its future. There is lurking danger that many persons may be beguiled into complacency or even optimism based on the statistics of its economic growth, of its increased job opportunities in certain sectors of economy, or of increasing penetration of modern technology of mobiles and internet. But the stark facts of the Indian situation cannot, and must not, be glossed over by this flickering tokenism. If even these tokens are considered in perspective, they will reveal rather disturbing situation below their thin veneer. High rate of economic growth must be considered vis-a-vis increasing impoverishment in the country. According to one estimate, 77% of people of India live on an income of Rs. 20.00($0.5) a day. The so called economic reforms comprising liberalization, privatization and globalization have opened the vast Indian market to multinational companies, which resulted in creation of jobs and led to introduction of electronic and other goods manufactured by these companies in this ready-made market. These manifestations of ‘ positive changes’ in India are really the results of growth of related science and technology outside India as well as of ‘ liberalized , privatized and globalized economy’. These are indicative of neither development of science, technology and industry in India nor of corresponding or consequential changes in life and living of people .While India is the fourth largest user of internet i.e., consumers of related technology and industry in the world , this use is confined to only 7% of its people as compared to the next higher users Japan (75%) , U.S.A (74%) , and China (27%) . These positive changes are rather characteristic features of neo-colonialism, i.e., supplier of raw materials and resources including human resources and consumer of finished goods. The colonial British government too had introduced railways in India as far back as in 1857 and it did create jobs in India, in implementation as well as for its operation and maintenance. It, however, was meant to serve, and did serve, the ultimate purpose of economic exploitation of a colony.

The systematic decline since independence in the above mentioned four politico-economic aspects which broadly encompass the entire Indian situation is, however, too apparent to be denied or ignored. When India had been struggling under the inspiring leadership of Mahatma Gandhi for its freedom from exploitation and degradation that its people had been suffering from under the colonial dispensation , the freedom fighters would have hardly envisaged that the free India would evolve like the way it has done. And since the decline in the situation of free India has been evolutionary, it is obvious that free India has not been on the right tracks from day one. As the rate of decline has been increasing over the years, one may conclude that free India had positioned itself on rather a downward slope where descent naturally goes on with acceleration.

The moot point is to deliberate and determine where India went wrong right in the beginning of its journey as a free nation. If this is not done thoughtfully ,it is quite likely that we may misdiagnose the various ills that afflict the nation as it moved along , prescribe wrong remedies, get frustrated when the affliction does not go away or become more complex and serious and then declare in desperation that ‘India is not fit for democracy ’ , ‘politicians are to blame for the nation’s plight’, ‘corruption is too deep rooted and pervasive to be eliminated’, ‘administration is unresponsive and inefficient’, or similar such sweeping statements which lead nowhere.

In order to discover and determine where and how India went off-track since it became free, one must step back a little and look broadly at its struggle for freedom. It is widely agreed that Mahatma Gandhi gave a new direction, imparted a great momentum and introduced a novel weapon of non-violent non- cooperation in the freedom struggle. Moved by the plight of the people under the colonial rule, he drew the oppressed masses to this struggle and made it a real mass movement, which earlier was confined only to the intelligentsia. His guiding spirit and common refrain in the freedom movement was that he was fighting against the unjust and immoral system of governance through which India was systematically exploited and degraded and not necessarily against the British people who were merely operating it. This system was defined and elaborated in the Government of India Acts passed by the British Parliament. These Acts were amended from time to time to accommodate some of the demands of the freedom fighters under the overall objective of economic exploitation of India with consequent deprivation and degradation of its people. Under the Government of India Act 1935, a provision was made for governments to be formed in the provinces of British India by popularly elected representatives. However, the provincial governments so formed found various provisions in this Act abhorrent and constraining under which they were hardly able to act in order to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the people and consequently they resigned in frustration after only a year or so. Henceforward, abolition of this Act itself became one of the important objectives of their independence struggle. When India was granted independence through the Indian Independence Act 1947, two provisions in this Act may be pointed out; one that until India framed its own constitution the Govt. of India Act 1935 would remain in force, and secondly the rights and privileges of members of the Indian Civil Service, who were under the control of British Secretary of State for India, would continue unchanged. The Constitution of India framed by the Constituent Assembly whose members were elected not directly by the people based on adult suffrage but indirectly by the members or the Legislative Assemblies of the provinces of British India as well as were nominated as representatives of the native Indian states, adopted the same system of governance as was operative in the 1935 Act and against which the freedom struggle was waged. The draft Constitution was criticized on two main counts in the Constituent Assembly. One that it was hardly indigenous to India having a rich heritage of culture and civilization and secondly, while it rejected the British rule, it adopted the institutions developed for and under this rule. These criticisms were recognized by Dr. Rajendra Prasad in his concluding speech but were glossed over in the hope that the country would throw up men of character, vision, integrity and national commitment , who would be able to make the best even of a defective Constitution. And the Constitution was thus passed by consensus on 26 November 1949 in the Constituent Assembly when the people of India were said to have “adopted, enacted and given to themselves” a Constitution. Unfortunately for India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad’s hope which seemed understandably justified in the political milieu of that time proved to be utterly naïve in contemporary India. It must also be recognized that Mahatma Gandhi, the architect of India’s freedom, was conspicuous by his total non-involvement in the constitution making process even while he was alive. The Constitution of India, which became operative with effect from 26 January 1950 known as Republic Day of India almost two years after Gandhi’s death, not only doesn’t bear any real imprint of Gandhi’s thoughts (not speaking of Gandhian thoughts) about free India but in vital aspects is rather an anti-thesis of his entire motivation and rationale of waging and guiding a novel struggle for freedom , which has inspired a large part of the world.

Is this then the point of off-track journey of the Republic of India? This will be examined and analyzed in some detail in the further posts on this Blog.

Emergence, Prevalence and Perpetuation of Poverty in India

One of the attributes, good as well as bad, by which India is commonly characterized is its poverty. There are, however, significant divergences in the estimates done by various agencies of the magnitude of this poverty. According to its own criterion used for the purpose, Planning Commission of the Government of India estimates that 27.5% of the population was living below the poverty line in 2004-05. While this estimate is contested by several states in India itself, according to the 2005 World Bank estimate, 42% of India live below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, which works out to be Rs. 21.6 a day in terms of purchasing power parity. Still another agency set up by the Government of India, National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) in its 2007 Report asserts that 77% of Indians, i.e. 836 million people live on less than Rs.20 a day. Apart from these divergent estimates, poverty in India is reflected by several well recognized indexes and parameters. India has the highest rate of malnutrition among children in the world under the age of 3; India ranks 143 and 134 in the comity of 190 nations of the world in infant mortality rate (IMR) and human development index (HDI), respectively. India has also one the highest incidences of human trafficking, including trafficking in women and children. In spite of government regulations, child labour in India is rampant. Increasing criminality in life and living and growing insurgency unsettling various parts of India are largely caused and fed by poverty. The subhuman conditions in which the poor people live and survive in India have been recently depicted dramatically in the internationally acclaimed 2008 British film Slumdog Millionaire, which should shame India of Gandhi who was appalled and moved by the poverty and degradation of people brought about by the system of exploitative governance of the British colonial rule in India and it was these conditions which had inspired him to call for freedom from that system though a nonviolent struggle.
In order to understand the serious and complex problem of poverty in India, it will be helpful to consider it both in its historical as well as its comprehensive socio-political-economic perspectives. While the former will show that poverty is not at all intrinsic to India, the latter would indicate the framework in which the solution to the vexed problem lies. The Indus Valley Civilization which existed in India from 2800 BC to 1800 BC was a very prosperous period marked by trade activity and urban development. The Maurya Empire (321 BC to 185 BC), under which most of the Indian subcontinent was unified under one rule, was known for flourishing economic activities. The famous politico-economic treatise Arthashastra was written by Chanakya, the Prime Minister to the first Maurya Emperor Chandragupta under the pseudonym Kautilya. The Gupta period (320 AD to 550 AD) was the so called Golden Age of India marked by not only economic prosperity but also by singular achievements in art, science, literature, astronomy, mathematics etc. In fact, India is estimated to have had the largest economy of the ancient and medieval world between the first and 15th centuries AD under various rulers. Under the Mughal rule in the 16th century up to the period of the rule of the Marathas in central India in the first half of the 18th century, the Indian economy, i.e., its gross domestic product was either the largest or the second largest after China, controlling from 1/4th to 1/3rd of the world economy. The economic scenario, however, changed dramatically and drastically with the coming of the British colonial rule in India which was aimed primarily at exploitation of its resources for the benefit of Britain. India’s share in the world economy fell from about 24% at the beginning of the colonial rule to about 4% at the end, brought out systematically through a governance and economic institutional instrument specially designed for the purpose. India experienced several devastating famines in the period, killing an estimated aggregate of 30 million people. By the end of the colonial rule, India inherited an economy that was one of the poorest in the world and totally stagnant.
Free and republic India no doubt made valiant efforts to reverse the inherited economic trend, but using the same institutional instrument of governance, under the visionary leadership of Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. In spite of having made considerable strides in infrastructural development, particularly in the first two decades after independence, no appreciable dent on the problem of poverty could be made. In the mixed economy model followed by India to bring about a socialistic pattern of society, with considerable state controls and regulations of economic activities, the rate of economic growth hovered around 3.5% in this period accompanied by increasing corruption. With the state having the prime responsibility of alleviating poverty but being unable to accelerate economic growth, the government depended on public distribution systems and price controls of essential commodities to provide succor to the poor resulting in black marketing, bureaucratic red tapism and growing corruption.
With the policy of economic liberalization, privatization and globalization courted by India since the early nineties, bidding socialism enshrined in the Constitution a formal good-bye and the vast Indian market opened to multi-national companies, Indian economy did register an appreciable growth rate of around 8%. While this has appreciably increased the size of the middle class and has led to acute concentrations of wealth in a limited number of hands, it has depressed the poor even more, both in numbers as well as in intensity. According to a recent report by an expert group, the poverty level in India has risen from an estimated 27.5% in 2004-05 to 37.2% in 2009 even according to the Planning Commission’s criterion. Thus while the problem of poverty remains essentially untouched, its sting has become sharpened in the midst of visibly widened economic disparity. Many schemes launched by the government targeted at benefiting the poor directly are only palliative measures like pain killers aimed at making the sting bearable, on the one hand, and at scoring political mileage, on the other. While India’s poverty is becoming intractable, India’s poor are becoming an increasingly attractive vote bank in India’s power-centric politics. The much acclaimed National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme is illustrative in this regard. The scheme apparently aims both at creating employment as well as contributing to development at one go. In effect, however, due to the inappropriate delivery mechanism in place, while the benefits reach the target only minimally, the net of corruption has become wider to include even the village functionaries. The political advantage accruing to the party in power at the Centre is distinct. Using India’s poor as a vote bank, while widely practiced by all political parties without exception, is at times carried to ludicrous extents. Fully air-conditioned long distance trains named as Garib Rath (Poor Man’s Train) at reduced fares were launched some years ago, flaunting this to be done with the poor in mind. While even those reduced fares are way beyond the affording capacity of the India’s poor, these trains really benefit only the middle class. A premier political party once fought and won a national election on the specious slogan of ‘Garibi Hatao’ (Remove Poverty). Thus, as the poor constitute a sizeable vote bank attractive to political parties, India’s poverty stands perpetuated in the present day polity.
While the new economic regime professes to benefit the poor by the process of trickling down of prosperity from the top to the bottom, it has certain disastrous fall outs. One of them is the growing nexus between the national and multi-national businesses, on the one hand, and politicians, on the other. Several high level and high magnitude corruption and scandals have been increasingly coming to light in recent years.
It is high time that we understand and appreciate that India’s poverty is rather systemic and is not amenable to any political gimmicks or economic stratagem. Its solution lies at systemic level only. More light will be thrown on this aspect in another post under this Blog.