India’s problems

April.07 : Anne O. Krueger in her book Economic Policy Reforms and Indian Economy narrates an interesting anecdote about a meeting at which discussions were centered on development strategies. When a speaker referred to India with the words “In a country like India”, well-known economist Harry Johnson interrupted the speaker by a counter question, “What other country is like India?” Through a simple question Harry Johnson was trying to convey that India’s problems cannot be compared with those of other developing countries, large or small, and that they have to be tackled in the background that’s specific to India. Let me begin with some of these special problems.  

The most serious among India’s handicaps is its limited land area. India with a population of over a billion people, accounting for 16.6 per cent of the world population, has only 2.2 per cent of world’s land area while the US, which has only one-third of India’s population, has three times India’s area. Another limitation is that out of the 6.23 lakh villages in India, 2.86 lakh have less than 500 people each and 1.45 lakh other villages have less than 1,000 people each, making it difficult to provide basic infrastructure like schools, healthcare centres etc. In the social sector, particularly healthcare and education, India is still in the company of some of the least-developed countries of the world. 
The proverbial poverty of the rural masses of India is the legacy of two centuries of British rule. India’s wealth along with China’s accounted for half of the world’s wealth for about 18 centuries but after two centuries of colonial exploitation India had been reduced to one of the poor countries of the world. 
The vast disparities in growth between states also show how the benefits of the growth already achieved are not uniformly distributed. States with large populations like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are cynically referred to as “BIMARU” states, as if these states are condemned to the sickness of under-development with limited chances of full recovery. 
Against a dismal picture of under-development and poverty, India’s position today is that it is one of the three largest economies of Asia, in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, the other two being China and Japan. Some Indian entrepreneurs have already entered the select group of the top-dozen billionaires of the world and this is taken as testimony to Indian’s ability to compete on equal terms with the most successful producers of wealth in the world, given the opportunities.
Thus, India presents to the world today the picture of a country with great contradictions, where abject poverty and backwardness exist side by side with high levels of affluence and technological advancement. However it will not be fair to jump to the conclusion that India’s strategies for development have failed to deliver or that they have been inadequate to tackle the problems of under-development special to our country. Six decades of development efforts have thrown up several lessons which have not engaged the serious attention of India’s planners and rulers whose concern has been mainly centered on the rate of gross domestic product growth. High growth rate is considered synonymous with development for the nation as a whole, irrespective of other problems which afflict it. A few of these “other problems” which do not receive the attention they deserve are briefly mentioned below.
The first is that we as a new nation have failed to assimilate the most important lesson, which the Father of the Nation had tried to instil in us, namely, good governance is not merely efficient governance but has to also be morally good. Gandhiji strived for improving the standard of living of all sections of the population but he also wanted this objective to be achieved along with improvement in the standard of living of the people. But an unfortunate development in the post-Gandhi decades was that politics in several parts of the country came to be dominated by people who cared only for power to satisfy their greed for wealth. 
If an impartial study is made on the statement of assets by the candidates themselves when they file their nomination papers and compare them with the information relating to the previous elections, we will be wondering how some of these leaders could meet with such enormous success in a very short time. 
Unfortunately, the common people in our country have become tolerant of corruption and are no longer shocked by such revelations. 
Another serious challenge to the development of a “good” democratic structure in our country is the manner in which the nomination culture practised by most political parties in India is stifling the rise of leadership at the local level. In the past several good ideas of development emerged from certain state leaders who had ground-level experience of initiating them. Those familiar with the initiation of some of the important government programmes like mid-day-meal for poor school children in Tamil Nadu and the employment guarantee scheme in Maharashtra, will recall how much the Central government had benefited from the experience of these states in implementing these programmes on a nation-wide scale. 
The practice of strict conformity to directions from the party leadership has of late been evident even when senior members of Parliament (MP) discuss important national policies in Parliament. We may recall the freedom which party leaders had given to their MPs to express their views freely when important national issues like Britain’s entry into the European Union and the use of a common currency for all member countries were being debated in the UK, both in Parliament and outside. In India freedom of expression is always restricted by the fear of displeasing party bosses and, therefore, all party MPs try to toe the party line indicated to them though no formal whip has been issued. It has become rare during the last several years for an MP to express his/her views boldly on an issue on which s/he may have honest differences of opinions with the party bosses. Freedom of speech for an MP in our democracy has, thus, become a myth of the past, which in turn has diluted the principle of “good governance” in the full sense of the term.
 
P.C. Alexander is a former governor of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra
 
P.C. Alexander