While the glory that was ancient India, relative prosperity of medieval India and the impoverishment as well as degradation of colonial India are well documented by historians, the notion of the condition of post-independence, contemporary and evolving India is, at best, mixed as well as confusing and, at worst, downright depressing. While on the one hand, there is an image and perception of contemporary India being the largest functioning democracy and a modern, secular nation emerging as an economic power, there is a veritable picture of India being characterized by strident and widespread poverty and whose socio-political fabric is riven by casteism, communalism and insurgency, on the other. While India won its independence from a well-entrenched powerful imperial regime through a non-violent struggle informed by pursuit of politics of high morality, which called for sufferings and sacrifices on the part of its leaders, in post-independence India politics is practiced in increasingly blatant pursuit of power for self-aggrandizement, public life is reeking of corruption and neo-imperialism is unobtrusively creeping in. The salient features of the picture of independent India which has emerged in the last six decades have been discussed in the previous nine posts on this blog titled “Understanding Contemporary India and its Problems”. A synoptic view of this picture is as follows.
In the first two posts titled “India’s Illusion of Democracy”, it has been shown that in the democracy that India has adopted for its governance, the people have hardly any voice in how the governments are constituted at the centre or in the states, or in how the affairs that affect their day to day lives and living are managed at the local levels. In spite of the din, bustle and heat in stark evidence at the time of elections, democracy in India is too indirect, distant and convoluted for the people to make any impact in normal circumstances on how they are to be governed, i.e., how their concerns are addressed and their aspirations met. For this very reason, the basic constitutional stipulation that sovereignty of the nation lies with its people has been rendered insubstantial. This is clearly discernible in the interactions the ‘sovereign people’ have with the ‘public servants’, i.e., the government officials at all hierarchical levels, as discussed in the third blog post titled “Reality of India’s Sovereignty”. In the fourth blog post titled “Secularism in the India Republic”, the real character of India’s secularism, as proclaimed in the Constitution, has been discussed. While in colonial India, the secular government of British India played the religious card as part of their ‘divide and rule’ strategy to keep themselves in power, the communal divides are kept alive as vote banks by the political parties in their bid to capture or sustain power in the Indian republic. Another constitutional principle enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, socialism has been given a formal burial in the name of economic reforms. In the case of India, embracing of the so called economic reforms, i.e., liberalization, privatization and globalization, followed from the government’s colossal failure in meeting its social responsibilities due to its institutional weaknesses, infirmities and aberrations, as discussed in the fifth blog post titled “What Happened to India’s Socialism?” As far as India being declared a republic in the constitution is concerned, one conjures up an image of the republic of India having a governance “of the people, by the people and for the people”. As explained in the blog post titled “Is India a True or Ideal Republic”, this image is not real at all. India is a republic only by its text-book definition of the headship of the state of India not being ancestral as in a monarchy. Ancestry in the Indian polity, however, is far from being uncommon.
The view of India as indicated above points out the basic institutional infirmities, the stark realities as against the illusions nurtured by the Indian republic. These infirmities, however, are very significant and fundamental for the health of the republic and for understanding the problems afflicting the nation. It is like a sick person having the illusion of being healthy will not be motivated to seek diagnosis for the problems he may be suffering from. He will run after symptomatic, rather than systemic, treatments for his problems, only to be frustrated at the end as these undiagnosed or misdiagnosed problems defy those superficial treatments. Similar situation has been happening with the Indian republic. When India became independent on 15 August 1947 and a republic on 26 January 1950, it got the illusion of being a healthy nation while its body politic inherited essentially the same germinal system of governance which had been corroding its vitals for the last century and a half of its colonial existence. It did not undergo the needed catharsis. Consequently, the problems afflicting the nation not only defied the conventional solutions applied but got more pervasive and complex with time. Three such problems have been dealt with in the previous posts on this blog. One is the problem of corruption in public life which has been systematically getting more serious, pervasive and corrosive over the years and decades. Secondly, the problem of insurgency and other disruptive forces crippling India has been increasing in extent and destructiveness over time. Last but not the least, the problem of pervasive poverty that emerged in the colonial period and prevailed in the post-independence period in spite of valiant efforts made for development, has now been perpetuated in the republic India. These problems, which characterize contemporary India, have been dealt with in the previous November, December and January posts. It must also be understood that the problems afflicting the nation are not only confined to these three. There are many others which are related, systemic and quite serious such as cross-border terrorism. Unless the basic illness afflicting the body politic of India is diagnosed appropriately and the treatment prescribed and acted upon accordingly, the prognosis will never be satisfactory and effective. This will be the subject matter of the next post.
Showing posts with label Poverty in India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty in India. Show all posts
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
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.
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.
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