Mera Bharat Mahaan

Here is an article, which featured in Deccan Chronicle, a south-Indian English daily on Jan'05, 2010. This article vehemently brings out the fact that how poor people have been excluded from the process of development despite so much rhetoric in recent past about State's social security programmes. Worth having a quick glance at it. ( Thanks to Neeraj Biyani for forwading this)

Mera Bharat Mahaan

By By Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Jan 05 2010

Economists have debated and continue to debate about how unequal India is. There is anecdotal evidence that indicates that even if the poor are not becoming poorer, the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow even as the economy grows by eight to nine per cent each year and politicians mouth empty slogans about the need for “inclusive” growth. The fact is that the government’s actions tend to favour the affluent and often come down hard on the underprivileged.

The venue was the ballroom of a five-star hotel in Delhi where a television channel was giving awards celebrating excellence in human and social development in Indian states.

Towards the conclusion of the function and a little before the whisky started flowing, one of the judges of the competition stood up to make a brief intervention. He happened to be a member of the Rajya Sabha and a former governor of Reserve Bank of India, Bimal Jalan. He stated that the total value of the assets of the country’s top five billionaires (that is, in US dollar terms) equalled those of the bottom 300 million people. He was no party-pooper that evening for scarcely an eyebrow was raised. Before long, it was back to the booze.

The upper classes in the country and, increasingly, large sections of the middle classes as well, have become apathetic to rising inequality.

“The poor are poor because they are lazy and inefficient… the poor must become resigned to their fates because human beings are not born equal, just as five fingers in a hand are not the same” — such statements are made with unerring regularity as well-off, inured individuals seek to clear their conscience by rolling down the windows of their air-conditioned cars to drop a few coins in the hands of begging children.

Yes, it’s become a cliché but the fact needs repeating: India produces one-third of the world’s computer software engineers and one-fourth of the planet’s poor, under-nourished and illiterate. In a recent article entitled How unequal a country is India? economist Pranab Bardhan argues that inequality in India is not merely higher than in China but possibly “in the Latin American range” as official data in this country focuses on distribution of consumption expenditure and not on income, which under-estimates inequality as the rich tend to save more than the poor (Business Standard, September 5, 2009).

Dr Bardhan argues that if one considers factors such as inequality in the distribution of land and capital, access to education, healthcare and employment opportunities and mobility across generations and social groups, there is substantial evidence to indicate that Indian society is becoming more polarised along class lines.

He refutes Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar’s contention about the poor that if they cared about inequality, they should have celebrated the erosion in the wealth of the rich on account of the worldwide recession. Dr Bardhan writes that the “reduction in the net worth of India’s corporate oligarchy has not at all reduced its corrupt grip in the (country’s) political life, or lowered the power of local landlords or the political elite that capture local governance and misappropriate funds and services meant for the poor”.

When, in May 2006, the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector headed by Arjun Sengupta claimed that 78 per cent of those who work in the unorganised sector in India live on Rs 20 a day or less, there was a huge hue and cry from economists who questioned the methodology and authenticity of the data that was used to arrive at such a conclusion. In December 2009, an expert group headed by the former head of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, Suresh Tendulkar, estimated that roughly a quarter of the country’s urban population live on Rs 19 a day while close to 42 per cent of the rural population consume goods and services roughly worth Rs 15 a day.

One can quibble for months about which estimate made by which particular group of economists is more accurate than the other. But the fact is that despite a lot of hot air about the need to ensure growth with equity, India’s track record in this regard has been pretty poor. This is regardless the overall rate of the economy picking up significantly in recent years. Yet, traditionally, unequal countries like Mexico, Brazil and Chile have been far more successful than India has been in reducing poverty and inequality, often by more than a fifth, through conditional cash transfer schemes — one important condition being that girl-children remain in school.

An example of how the Indian government often turns a blind eye towards recovering dues from the rich became known when, in response to a query raised under the Right to Information Act, the New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC) disclosed a list of arrears that were due to it, the country’s most affluent civic body, accounting for over half its annual budget of Rs 1,656 crores.

Here’s a small sample from the list on the NDMC’s website: ITC Maurya Hotel (Rs 64 crores), Taj Palace Hotel (Rs 43 crores), the public sector State Trading Corporation (Rs 43 crores), The Oberoi Hotel (Rs 37 crores), the government owned Ashok Hotel (Rs 31 crores) and Samrat Hotel (Rs 20 crores).

Even the owners of the building on Tansen Marg, that houses the offices of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, an association of some of India’s most wealthy industrialists, owes the NDMC over Rs 1 crore. Not surprisingly, these claims of arrears are embroiled in a welter of complex legal cases, suits, petitions and appeals in and out of courts.

This is India, for you. A steaming cup of tea in one of the hotels mentioned could cost you more than what an unskilled labourer will earn as his or her new daily minimum wage for eight hours of work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act — said to the world’s largest social security programme — that is, a princely sum of a hundred rupees.

Mera Bharat mahaan. Happy new year!

Some criticism of NGOs

Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can’t give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can’t send children to school, try non-formal education. When you can’t provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can’t give them jobs? Not to worry, just redefine the words “employment opportunities”. Don’t want to do away with using children as a form of slave labor? Never mind. Talk of “improving the conditions of child labor!” It sounds good. You can even make money out of it.


— Palagunmi Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought; Stories from India’s Poorest Districts, (Penguin Books, 1996), p.421



Everybody talks about role of civil societies especially in the countries where Governments proved to be corrupt and inefficient but whether NGOs are different. Some common criticisms of NGOs are (which are unfortunately true also) –

- NGOs are self-appointed; lacks the transparency and accountability.

- Many of the NGOs are ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special interests.

- NGO's have known for openly interfering with elections specially in the undergoing some sort of crisis.

- NGO's tops officials are well-remunerated and enjoy better facilities than their counterparts in corporate sectors

- The financing of NGO's are invariably obscure and their sponsors unknown.

- Many NGO's serve as official contractors for governments.

- NGO's claims to be not for profit - yet, many of them possess sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to increase the market share of firms they own.



"The Economist" sums up the short-sightedness, inaptitude, ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGO's neatly:

"Suppose that in the remorseless search for profit, multinationals pay sweatshop wages to their workers in developing countries. Regulation forcing them to pay higher wages is demanded... The NGOs, the reformed multinationals and enlightened rich-country governments propose tough rules on third-world factory wages, backed up by trade barriers to keep out imports from countries that do not comply. Shoppers in the West pay more - but willingly, because they know it is in a good cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies, having shafted their third-world competition and protected their domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from locally owned factories explain to their children why the West's new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve."

Need of Public health experts

India is a land of paradox. It has some of the best health care facilities in the world and emerged as the favourite destination for medical tourism. It is one of the largest exporters of drugs and trained medical personnel to the world. But a significant part of its own population is deprived of even basic medical facilities. Only 43.5% of children are fully vaccinated, infant mortality rate is 57(per 1000) and 56% of children of age under three are underweight (NFHS-III) and 25% of total TB patients in the world are in India. New public threats are emerging due to changes in life style for example India is now estimated to have around 120 million persons with hypertension and 40 million with diabetes (WHO). The emerging diseases and increasing population with migration of qualified manpower are going to put tremendous pressure on India’s public health system which is already in overstretched. Shortage of funds, physical infrastructure & medical personnel, poor quality of services, rampant corruption, poor governance, and lack of convergence among different vertical programmes further worsens the problem.

Though India lacks the financial and human resources to eradicate all disease and provide universal health but the major problem is that existing resources are not optimally utilized due to absence of leadership with solid managerial and public health skills. The lack of public health expertise resulted in poorly designed health programs which were ineffective and inefficient. Health programs were independently implemented instead of adopting inter-disciplinary approach; design and delivery of health programmes doesn’t factor social, economical and geographical barriers like poverty, illiteracy, regional and gender disparities; available resources were either underutilized or poorly utilized for example, in the year 2008-09 out of Rs 373 crore allotted by Government for human resource development for health but only Rs 74.64 crore were utilized; similarly grants provided by other countries, bilateral and multilateral were also underutilized.

Hence the first priority for improvement in public health system should be to develop pool of qualified manpower with good managerial skills. Considering that developing human resources is a long term process, Government should estimate the future requirenments of qualified manpower and accordingly work on developing pool of qualified manpower.

Wastage of resources

( Taken from India today - 22nd October 2009)

According to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), as of March 31, 2009, India is sitting on an unutilised foreign assistance of a whopping Rs 78,037 crore. This has been mounting from Rs 56,920 crore in 2001 to Rs 75,935 crore in March 2007. Even as the country's external assistance has grown, usage has declined from 78.65 per cent in 2000-01 to 61 per cent in 2006-07.

Worse, as India negotiates more loans, an internal assessment of the Finance Ministry reveals that the government has been paying commitment charges of several hundred crores of rupees every year. Between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the government paid close to Rs 700 crore for the non-disbursed portion of sanctioned loans to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and some bilateral donors.

An estimate of such expenditure since 1991 puts the figure upwards of Rs 1,400 crore. Efficient use of these monies will obviously help push the vision of inclusive growth by putting the economy on a sustainable growth trajectory, creating faster and more productive employment and reducing poverty.

The question is, since India cannot deploy the resources, why does it need to borrow so much? Some of the reasons are-

a) Inefficient handling of land acquisition, site handover, utility shifting, rehabilitation and dispute settlement

b) Unavailability of qualified contractors, engineers and consultants with the required domain expertise

c) High fiscal deficit limits the ability of states to share costs of infrastructure development

d) Poor monitoring and evaluation. There is a paucity of qualified and trained people for this task

 

Considering the poor state of infrastructure and public services, Government and civil society should take this issue seriously. It is a luxury which India can't afford.

Public Policy problems in india

Designing and implementing of public policy in a country like India is a huge task. But in last three years while working in development field, I found that there are some very obvious problems with the way the public policy are designed and implemented in the country. Some of them are –

1. The policies are formulated by the concerned department/ministry but their successful implementation depends upon contribution of different departments/ministries. In the absence of a joint implementation and monitoring system often policies are not implemented properly.

2. Planning and implementation of public polices failed to factor in social, economic and geographical barriers like poverty, illiteracy, regional and gender disparities.

3. Planners and implementers are accountable only to their higher ups but not to the public or stakeholders who are directly affected by those policy.

4. In most of cases before policy formulation not all the stakeholders are consulted which results in opposition by certain stakeholders at the time of implementation.

5. Not enough discussion takes place in parliament before taking major policy decisions. Specially in last few years, the number of Parliament work in a year is decreasing steadily

6. In many cases the policies are formed by Centre but they have to be implemented by states and states depending upon their priorities and availability of resources implement those policies. It results in uneven implementation of policy among different states.

Government and civil society is aware about these problems. But still nothing has been done to rectify these problems. Considering the impact and importance of public policies, there is immediate need of overhauling the complete public policy making mechanism in the country. There is need to make it more responsive to the country’s need and requirements.

Public Policy as a discipline in India: Still in infancy stage

Even after sixty two years of independence, a significant percentage of population is deprived of basic amenities which show the failure of policies adopted by successive government. Though a lot has been written on lost opportunities and government failures but nothing concrete has been done to correct those mistakes. I was trying to understand why public policies in the country have failed consistently. I searched for the relevant material on internet but barring one paper couldn’t find anything useful. I searched for the courses in public policy, found a few but the course contents were nowhere near to courses offered in developed countries. I couldn't understand that why in country like India with poor social and physical infrastructure, and inefficiencies in delivery of basic public services, Public policy as discipline still in infancy stage. Though IIM A and B started a course in Public Policy but the intake is limited and it primarily focuses on officers from various government services. The works of so called “think tanks” or on policy research by some institutes are limited to studying the implementation of some government programmes in a district or at state level. There is serious shortage of people with understanding of public policy designing and implementation. All developed countries and many of the developing countries like China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore have institutions dedicated for researching public policy related issues and imparting knowledge in public policy domain. The output from these institutions is of high quality and helps the government in making right decisions. There is immediate need to develop world class institutions for imparting knowledge in public policy domain and studying the public policy challenges in the country. .