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Showing posts with label kerala. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kerala. Show all posts
Wednesday 1 November 2017
Tuesday 29 November 2016
How Isis recruiters found fertile ground in Kerala
Michael Safi in The Guardian
The Keralan backwaters are a pretty network of lakes, rivers and canals stretching almost half the length of the state. Photograph: Oyster Opera Resort
Padanna in Kerala is the home town to at least six young men who are believed to have left to join the Islamic State Photograph: Sasi Kollikal for the Guardian
Residents of Kerala like to call their lush south Indian state, “God’s own country”. Hafizuddin Hakim disagreed.
The 23-year-old left his wife and family in June, telling them he was headed to Sri Lanka to pursue his Islamic studies. Around the same time, 16 others slipped out of his district, Kasargod, and another four from neighbouring Palakkad.
The next anyone heard from the missing 21 was an encrypted audio recording sent from an Afghan number. “We reached our destination,” it said. “There is no point in complaining to police ... We have no plans to return from the abode of Allah.”
The mass disappearance of the group, widely believed – but not confirmed– to have joined Islamic State, is one of a number of incidents this year that have raised fears that India, so far unscathed by the terrorist group, might be seeing increased activity.
India’s Muslim population, the third largest in the world, has so far contributed negligible numbers to Isis – fewer than 90 people, according to most estimates. “More have gone from Britain, even from the Maldives, than India,” says Vikram Sood, a former chief of India’s foreign spy agency.
But growing concern over the group’s influence was made official this month, when the US embassy in Delhi issued its first Isis-related warning, of an “increased threat to places in India frequented by Westerners, such as religious sites, markets and festival venues”.
However, it is not India’s harsh, dry north, nor Kashmir, the site of a burning Islamic insurgency, where Isis has found most appeal. The group’s unlikely recruiting ground is Kerala, one of India’s wealthiest, most diverse and best-educated states.
Minarets and palm trees intersperse the skyline along Kerala’s Malabar coast, a verdant region of paddies and waterways that weave between villages like veins.
Padanna, in the north of the state, is a typical backwater town: orderly, lined with oversized houses, and made rich by remittances from its share of the nearly 2.5m Keralites who work in the Arab gulf.
It is also from where a dozen people, including Hakim, vanished in June. “He was a carefree, easy-going boy,” recalls his uncle, Abdul Rahim. “He used to indulge in all kinds of activities, smoking, drinking. He was not that religious.”
Hakim had worked in the United Arab Emirates in his late teens, returning to Padanna two years ago. A little aimless, he fell in with a new crowd, centred around an employee of the local Peace International School, an education franchise that adheres to a hardline Salafi Muslim ideology (but which has denied any involvement in the group’s disappearance).
Residents of Kerala like to call their lush south Indian state, “God’s own country”. Hafizuddin Hakim disagreed.
The 23-year-old left his wife and family in June, telling them he was headed to Sri Lanka to pursue his Islamic studies. Around the same time, 16 others slipped out of his district, Kasargod, and another four from neighbouring Palakkad.
The next anyone heard from the missing 21 was an encrypted audio recording sent from an Afghan number. “We reached our destination,” it said. “There is no point in complaining to police ... We have no plans to return from the abode of Allah.”
The mass disappearance of the group, widely believed – but not confirmed– to have joined Islamic State, is one of a number of incidents this year that have raised fears that India, so far unscathed by the terrorist group, might be seeing increased activity.
India’s Muslim population, the third largest in the world, has so far contributed negligible numbers to Isis – fewer than 90 people, according to most estimates. “More have gone from Britain, even from the Maldives, than India,” says Vikram Sood, a former chief of India’s foreign spy agency.
But growing concern over the group’s influence was made official this month, when the US embassy in Delhi issued its first Isis-related warning, of an “increased threat to places in India frequented by Westerners, such as religious sites, markets and festival venues”.
However, it is not India’s harsh, dry north, nor Kashmir, the site of a burning Islamic insurgency, where Isis has found most appeal. The group’s unlikely recruiting ground is Kerala, one of India’s wealthiest, most diverse and best-educated states.
Minarets and palm trees intersperse the skyline along Kerala’s Malabar coast, a verdant region of paddies and waterways that weave between villages like veins.
Padanna, in the north of the state, is a typical backwater town: orderly, lined with oversized houses, and made rich by remittances from its share of the nearly 2.5m Keralites who work in the Arab gulf.
It is also from where a dozen people, including Hakim, vanished in June. “He was a carefree, easy-going boy,” recalls his uncle, Abdul Rahim. “He used to indulge in all kinds of activities, smoking, drinking. He was not that religious.”
Hakim had worked in the United Arab Emirates in his late teens, returning to Padanna two years ago. A little aimless, he fell in with a new crowd, centred around an employee of the local Peace International School, an education franchise that adheres to a hardline Salafi Muslim ideology (but which has denied any involvement in the group’s disappearance).
The Keralan backwaters are a pretty network of lakes, rivers and canals stretching almost half the length of the state. Photograph: Oyster Opera Resort
“All of a sudden he became a recluse,” Rahim says. He grew a wispy beard, cut the TV cable to his home and one day, stopped driving his car. “He said it was taken on loan, and a loan was anti-Islam.”
Salafism is not new to southern India, but an influx of Saudi Arabian money in the past decades – partly detailed in Saudi diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks – has produced a harder-edged Islam in the region, says Ashraf Kaddakal, a professor at the University of Kerala.
“It is a very narrow, very rigid, very reactionary kind of ideology,” he says. “And it has attracted many youngsters, especially students.
“These youngsters have detached from their [orthodox Sunni] leaders and started following the online Islam, the preaching and sermons of these Saudi and other Salafi scholars,” he says. “They indoctrinated many through these internet preachings.”
Kadakkal himself has tried to counsel dozens of young people, whose parents fear their children’s increasingly rigid faith. “My counselling has been a total failure”, he admits. “They blindly follow their masters. They get their fatwas from the internet.”
Whatever threat Isis poses to India is fundamentally different, and probably less pressing, than that which most occupies the minds of Indian security officials.
“For us the major fear is from groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed,” says Sood, the former intelligence chief. “That is where the real, organised, state-sponsored threat lies.”
In contrast, those arrested so far on suspicion of Isis links or sympathies, numbering 68 people, have largely been self-starters, operating in small, unskilled networks.
“And they were almost all well-short of coming close to actually carrying out anything resembling a lethal operation,” says Praveen Swami, an author and journalist who specialises in strategic issues.
Still, the militant group has explicitly tried to ignite fervour among Indians. Its propaganda wing released a video in May featuring interviews with Indian recruits, including members of an existing jihadi group, the Indian Mujahideen, that pledged allegiance to Isis in 2014.
According to a National Intelligence Agency charge-sheet issued against 16 alleged extremists in July, authorities also believe Shafi Armar, a notorious Indian Mujahideen member believed to be in Syria, has been actively trying to groom recruits back home.
As well, Subahani Haja Moideen, one of six members of an alleged extremist cell arrested in northern Kerala in October, is believed to have actually returned from fighting with Isis in Iraq, where he reportedly met with some of the alleged organisers of the Paris terror attacks, according to Indian news agencies.
On the numbers, overall – and like al-Qaida before it – the group has so far failed to make deep roots in India.
Kadakkal suggests India’s idiosyncratic religious culture just doesn’t blend well with Isis’ highly orthodox worldview. “Indian soil is not right for this kind of extremism,” he says.
Sood agrees: “There is a lot of laissez faire in India, much more than in the more ordered societies of the modern world. We let things be, and that’s terrible when it comes to driving, but otherwise ... it has upsides.”
But the fault-line between Hindus and Muslim in India is a deep one, and the symbolic power of a successful attack could far outweigh any toll of casualties.
“I guess that is the real fear,” Swami says. “If even this small Isis thing succeeds in carrying out large acts of violence, the political and knock-on consequences could create serious trouble.”
Salafism is not new to southern India, but an influx of Saudi Arabian money in the past decades – partly detailed in Saudi diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks – has produced a harder-edged Islam in the region, says Ashraf Kaddakal, a professor at the University of Kerala.
“It is a very narrow, very rigid, very reactionary kind of ideology,” he says. “And it has attracted many youngsters, especially students.
“These youngsters have detached from their [orthodox Sunni] leaders and started following the online Islam, the preaching and sermons of these Saudi and other Salafi scholars,” he says. “They indoctrinated many through these internet preachings.”
Kadakkal himself has tried to counsel dozens of young people, whose parents fear their children’s increasingly rigid faith. “My counselling has been a total failure”, he admits. “They blindly follow their masters. They get their fatwas from the internet.”
Whatever threat Isis poses to India is fundamentally different, and probably less pressing, than that which most occupies the minds of Indian security officials.
“For us the major fear is from groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed,” says Sood, the former intelligence chief. “That is where the real, organised, state-sponsored threat lies.”
In contrast, those arrested so far on suspicion of Isis links or sympathies, numbering 68 people, have largely been self-starters, operating in small, unskilled networks.
“And they were almost all well-short of coming close to actually carrying out anything resembling a lethal operation,” says Praveen Swami, an author and journalist who specialises in strategic issues.
Still, the militant group has explicitly tried to ignite fervour among Indians. Its propaganda wing released a video in May featuring interviews with Indian recruits, including members of an existing jihadi group, the Indian Mujahideen, that pledged allegiance to Isis in 2014.
According to a National Intelligence Agency charge-sheet issued against 16 alleged extremists in July, authorities also believe Shafi Armar, a notorious Indian Mujahideen member believed to be in Syria, has been actively trying to groom recruits back home.
As well, Subahani Haja Moideen, one of six members of an alleged extremist cell arrested in northern Kerala in October, is believed to have actually returned from fighting with Isis in Iraq, where he reportedly met with some of the alleged organisers of the Paris terror attacks, according to Indian news agencies.
On the numbers, overall – and like al-Qaida before it – the group has so far failed to make deep roots in India.
Kadakkal suggests India’s idiosyncratic religious culture just doesn’t blend well with Isis’ highly orthodox worldview. “Indian soil is not right for this kind of extremism,” he says.
Sood agrees: “There is a lot of laissez faire in India, much more than in the more ordered societies of the modern world. We let things be, and that’s terrible when it comes to driving, but otherwise ... it has upsides.”
But the fault-line between Hindus and Muslim in India is a deep one, and the symbolic power of a successful attack could far outweigh any toll of casualties.
“I guess that is the real fear,” Swami says. “If even this small Isis thing succeeds in carrying out large acts of violence, the political and knock-on consequences could create serious trouble.”
Saturday 2 April 2016
Tarek Fatah on Sharia, Education, Kerala, Sufism, India and Islam
On the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist
Monday 4 January 2016
Prohibition, Discrimination in Kerala's alcohol policy
Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu
Since 2007, the Kerala government has sought to tighten its Abkari (excise) policy with a view to making liquor less freely available in the State, ostensibly in the interest of public health. At first, the State sought to amend the policy by permitting new bar licences to be granted only to those hotels that were accorded a rating of three stars or more by the Central government’s Ministry of Tourism. In 2011, these rules were further changed. This time, all hotels that had a rating of anything below four stars were disentitled from having a licence issued to serve alcoholic beverages on their premises. However, those hotels with existing licences were accorded an amnesty, which permitted them to have their licences renewed even if they did not possess a four-star mark.
Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the judgment on the validity of Kerala’s liquor policy militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution.
As virtually its last significant act of 2015, on December 29, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on the validity of Kerala’s newest liquor policy, which seeks to prohibit the sale and service of alcohol in all public places, save bars and restaurants in five-star hotels. Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the new law, as is only plainly evident, militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution. In placing five-star hotels on a pedestal, the law takes a classist position, and commits a patent discrimination that is really an affront to the underlying principles of our democracy. Regrettably, though, the Supreme Court’s judgment, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association v. State of Kerala, eschews even the most basic doctrines of constitutionalism, and, in so doing, allows the state to perpetrate a politics of hypocrisy.
Kicking off the excise policy
Since 2007, the Kerala government has sought to tighten its Abkari (excise) policy with a view to making liquor less freely available in the State, ostensibly in the interest of public health. At first, the State sought to amend the policy by permitting new bar licences to be granted only to those hotels that were accorded a rating of three stars or more by the Central government’s Ministry of Tourism. In 2011, these rules were further changed. This time, all hotels that had a rating of anything below four stars were disentitled from having a licence issued to serve alcoholic beverages on their premises. However, those hotels with existing licences were accorded an amnesty, which permitted them to have their licences renewed even if they did not possess a four-star mark.
The Supreme Court held, in a convoluted judgment, in March 2014, that the deletion of three-star hotels from the category of hotels eligible for a liquor licence was, in fact, constitutionally valid. The court provided a rather bizarre rationale for what appeared to be a palpable act of favouritism. Even hotels without a bar licence, it said, were entitled to three-star statuses under the Ministry of Tourism’s rules and regulations.
In August 2014, the Kerala government sought to further intensify its Abkari policy, by making its most drastic change yet, in purportedly trying to enforce complete prohibition. Only hotels classed as five star and above, by the Union government’s Ministry of Tourism, the new policy commanded, would be entitled to maintain a bar licence. To give effect to this rule, the Abkari Act, a pre-constitutional enactment that was extended in 1967 to Kerala, was duly amended, and the State’s excise commissioners issued notices to all hotels of four stars and below, which served liquor, intimating them of the annulment of their respective bar licences.
The new policy was immediately challenged in a series of petitions filed in the Kerala High Court by hotels of various different denominations. In May last year, after a division bench of the High Court had ruled in favour of the State, the hotels filed appeals before the Supreme Court. They raised two primary grounds of challenge, both predicated on fundamental rights guaranteed under Part III of India’s Constitution.
Fundamental rights
First, the hotels submitted that in cancelling their bar licences, and in prohibiting them from serving and selling liquor on their premises, the State had infracted their right, under Article 19(1)(g), to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. Second, they pleaded, in separately categorising hotels of five stars or more, and in permitting those hotels alone to serve liquor in public, the new Abkari policy had made an unreasonable classification, by treating persons on an equal standing unequally, and therefore violated Article 14 of the Constitution.
First, the hotels submitted that in cancelling their bar licences, and in prohibiting them from serving and selling liquor on their premises, the State had infracted their right, under Article 19(1)(g), to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. Second, they pleaded, in separately categorising hotels of five stars or more, and in permitting those hotels alone to serve liquor in public, the new Abkari policy had made an unreasonable classification, by treating persons on an equal standing unequally, and therefore violated Article 14 of the Constitution.
The first argument was admittedly going to be a difficult one to maintain. The liberty to freely carry on any trade or business is subject to reasonable restrictions that may be imposed by the state in the interest of the general public. The Constitution itself, in Article 47, requires States to make an endeavour towards improving public health, including by bringing about prohibition of the consumption of liquor. Therefore, quite naturally, any policy in purported furtherance of such goals would almost always be viewed as a legitimate limitation on any freedom to do business. In fact, in 1994, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court, in Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, explicitly questioned whether any right to trade in alcoholic beverages even flowed from our Constitution.
“The State can prohibit completely the trade or business in potable liquor since liquor as beverage is res extra commercium,” wrote Justice P.B. Sawant. “The State may also create a monopoly in itself for trade or business in such liquor. The State can further place restrictions and limitations on such trade or business which may be in nature different from those on trade or business in articles res commercium.” Therefore, the court, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case, perhaps, had little choice but to hold the Abkari policy as being in conformity with the right under Article 19(1)(g).
Such a holding, though, ought not to have precluded the court from scrutinising the liquor policy with further rigour. The mere fact that a commodity is res extra commercium — a thing outside commerce — does not give the state absolute power to make laws on the subject in violation of the guarantee of equal treatment. While a law might represent a valid constraint on the freedom to trade, it nonetheless must confirm to other constitutional commands, including Article 14, which assures us that the state shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.
The point of classification
Equality, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is a contested concept. But it is however, in its abstract form, a solemn constitutional pledge that underpins our democracy. The Supreme Court, in some of its earliest decisions, interpreted Article 14 as forbidding altogether any law that seeks to make distinctions based on class, except where reasonable classifications are made in a manner that does no violence to the provision’s core promise. The court also crystallised a basic two-prong test to determine what constitutes such a classification: there must be, it held, an intelligible differentia, which distinguishes persons or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group, and this differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law in question.
Equality, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is a contested concept. But it is however, in its abstract form, a solemn constitutional pledge that underpins our democracy. The Supreme Court, in some of its earliest decisions, interpreted Article 14 as forbidding altogether any law that seeks to make distinctions based on class, except where reasonable classifications are made in a manner that does no violence to the provision’s core promise. The court also crystallised a basic two-prong test to determine what constitutes such a classification: there must be, it held, an intelligible differentia, which distinguishes persons or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group, and this differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law in question.
Hence, in determining whether Kerala’s Abkari policy violated the right to equality, the question was rather simple: has the State made a reasonable classification in consonance with Article 14 by permitting only five-star hotels and above to serve liquor? When we apply the test previously laid down by the Supreme Court, there is little doubt that the distinction that the policy makes between hotels on the basis of their relative offering of luxuries constitutes a discernible intelligible differentia between two classes of things. But a proper defence of the law also requires the government to additionally show us how this classification of five-star hotels as a separate category bears a sensible nexus with the object of the law at hand. The changes in the liquor policy were ostensibly brought through with the view of promoting prohibition, and thereby improving the standard of public health in the State. Now, ask yourself this: how can this special treatment of five-star hotels possibly help the Kerala government in achieving these objectives?
The Supreme Court, as it happened, made no concerted effort to answer this question. This could be because, however hard we might want to try, it’s difficult to find any cogent connection between classifying five-star hotels separately and the aim of achieving prohibition. The court, therefore simply said, “There can be no gainsaying that the prices/tariff of alcohol in Five Star hotels is usually prohibitively high, which acts as a deterrent to individuals going in for binge or even casual drinking. There is also little scope for cavil that the guests in Five Star hotels are of a mature age; they do not visit these hotels with the sole purpose of consuming alcohol.” Given the palpable inadequacies of such a justification — and also given its validation of a manifestly classist position — the court also used the State government’s excuse of tourism as a further ruse to defend the law. But when a policy exists to promote the prohibition of the consumption of liquor, it’s specious to use an extraneous consideration, in this case, tourism, to defend a classification made in the law, regardless of how intelligible such a classification might be.
Prohibition often has a polarising effect on the polity. But the criticisms of the ineffectuality of such policies apart, Kerala’s new law ought to have been seen for what it is: paternalism, at its best, and, at its worst, an extension of an ingrained form of classism that is demonstrably opposed to the guarantee of equality under our Constitution. The judgment in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case is therefore deeply unsatisfactory, and requires reconsideration.
Friday 29 May 2015
Sunday 11 May 2014
Gujarat Shining - An Alternative Opinion
Jean Dreze in The Hindu 11 April 2014
Why does Gujarat have indifferent social indicators, in spite of having enjoyed runaway economic growth and relatively high standards of governance?
Gujarat’s development achievements are moderate, largely predate Narendra Modi, and have as much to do with public action as with economic growth.
As the nation heads for the polling booths in the numbing hot winds of April, objective facts and rational enquiry are taking a holiday and the public relations industry is taking over.
Narendra Modi’s personality, for one, has been repackaged for mass approval. From an authoritarian character, steeped in the reactionary creed of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and probably complicit in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, he has become an almost avuncular figure — a good shepherd who is expected to lead the country out of the morass of corruption, inflation and unemployment. How he is supposed to accomplish this is left to our imagination — substance is not part of the promos. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), too, is being reinvented as the party of clean governance, overlooking the fact that there is little to distinguish it from the Congress as far as corruption is concerned.
Spruced up image
Similarly, Gujarat’s image has been spruced up for the occasion. Many voters are likely to go the polling booths under the impression that Gujarat resembles Japan, and that letting Mr. Modi take charge is a chance for the whole of India to follow suit.
Some of Mr. Modi’s admirers in the economics profession have readily supplied an explanation for Gujarat’s dazzling development performance: private enterprise and economic growth. This interpretation is popular in the business media. Indeed, it fits very well with the corporate sector’s own view that the primary role of the state is to promote business interests.
However, as more sober scholars (Raghuram Rajan, Ashok Kotwal, Maitreesh Ghatak, among other eminent economists) have shown, Gujarat’s development achievements are actually far from dazzling. Yes, the State has grown fast in the last twenty years. And anyone who travels around Gujarat is bound to notice the good roads, mushrooming factories, and regular power supply. But what about people’s living conditions? Whether we look at poverty, nutrition, education, health or related indicators, the dominant pattern is one of indifferent outcomes. Gujarat is doing a little better than the all-India average in many respects, but there is nothing there that justifies it being called a “model.” Anyone who doubts this can download the latest National Family Health Survey report, or the Raghuram Rajan Committee report, and verify the facts.
To this, the votaries of the Gujarat model respond that the right thing to look at is not the level of Gujarat’s social indicators, but how they have improved over time. Gujarat’s progress, they claim, has been faster than that of other States, especially under Mr. Modi. Alas, this claim too has been debunked. Indeed, Gujarat was doing quite well in comparison with other States in the 1980s. Since then, its relative position has remained much the same, and even deteriorated in some respects.
An illustration may help. The infant mortality rate in Gujarat is not very different from the all-India average: 38 and 42 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. Nor is it the case that Gujarat is progressing faster than India in this respect; the gap (in favour of Gujarat) was a little larger twenty years ago — in both absolute and proportionate terms. For other indicators, the picture looks a little more or a little less favourable to Gujarat depending on the focus. Overall, no clear pattern of outstanding progress emerges from available data.
In short, Gujarat’s development record is not bad in comparative terms, but it is nothing like that of say Tamil Nadu or Himachal Pradesh, let alone Kerala. But there is another issue. Are Gujarat’s achievements really based on private enterprise and economic growth? This is only one part of the story.
When I visited Gujarat in the 1980s, I was quite impressed with many of the State’s social services and public facilities, certainly in comparison with the large north Indian states. For instance, Gujarat already had mid-day meals in primary schools at that time — decades later than Tamil Nadu, but decades earlier than the rest of India. It had a functional Public Distribution System — again not as effective as in Tamil Nadu, but much better than in north India. Gujarat also had the best system of drought relief works in the country, and, with Maharashtra, pioneered many of the provisions that were later included in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Gujarat’s achievements today build as much on its ability to put in place functional public services as on private enterprise and growth.
Misleading model
To sum up, the “Gujarat model” story, recently embellished for the elections, is misleading in at least three ways. First, it exaggerates Gujarat’s development achievements. Second, it fails to recognise that many of these achievements have little to do with Narendra Modi. Third, it casually attributes these achievements to private enterprise and economic growth. All this is without going into murkier aspects of Gujarat’s experience, such as environmental destruction or state repression.
At the end of the day, Gujarat poses an interesting puzzle: why does it have indifferent social indicators, in spite of having enjoyed runaway economic growth for so long, as well as relatively high standards of governance? Perhaps this has something to do with economic and social inequality (including highly unequal gender relations), or with the outdated nature of some of India’s social statistics, or with a slackening of Gujarat’s earlier commitment to effective public services. Resolving this puzzle would be a far more useful application of mind than cheap propaganda for NaMo.
Jean Dreze in The Hindu on 11 May 2014
If Gujarat is a model, then the real toppers in development indicators, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, must be supermodels
In an earlier article published on this page (“The Gujarat Muddle,” April 11, 2014), I pointed out that Gujarat’s development achievements were hardly “model” class. This is pretty firm ground: the same point has been made by a long list of eminent economists. Yet confusion persists, so I decided to take another look at the data, just in case I had been carried away.
Summary indexes
This time I looked at a bunch of summary indexes based on multiple development indicators. One advantage of summary indexes is that they make it harder to “cheat” by focussing selectively on particular indicators that happen to suit one’s purpose. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a good starting point. The latest HDI computations for Indian states, presented by Reetika Khera and myself in Economic and Political Weekly, place Gujarat in the 9th position among 20 major States — very close to the middle of the ranking. In the same paper, we also looked at a summary index of child well-being, nicknamed Achievements of Babies and Children (ABC), which is based on four indicators related to child nutrition, survival, education and immunisation respectively. In the ABC ranking, too, Gujarat occupies the 9th position among 20 major States.
This time I looked at a bunch of summary indexes based on multiple development indicators. One advantage of summary indexes is that they make it harder to “cheat” by focussing selectively on particular indicators that happen to suit one’s purpose. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a good starting point. The latest HDI computations for Indian states, presented by Reetika Khera and myself in Economic and Political Weekly, place Gujarat in the 9th position among 20 major States — very close to the middle of the ranking. In the same paper, we also looked at a summary index of child well-being, nicknamed Achievements of Babies and Children (ABC), which is based on four indicators related to child nutrition, survival, education and immunisation respectively. In the ABC ranking, too, Gujarat occupies the 9th position among 20 major States.
Another useful summary index is the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). Briefly, the idea is that poverty manifests itself in different kinds of deprivation — lack of food, shelter, sanitation, schooling, health care, and so on. Starting with a list of basic deprivations, a household is considered “poor” if it has more than a given proportion (say one third) of these deprivations. There is some inevitable arbitrariness in the specification of basic deprivations, but nevertheless, the MPI is a very useful supplement to other poverty indicators. In the latest MPI ranking of Indian States, by Sabina Alkire and her colleagues at Oxford University, Gujarat comes 9th (again) among 20 major Indian States.
A new entrant in this family of summary statistics is the Composite Development Index devised by the Raghuram Rajan Committee. This index has ten components related to per capita consumption, household amenities, health, education, urbanisation, connectivity, financial inclusion, and so on, based on the latest available data. Looking at the list of component indicators, an unsuspecting reader of the mainstream media might expect Gujarat to emerge pretty close to the top of the State ranking. Alas, not. Here again, Gujarat scores 9th among 20 major States!
There is something almost uncanny about this pattern, since the summary indexes are based on very different indicators. And it’s not that I am selectively focussing on particular rankings where Gujarat happens to rank 9th out of 20. I have reported all the recent summary indexes I know of. If you don’t like them, we can always fall back on the Planning Commission’s standard poverty estimates based on per capita expenditure. But then Gujarat slips from the 9th to the 10th position among 20 major States, according to the latest estimates for 2011-12.
The Raghuram Rajan Committee also devised another interesting index: the Performance Index, which captures the progress that States are making over time in terms of the Composite Development Index. This is an important indicator, because some proponents of the Gujarat model argue that what we should look at is not the level of Gujarat’s development indicators, but how they change over time. And that is precisely what this index does. Further, it focusses on performance in the decade of the 2000s, when Gujarat was supposed to be at its best. Surely, Gujarat will fare well this time? On the contrary, it slips from 9th to 12th in the ranking of 20 major States.
In short, whichever way we look at it, Gujarat looks less like a model State than a “middle State” — far from the bottom in inter-State rankings, but far from the top too. If there is a Gujarat model, then there must also be a Haryana model and perhaps a Karnataka model. Incidentally, Maharashtra does better than Gujarat on all the summary indexes mentioned earlier. Why, then, is Gujarat held as a model and not Maharashtra? Your guess is as good as mine.
If Gujarat is a model, then the real toppers, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, must be supermodels. Indeed, not only do Kerala and Tamil Nadu routinely come at — or near — the top in rankings of summary development indexes, they also surpass other States in terms of the speed of improvement. For instance, Kerala and Tamil Nadu do better than any other major State in terms of both level and change of the Composite Development Index. Of course, if you believe the touching story whereby Kerala’s achievements are actually based on the Gujarat model, then we are back to square one.
Why this image?
An interesting question arises: how did Gujarat acquire an inflated image? No doubt, this optical illusion partly reflects Narendra Modi’s outstanding ability to confuse the public (with a little help from his admirers in the economics profession). But perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that our perception of India is over-influenced by the large north Indian States — the former “BIMARU” States, which have dismal infrastructure, awful public services, and abysmal social indicators. Gujarat certainly shines in comparison — but so do many other States.
An interesting question arises: how did Gujarat acquire an inflated image? No doubt, this optical illusion partly reflects Narendra Modi’s outstanding ability to confuse the public (with a little help from his admirers in the economics profession). But perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that our perception of India is over-influenced by the large north Indian States — the former “BIMARU” States, which have dismal infrastructure, awful public services, and abysmal social indicators. Gujarat certainly shines in comparison — but so do many other States.
Mind you, the “G spot” (9th out of 20) may be auspicious. The number nine, according to Wikipedia, “is revered in Hinduism and considered a complete, perfected [sic] and divine number.” The Chinese, for their part, associate the number nine with the dragon, “a symbol of magic and power,” which also “symbolises the Emperor.” If the numerologists got this right, NaMo is well placed.
Wednesday 18 December 2013
Time for a ‘Right to Healthcare’
Amartya Sen says India ranks alongside Haiti and Sierra Leone when it comes to government spending on health as a share of the total health expenditure of the people
Any self-respecting country has to regard provision of health-care to its citizens a primary responsibility and it’s amazing that the Indian government never thought of that, says Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Excerpts from his interview with Raghuvir Srinivasan:
After Right to Work and Right to Food, do you think that the time has come for a Right to Healthcare legislation given the poor state of public healthcare infrastructure in this country?
Absolutely! Let me just say that it is incredible that we have got to this state. If you take any country in the world with the possible exception of the United States among the richer countries, they have always regarded it as absolutely elementary for people to have a right to healthcare. The fact that you have to do it through a separate Act itself indicates how backward we have been. Consider the history of the world.
With the end of the Second World War, European countries gave the right to healthcare to all residents and other countries, including in Asia, went in that direction. Japan already had a very well established medical system but they extended that. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan also had it. China had healthcare for all but when it marketised in 1979, they made it necessary like in the U.S., which was affecting their thinking very much at that time, for the citizens to buy their insurance cover themselves. So the coverage of health insurance which was automatic until 1979 moved from 100 per cent to 12 per cent. It took them a quarter of a century from 1979 to 2004 to admit that they made an error. And they moved to cover everyone. Now, 96 per cent of the population is covered.
Basically any self-respecting country has regarded this to be a primary responsibility of the government. Therefore it is amazing that the government of India never thought of that. The whole engine of Asian economic development has been the expansion of human capability and the recognition that there is nothing as favourable not only for development but also for economic growth. Since this country is single-mindedly concerned with growth rate, to maintain high growth rate for a long time there is no better recipe than to have a healthy, educated population. So, coming back to your question, if the government won’t do it, will it be right to force the government to do it through a Right to Healthcare Act? Yes. But why shouldn’t the government do it? Why isn’t this a big public issue? Even the Aam Aadmi Party didn’t raise it. The media has a role to play here. In general, the Indian media, print and electronic, should pay much more attention on this subject.
That brings me to the next question. More than 85 per cent of the revenue of Indian publications comes from advertisements which are aimed at the affluent and middle-class readership. Therefore, its focus is on issues that concern this segment of the population rather than on the poor and the deprived. How do you get over this handicap?
I’ll say three things on that. One, yes, it is a problem. Two, is India unusual in depending on advertisement revenue? No, it is not. How come this is not a problem in say, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Brazil or Mexico? We are not uniquely dependent on ads. It is a question of with what imagination and with what level of independent reasoning can newspapers, acting together, deal with advertisement revenue. There should be some convention on that. We have a vibrant media which has made many innovations. It can get more innovative on this. Third, the advertisers are competing with each other and they are playing one newspaper up against another. It should be possible for newspapers to have a code wherein certain types of news are covered and that code is important to seek.
This is about the two-way relationship between growth and enhancement of human capabilities. How do you break the chicken and egg situation of which comes first?
No, no, there is no chicken and egg situation at all. It is a win-win situation. Every bit of growth generates more revenue that you can spend on health and education. More spending on health and education solidifies the foundation of growth as well as development. You can start anywhere anytime and each of them will work. It’s not that you wait until one gets down and start working. Unfortunately I know that some economists talk like that but that’s a terrible way of thinking about economics. It is one of the things that Adam Smith said with absolute clarity in 1776.
Asked a question why is it that they want to go for a political economy, the answer he gives is that it makes an economy advanced. What is the advantage of that? First, it increases the people’s income. A higher income gives people the ability to do things which they value doing. And it increases public revenue which allows the government to do those things which governments alone can do such as education.
But you have this anomalous situation in India where the government is practically absent in areas such as education and health care leaving them to the private sector and is present in strength in manufacturing steel and refining oil which are better left to the private sector….
That’s just unclear thinking. You should clear out unclear thinking. Every time I come here, a lot of people tell me that the government cannot do anything at all and therefore education and healthcare should be left to the private sector. They don’t recognise, for example, that governmental share of health care in India as a percentage of total health expenditure that people make is one of the three lowest in the world. We are in the company of Haiti and Sierra Leone. We spend one quarter of what the Chinese government spends on health care. We spend 1.2 per cent of GDP while China spends close to 3 per cent. And there is no evidence for this idea that the private sector can do better.
At the level of basic health care it doesn’t work like that. Even the intervention schemes that exist don’t cover preventive medicine or preventive health care but if you become catastrophically ill then the government will pay the money, often to the private hospital, to treat you. That is no way of running public health care.
And this whole idea that the government cannot do anything, you have to look at the examples of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh. When we discussed them a long time ago that they were doing well, I was told that they cannot sustain it because Kerala, for example, is a poor economy. But now it has the highest disposable income per capita in India. The same thing that improves the quality of your life also enhances the economic development. And that story you will not hear. You will hear that [Narendra] Modi has brought such transformation that his State’s growth rate is much higher than [that of] the others. We had a hurricane recently which was expected to be in the news for a month. But it ended the first day because the government could move a million people off the coast. And this was a hurricane five times bigger than Katrina. The problem is that we have convinced ourselves that the government cannot do anything and we give it to the private sector, provide additional money and tie ourselves into a knot from which we cannot exit.
There are some interesting developments in the recent elections. We have a party formed out of a civil society movement which has captured the imagination of the electorate and we are seeing a resurgence of centre-right politics manifested by the success of the BJP. How do you see these developments?
The practice of democracy depends very much on what kinds of issues are brought into the public domain and into the debate connected with elections. The Delhi election was the more interesting one because it brought in many issues which people had neglected in the past. It didn’t bring in all the issues that we want to emphasise as much. It didn’t talk so much about the neglect of education, the lack of public health care and so on. It was concerned more about the delivery of existing services in an efficient and non-corrupt way.
That is important too but I would have liked a broader agenda discussed. However, one cannot get everything and certainly not in one go. But I’m happy that the AAP did bring in some public concerns into the politics of the election. The fact that they could get the people to focus on these issues rather than on issues of religion or caste is also a very positive thing, as also the fact that they won the election in many areas of Delhi without getting into these issues.
The rest of the elections were not unpredictable. The results were connected with traditional politics where religion and caste have played a part. The BJP has been able to project the image of a party that led powerfully even though the nature of the leadership raises deep questions in people’s mind, including mine. The Congress has looked rudderless. So, there’s nothing terribly exciting. Is that an indicator of what’s going to happen in the general election? Is it a wake-up call for Congress? Well, it’s not clear that Congress can be woken up!
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Vaastu shastra to oil massages: Bhargava reveals what killed Air India
Sindhu Bhattacharya in First Post.Business
Who killed Air India? Jitender Bhargava, who spent more than two decades with the airline in several executive positions, has spared no one in his book ‘Descent of Air India’. The ministry of civil aviation, successive Air India chairmen, employees and of course the various ministers who have held sway over the airline – everyone has been in the line of Bhargava’s fire. He has leveled serious charges against at least one Chairman of the airline and one minister who held charge of the Ministry of Civil Aviation for long years. But in this long narrative of what ails the airline, what led to its decline and what should be done to improve its fortunes, Bhargava has also managed to regale his readers with some rather interesting anecdotes.
The one about former Chairman V Thulasidas resorting to vaastu shastra when the airline’s financial health was fast declining shows how instead of tackling the situation, Thulasidas allegedly waited for divine intervention. This is the same chairman who allegedly doubled the aircraft order for Air India which subsequently pushed the airline into deep losses. Bhargava says vaastu expert Raj Shekhar Chawla from Hyderabad was appointed to guide the chairman on “where to place his desk, where to conduct his meetings with colleagues and which doors to the conference room to keep shut or open”. He also narrates Thulasidas’ alleged penchant for having an AI employee accompany him from his house to work and back every day, with a peon being instructed to keep the lift doors open when the chairman’s car was nearing the office!
In this long narrative of what ails the airline, what led to its decline and what should be done to improve its fortunes, Bhargava has also managed to regale his readers with some rather interesting anecdotes.
What is ‘shortfall allowance’? It’s the money that senior pilots were paid even if they did not fly as many hours and junior pilots flew by 1994. Because earnings of a senior pilot cannot be below those of a junior one, never mind how many hours of flying the senior did. This scheme, which replaced fixed daily allowances for pilots till then, led to an increase in expenditure of Rs 307.2 crore during 1995-1999 says Bhargava. It also meant that often, senior pilots were indeed being paid for not flying. Ludicrous, isn’t it?
Even Naresh Goyal and his legendary powers of persuasion find a mention in the book. Bhargava has alleged that since 1970s, Jordan’s ALIA group wanted air traffic rights to India despite there not being enough air traffic between the two countries. This request was refused once, then a second time in 1979. But in 1981, ALIA was granted full traffic rights. “The local manager of the airline representing ALIA was none other than the current chairman of Jet Airways – Naresh Goyal”.
But the most unctuous reference is made to Kerala oil massages which the then minister Shahnawaz Hussain wanted on board Air India flights. Bhargava says the minister announced this decision to the media first and then asked the airline to implement it. Never mind if some passengers object to the smell of the oil, if the aircraft’s upholstery would get spoiled, even if there is no space really to accord anyone having a massage some privacy. “The minister suggested that we provide some curtained enclosure within the aircraft.” The author says though the massage was feasible in a separate enclosure, it would also warrant a bath on board! This is when the proposal was finally buried. To assuage the minister’s wish however, a Delhi-based company was persuaded to introduce the Kerala massage at Delhi airport and the service continued till Shahnawaz was minister.
The author speaks of new uniforms for cabin crew and ground staff and how Ritu Beri went one up on designers such as J J Valaya and Tarun Tahiliani in 2007, when new aircraft induction meant new uniforms. Bharagava alleges that Beri was rejected in the first round of approvals for uniform designing but she offered to waive the designing fee and the tendering process was shelved mid way. “How Ms Beri was compensated for her efforts makes for an even more interesting story. Thulasidas deputed a team of Air India officials to her farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. …….Initially she offered to supply the sarees at Rs 4000 each but that was way more than the amount we were paying the existing vendor – Rs 1600 per saree. When the team brought that to her notice, she agreed to drop the price to Rs 3600. She sourced the uniforms from one of our existing vendors and we ended up paying an additional amount Rs 2000 per saree…… J J Valaya and Tarun Tahiliani took AI to court for wasting their time and effort and were reimbursed all costs in an out-of-court settlement”.
Did you know that earlier, officials from the Air India’s Commercial Department would visit large corporate houses with a flight timetable and a small gift – a clay model of the Maharajah or grey overnight bag – to promote airline’s sales? Bhargava says he suggested that this practice be restarted sometime in 2002 and that airline’s senior managers should personally meet Ratan Tata, Ambanis, Birlas, Mahindras and the Godrej family members to hardsell Air India’s First and Business Class offerings. Of course, the airline never took up this suggestion.
Who killed Air India? Jitender Bhargava, who spent more than two decades with the airline in several executive positions, has spared no one in his book ‘Descent of Air India’. The ministry of civil aviation, successive Air India chairmen, employees and of course the various ministers who have held sway over the airline – everyone has been in the line of Bhargava’s fire. He has leveled serious charges against at least one Chairman of the airline and one minister who held charge of the Ministry of Civil Aviation for long years. But in this long narrative of what ails the airline, what led to its decline and what should be done to improve its fortunes, Bhargava has also managed to regale his readers with some rather interesting anecdotes.
The one about former Chairman V Thulasidas resorting to vaastu shastra when the airline’s financial health was fast declining shows how instead of tackling the situation, Thulasidas allegedly waited for divine intervention. This is the same chairman who allegedly doubled the aircraft order for Air India which subsequently pushed the airline into deep losses. Bhargava says vaastu expert Raj Shekhar Chawla from Hyderabad was appointed to guide the chairman on “where to place his desk, where to conduct his meetings with colleagues and which doors to the conference room to keep shut or open”. He also narrates Thulasidas’ alleged penchant for having an AI employee accompany him from his house to work and back every day, with a peon being instructed to keep the lift doors open when the chairman’s car was nearing the office!
In this long narrative of what ails the airline, what led to its decline and what should be done to improve its fortunes, Bhargava has also managed to regale his readers with some rather interesting anecdotes.
What is ‘shortfall allowance’? It’s the money that senior pilots were paid even if they did not fly as many hours and junior pilots flew by 1994. Because earnings of a senior pilot cannot be below those of a junior one, never mind how many hours of flying the senior did. This scheme, which replaced fixed daily allowances for pilots till then, led to an increase in expenditure of Rs 307.2 crore during 1995-1999 says Bhargava. It also meant that often, senior pilots were indeed being paid for not flying. Ludicrous, isn’t it?
Even Naresh Goyal and his legendary powers of persuasion find a mention in the book. Bhargava has alleged that since 1970s, Jordan’s ALIA group wanted air traffic rights to India despite there not being enough air traffic between the two countries. This request was refused once, then a second time in 1979. But in 1981, ALIA was granted full traffic rights. “The local manager of the airline representing ALIA was none other than the current chairman of Jet Airways – Naresh Goyal”.
But the most unctuous reference is made to Kerala oil massages which the then minister Shahnawaz Hussain wanted on board Air India flights. Bhargava says the minister announced this decision to the media first and then asked the airline to implement it. Never mind if some passengers object to the smell of the oil, if the aircraft’s upholstery would get spoiled, even if there is no space really to accord anyone having a massage some privacy. “The minister suggested that we provide some curtained enclosure within the aircraft.” The author says though the massage was feasible in a separate enclosure, it would also warrant a bath on board! This is when the proposal was finally buried. To assuage the minister’s wish however, a Delhi-based company was persuaded to introduce the Kerala massage at Delhi airport and the service continued till Shahnawaz was minister.
The author speaks of new uniforms for cabin crew and ground staff and how Ritu Beri went one up on designers such as J J Valaya and Tarun Tahiliani in 2007, when new aircraft induction meant new uniforms. Bharagava alleges that Beri was rejected in the first round of approvals for uniform designing but she offered to waive the designing fee and the tendering process was shelved mid way. “How Ms Beri was compensated for her efforts makes for an even more interesting story. Thulasidas deputed a team of Air India officials to her farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. …….Initially she offered to supply the sarees at Rs 4000 each but that was way more than the amount we were paying the existing vendor – Rs 1600 per saree. When the team brought that to her notice, she agreed to drop the price to Rs 3600. She sourced the uniforms from one of our existing vendors and we ended up paying an additional amount Rs 2000 per saree…… J J Valaya and Tarun Tahiliani took AI to court for wasting their time and effort and were reimbursed all costs in an out-of-court settlement”.
Did you know that earlier, officials from the Air India’s Commercial Department would visit large corporate houses with a flight timetable and a small gift – a clay model of the Maharajah or grey overnight bag – to promote airline’s sales? Bhargava says he suggested that this practice be restarted sometime in 2002 and that airline’s senior managers should personally meet Ratan Tata, Ambanis, Birlas, Mahindras and the Godrej family members to hardsell Air India’s First and Business Class offerings. Of course, the airline never took up this suggestion.
Sunday 22 September 2013
Mavelli comes to Cambridge
Lyrics - Girish Menon
The Asura king Mahaballi
Rich, generous had a big belly
The Devas just hated him
Into Patalam they kicked him
But he can visit us once a year
To meet his beloved, near and dear
SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI
For his sadya we've made Ollan
Sambar, Erisserry and some Kallan
He likes his rice mixed with Rasam
And tops it up with Payasam
To lift his spirits we've got Nadan Cull
For entertainment we'll do Onnam Thall
SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI
The Asura king Mahaballi
Rich, generous had a big belly
The Devas just hated him
Into Patalam they kicked him
But he can visit us once a year
To meet his beloved, near and dear
SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI
For his sadya we've made Ollan
Sambar, Erisserry and some Kallan
He likes his rice mixed with Rasam
And tops it up with Payasam
To lift his spirits we've got Nadan Cull
For entertainment we'll do Onnam Thall
SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI
Monday 22 July 2013
Prospect interviews Amartya Sen
The full transcript of Jonathan Derbyshire’s interview with renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen
Jonathan Derbyshire: We first met four years ago. You said something to me then that I think bears on the preoccupations of your new book, co-written with Jean Drèze, An Uncertain Glory. We were talking about the Indian left. You said: “I’ve been very critical of the political balance of the left in India in recent years. A party which has a real commitment to the underdogs of society should be much more worried than it seems to be that India has a higher proportion of undernourished kids than anywhere else in the world.” That insight is, more or less, the point of departure for your new book isn’t it? You’re interested, in other words, in what you call the “two-way relationship” between “social justice” (your term) and economic growth, which of course has been spectacular in India over the past 15-20 years.
Amartya Sen: That’s exactly right. At the time, I hadn’t done the systematic work to see what the other indicators looked like, but I knew that on the undernourishment index we [ie India] were very low. But then when I found that this was true in other many other aspects – having a stable and secure medical arrangement for all; having a well functioning school system to which every child has actual access; universal coverage of immunisation – in all these areas India seemed to be doing worse than many countries which it has overtaken in terms of per capita income- for example, Bangladesh. So this, four years ago, was a thought that was bothering me which I always wanted to follow up. As I looked through it with my friend and collaborator Jean Drèze, it became clear that systematically India was underperforming in these respects, even when it was outperforming other large economies, with the exception of China (today, despite its fall in growth rate, it still has the third highest rate of growth among large economies, after China and Indonesia).
JD: That context – the competition with China and the other BRIC nations, India’s sense of itself as punching its weight on the global stage – matters doesn’t it?
AS: Yes. Economic growth is important precisely because it can help people to lead better lives, but to take growth itself to be a fetishistic object of admiration is part of the problem. We may legitimately worry about the slowing of Indian growth that is happening compared to, say, Indonesia. But we have to ask the right questions and note, for example, the importance of the fact that Indonesia has a higher ratio of literacy, education, higher ratio of secure healthcare. I think we have to understand that ultimately not having an educated, healthy population is not only bad for well-being but also bad in the long run for sustaining our economic growth.
JD: A question about the theoretical framework of the book. You said you started from a number of empirical observations about these indices (healthcare, literacy and so on) in which India was doing much worse than countries that it was outstripping in terms of GDP growth. I wondered whether your notion of “capabilities” is shaping your approach here (access to healthcare, education etc being “capabilities” that make human lives go better rather than worse).
AS: Yes, it’s very important for two different reasons. The first reason is that in order to judge how a country is doing you can’t just talk about per capita income. India used to be 50 per cent richer than Bangladesh in per capita income terms but is now 100 per cent richer. Yet, in the same period … when, in the early 1990s, India was three years ahead of Bangladesh in life expectancy, it is now three or four years behind. In India it is 65 or 66, in Bangladesh it’s 69. Similarly, immunisation: India is 72 per cent, Bangladesh is more like 95 per cent. Similarly, the ratio of girls to boys in school. So in all these respects, we are looking at capability. We’re looking at the capability to lead a healthy life, an educated life, to lead a secure life (with immunization making people immune to some preventable illnesses), having the capability to read and write, for girls as well as boys.
Expanding and safeguarding human capability is central to thinking about policy making. That understanding informs our work. But what plays a more dialectical role in this book is the insight that many Indian policy analysts may have missed is that human capability is not only important in itself, but that human capability expansion is also a kind of classic Asian way of having sustained economic growth. It started in Japan, just after the Meiji restoration, where the Japanese said: “We Japanese are no different from the Europeans or the Americans; the only reason we’re behind is that they are educated and we are not.” They then had this dramatic expansion in universal education and then, later, widespread enhancement of healthcare. They found that a healthy, educated population served the purpose of economic growth very well. That lesson was later picked up in South Korea. Korea had quite a low educational base at the end of the Second World War. But following Japan, they went in the same direction. The same happened in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and, to some extent, even Thailand. And gradually, in a smaller way, in Indonesia. Of course, they reaped as they had sown. So human capability expansion is very important for Asian economic growth.
This can be seen to be closely related, to use the terms economists seem to prefer, to the importance of “human capital”. I don’t like the term “human capital” very much. Adam Smith says somewhere – it may have been in a letter to Hume – that in this way of talking about human beings, there’s a danger you won’t be able to distinguish between a good human being and a good chest of drawers!
JD: The other central part of the argument in this book concerns democracy and the state of public discourse in India. I think it’s your view that democratic participation is part of the capability set required to live a flourishing human life. Of course, one of the things about the Asian market economies you’ve just discussed, certainly in the 1980s when they experienced the most dramatic growth, is that although they had flourishing civil societies, political participation was actually limited – this is certainly true of Singapore, say, and I think South Korea in that period. How does that sit with the claims you’re making in the book about democracy?
AS: The choice those Asian economies made [to extend healthcare, education etc] wasn’t a democratic choice, but it was a very smart choice. You can be smart without being democratic. However, good practice of democracy – well informed and vigorous – can help to select smart governments, humane governments, and can make those qualities be less fragile and transitory. For this the quality and force of media discussion are important. But if you are lucky enough to have a friendly authoritarian government, they can take smart decisions without having to rely on forceful media discussion. That’s what they did in South Korea and in Taiwan. But North Korea did not. Nor did Cambodia in the 1970s. Democracy can help to make the choice of government not a matter of luck, but of conscious and reasoned public choice. For this to be ensured the opportunities offered by democracy have to be strongly seized. This is where India’s record is divided – excellent use in some areas and very slack use in others. We have to make democratic practice more comprehensive.
Over the decades China has presented examples of good and smart as well as weak and confused authoritarian rule. The gigantic famines of 1958-61 resulted from terrible policy choices that could not be changed for three years despite tens of millions dying each year- no political party could criticize the terrible policies, and newspapers could not even cover the bad news. But after that, despite many other problems, China did remarkably fast progress in education and healthcare for all – an example of good authoritarianism. But they were irrationally prejudiced about the use of markets, which they shunned until the reforms of 1979. With the reforms there were some smart moves (with marketization China did brilliantly in manufacturing and agriculture) but also a big mistake when they marketised health insurance, so you had to buy health insurance rather than being insured by the state or the commune; the Chinese were not alert to the terrible consequences of marketizing everything. The percentage of health coverage went down after 1979 from 100 per cent to 10 or 12 per cent, with downward effects on the high pace of China’s progress in life expectancy. Again, it took them many years to recognise that they had made a mistake, and went about un-doing the harm, a correction that became full speed only in 2004 – a quarter century after the error of marketizing health insurance in 1979. Now they have nearly a hundred percent coverage – and with much better quality health care thanks to China’s economic prosperity.
An authoritarian system, if it is intelligently and humanely led (but there is no guarantee of that), can get its way quickly. A democratic system is somewhat slower, because you have to convince everyone. In the case of India, the question is which issues get dramatised and politicised. Famine was instantly politicised, because it is so central to the Indian view of the British Raj. The Raj began with a famine [in 1769] and ended with a famine [in 1943]. The elimination of famines was an immediate success of democratic India. There have been other successes, particularly when there have been crises – with HIV, for example – when there has been a real sense of urgency, which the media discussion and democratic pressure reflected. Five or ten years ago, people were saying that India was going to have more cases of HIV than anywhere else in the world – not only as an absolute number, but as a proportion. But it hasn’t happened. That challenge was met and things were done to reduce the vulnerability of the population. These challenges received public attention and advocacy, and a democratic success followed.
Unfortunately, the challenge has not been seized in the case of general healthcare, not even general immunisation. And nor has it happened with general education. So I think there is no guarantee that democracy will get there immediately, but it depends on the people to make it happen. And of course the foundational reason for wanting democracy isn’t that. The basic reason for wanting democracy is that it gives people dignity, political freedom, and voice – democracy has its own value. If that is compatible with doing good things, and if what happened with famine and HIV crisis could be translated to general healthcare and chronic undernourishment, then that would be a wonderful combination. There is no reason at all why we- and here I speak as an Indian citizen – cannot make that happen.
JD: You argue that there is a “two-way relationship” between growth, on the one hand, and the expansion of human capability on the other. It’s easy to grasp that point from the side of growth. Could you explain the other side of the argument? How does the expansion of capability enhance growth?
AS: Well, I think the basic insight is that of the Meiji restoration I mentioned earlier – namely that an educated, healthy workforce is very productive. And ultimately it is productivity and skill-formation on which economic and social progress depends. That is the Adam Smithian point. Smith asked “why is trade good?” Trade is good because it allows you to specialise and specialisation allows you to develop skills. He didn’t take the view which can be associated with David Ricardo, that trade is important because of comparative advantage. Smith’s view was that any country could typically produce any good (unless they are unusually geography-dependent). But if you specialise in something you become frightfully good at it – like the Swiss, making chocolate, watches or running banks. Once that happens, then your productivity rises, while in other countries’ productivity rises in other things. Smith also emphasised that general education is something that the state ought to do. He thought it’s a good thing to have an educated population but also that it would help skill-formation.
I think that connection the Asian economies saw, and they also saw the central role of skill-formation. Are there studies showing how productivity responds to nourishment, education, healthcare? There are indeed such studies, though we don’t go into a great deal of detail on this in the book. We were going more by the experiences of different countries which have adopted the human development strategy and have all done well. Similarly, states within India – Kerala, for example, which has a faster rate of growth than most others. Every state in India which went in the direction of human capability-formation typically led by the state – think of Tamil Nadu or Himachal Pradesh in addition to Kerala – ended up having a faster rate of economic growth and being ahead. Now some people who earlier were saying that Kerala’s early focus on state-financed education and healthcare could not be sustained now seem to be saying there is nothing to explain! Keralans are rich and therefore have high human capabilities. But that overlooks how they became rich.
JD: So what the other Asian economies show us is that you don’t have to have liberal democratic political institutions in order to have human capability growth?
AS: Yes. But I’ve never denied that.
JD: So what’s the claim about democracy being in this book then?
AS: There are in fact three claims being made. One, that democracy is important in itself, and it is compatible with human capability-based expansion. Two, democratic practice would be deeply favourable to human capability expansion, through good and forceful use. What has been done in the case famine-prevention or HIV-handling can be done more generally through the same practice of democratic pressure. Three, there is no guarantee that you will have human capability expansion with authoritarianism any more than we can be sure about a democracy, except that in the case of a democracy we know how to correct that neglect – in fact through more forceful and informed democratic practice. As the examples I discussed earlier illustrates, while human capability expansion may be well pursued by some authoritarian governments, it may be entirely neglected by other authoritarian rule. With authoritarianism, we do not know whether we would be South Korea or North Korea.
And even when things go well in many ways in an authoritarian state, there is always a fragility [in authoritarian states]: under good rulers you go one way, under bad rulers another. In many ways, Akbar’s India was a benign state, but it depended on the authoritarian rulers having these values. There was nothing in the system that guaranteed it. Democracy doesn’t have that fragility, though it may be harder to get there, slower to get there. For example, consider the fact that one morning in 1979 China abolished universal healthcare – if there had already been universal healthcare in India in 1979, as there was in China, I don’t think any government in India would have been able to abolish that.
JD: How robust do you think Indian democracy is?
AS: Its institutions are robust enough, but its practice is still quite limited. We have to be more vigilant. Gender inequality, long neglected, is a subject that is being taken up much more now, partly because of the terrible incident of rape on 16 December (leading to mass protests). Democracy itself is quite stable in India, but the practice of democracy has been partially vigorous and partially very lethargic. Can we be sure of its vigour? It depends on us – the citizens of the country. Like liberty, democracy requires eternal vigilance.
JD: You distinguish, it seems to me, two questions about democracy. First there’s a question about the compatibility between democracy and growth and you say that question has been definitively settled – we know the two are compatible. The second question is more interesting and difficult to answer and has to do with democracy, on the one hand, and what you call “the use of the fruits of growth for social advancement” on the other. And here the picture is much less clear isn’t it?
AS: Indeed, much less clear. Democracy’s difficulty is that the vocal and the active can influence the agenda in a way that the inactive and unvocal cannot. And the active ones have been the relatively poor among the rich – the bottom 40 per cent of the top 20 per cent (though they’re still part of the top 20 per cent). So, for example, they have asked for a diesel subsidy, and got it; they asked for a cooking gas subsidy and got it; they insisted on electricity being sold to urban consumers at below cost. There have been many other concessions which have cost money. The surplus has gone in their direction because they’ve been more vocal. And what is pernicious, or at least disturbing, is that they speak in the name of “ordinary people”. But ordinary people don’t drive diesel vehicles. Ordinary people don’t have cooking arrangements to which gas cylinders can be attached. And many ordinary people don’t have electricity. Democracy is a guarantee of process. But offers no guarantee as to how that that process will be pursued and what will come of it. If you don’t do anything, you won’t get anything.
JD: Another preoccupation of the book is the contrast between capability growth in India and in China. Presumably that’s a central preoccupation of the India elite? The race with China.
AS: For some parts of the elite. The media gives the impression that the number of people preoccupied with the comparison with China is very large. But it is a relatively small part of the population who read the “pink papers” (the local equivalents of the Financial Times). They are very concerned about this. But I’m not sure it’s an obsessive concern of the Indian elite generally. The literary elite is not very aware of how … they’re quite happy that India is a big player now in literature, in film and in technology. The Indian elite is often under-informed, which is why this book is so information-focused. The business elite is certainly very concerned with the horse race with China without ever asking how India can catch up with China in life expectancy, in literacy, in immunisation. And that’s a bizarre focus.
JD: One aspect of the way India lags behind China is that wage growth in China has far outstripped wage growth in India. Why do you think that is?
AS: First, the bargaining power of workers has been relatively small in India. Also, India has had a high growth rate but based on highly skilled labour – pharmaceuticals, information technology and car parts. But these don’t provide as much employment as you would expect from other industries. As a result, the general competition for labour hasn’t actually occurred. By contrast, a lot of American and European investors in China complain that wages have been rising very fast there. But that’s a sign of success. An economy that’s growing at six, seven or eight per cent a year should not be experiencing wage stagnation of the kind we have in India.
JD: But surely the bargaining power of labour in China is not significantly better in authoritarian China than it is in democratic India?
AS: The bargaining power of labour is better there, definitely. They don’t have unions, certainly, but the unions in India often serve those already relatively better-placed, rather than landless labourers in agriculture or those engaged in other basic unskilled labour. There was a time when the left parties did do that. But since then the more middle-class oriented left parties have been concerned with skilled labour. Skilled labourers’ wages have sometimes risen, but it’s the basic wages of the common labourer which have stagnated. And at that level I think that China does have more competition. But it doesn’t come from the unions – they don’t tolerate unions!
JD: Back to this question about the relationship between GDP growth and capability growth. You know that there is a competing view to yours which says that successful economic development necessarily occurs in two stages – this is a “two-track” account according to which “Track 1” reforms are designed to increase GDP and pull up the poor; healthcare and educational reforms belong to “Track 2”. And that it’s only Track 1 which makes Track 2 possible. You reject that model don’t you?
AS: Well, there’s no historical illustration of that. Japan isn’t. China isn’t. Korea isn’t. Hong Kong isn’t. Taiwan isn’t. Thailand isn’t. Europe isn’t. America isn’t. Brazil isn’t. So what are we drawing that model from? That’s not how things have happened in the world. They’ve all done it through increasing capability. I know of no example of unhealthy, uneducated labour producing memorable growth rates!
JD: What about the charge that you don’t pay as much attention in the book as you might to what one might call the negative externalities of growth and development – principally, the environment and population growth.
AS: On the environment, we do say quite a bit about that in the book, but maybe it’s not adequate – our primary battle was on a different front. Is growth inescapably damaging to the environment? I don’t think so. The biggest influence in reducing the fertility rate, for example, is women’s literacy. The best way of cutting population growth is women’s education, women’s gainful employment. Even in China, the low fertility rate they’ve achieved is explicable entirely by the good things China has done – widespread education of girls, widespread economic independence of women. Anything that increases the voice of young women tends to cut down the fertility rate because the lives that are battered most by the continuous bearing of children are those of young women. So human capability-expansion in the form of education is very environment-friendly in that respect. Now if you want just growth and nothing else, then you may have a clashing course. But if you are concerned with growth and human capability, that’s part of your calculation as to how you can make growth better oriented. It’s a point that Adam Smith makes: we are not concerned commodities themselves; we want them because they allow us to do certain things. If you want to be able to take part in the life of the community and appear in public without shame, then you have to have clothes like those of others. Similarly, if you live in California, you have to have a car to drive around. But what is the point of public reasoning if it doesn’t engage the fact that by having good public transport you can cut down the need for having cars, for example? There is no automatic process by means of which growth itself becomes sustainable without giving thought to it.
JD: We’ve spoken a lot about China. But the book also spends some time on the comparisons between India and another of the BRIC countries, namely Brazil. The account you give of the recent history of Brazil says that what the Brazilians have done in the last 20 years, say, is to correct for what you called “unaimed opulence” with active social policies. Obviously, the book was finished before the current unrest in Brazil began. How are we to understand what is happening in Brazil today? Are we to blame it on sluggish social reform? Probably not, because as you point out, these have been far-reaching. Or do the causes lie elsewhere? Do they lie, for example, in something else you discuss, that is in failures of accountability and corruption in the system?
AS: Yes. Most popular agitations in the world have not been about capability issues. That is the problem we have been discussing in the case of India, too – the cause of the basic education of the common man is not easy to translate into democratic agitation. On the other hand, corruption is; the specific deprivation or organised groups is. Many countries suffer from corruption, including China. Incidentally, those who think India is not growing as fast as China because it’s more corrupt, we don’t know that this is the case. As I’ve said, I think the reason is that they’re dealing with a healthier and better educated population. In the case of Brazil, they are also dealing with a healthier and more educated population. But that’s not what the agitation is about – the protestors aren’t calling for universal healthcare or education. They are talking about corruption and other issues. I think it’s very difficult to judge what’s really going on. Take the Falklands War, which changed the fortunes of Mrs Thatcher completely. It was a minor issue when you think about it. Similarly, there was a kind of massive groundswell to intervene in Iraq in 2002-03, into which initially even very sane voices moved. So I wouldn’t draw any big conclusions on the basis of what is going on in Brazil. By the way, mine isn’t a theory of public agitation. I don’t have a general theory of public discomfort!
JD: Chapter 8 of the book is devoted to the question of inequality. Could you say something about how in India caste aggravates and exacerbates the economic inequalities that are a feature of all advanced market economies?
AS: It does this in a very big way. First, it is stratification. Second, it is stratification on very hardened lines – it’s not like becoming rich. It’s easier to become bourgeois than it is to become a high-caste Brahmin! Third, there is a kind of approach that has gone along with the caste system, which is that it is a natural order and you can’t change it, and that the alternative is chaos. And that’s quite important to recognise. There are a lot of people who tend to think that undoing the caste system now would be a destabilising course of action. I think caste is about the worst form of inequality you can think of. And the fact that it has gone on for 2,500 years indicates how much of a historical background it has. Class and gender also play a part in Indian inequality. The idea that you need a good school, basic healthcare with a medical unit near where you live, that everyone needs a toilet in their home – these have become more ingrained in many societies, even poor ones, than has been the case in India. You can still build a large condo complex where, given Indian social structures, there will be many servants, without constructing toilets for them. And I think this is a ridiculous failure of vision. So, in that respect, inequality in China, though it is high, is quite different to that in India.
JD: It’s a failure of vision, but not an insuperable obstacle to change? After all, the book ends on an optimistic note.
AS: Yes. In order to get there in a democracy you have to fight for it. There is no way that democracy automatically guarantees that. I first argued that functioning democracies prevent famine in around 1979/80. I think today I would put it slightly differently and say that human beings in a functioning democracy prevent famine. The system in itself wouldn’t do it unless there was activity along with it. In the case of famine, it’s very easy to generate activity. In the case of under-nourishment, less so. We could only make a difference by trying harder.
JD: This invites the question what you mean by “democracy”. As you point out, democracy is about more than free elections. So what’s the ramified notion of democracy at work here?
AS: There are three aspects to it. At some level democracy was to involve majority rule and free voting. That’s the point at which someone like Samuel Huntington would like to stop. I would like to go further. It must also include minority rights, which are part of the institutional structure, and the protection of public discussion – free public discussion, free media and so on. Now, these two requirements are institutional. But the third aspect is not purely institutional – it’s the requirement that people use public reasoning; democracy would be more active the more we use public reasoning in an open way. Now, if the latter doesn’t obtain but the first two do, is it a democracy or not? I won’t go into that debate. I’d say, it is a democracy but it’s not doing very well. That’s what I’d say about India today. When you think about it more widely – America had Iraq; also Americans don’t necessarily quickly vote for healthcare (even those without health insurance don’t seem to see the merit of it) – there are all kinds of ways in which democratic debate doesn’t proceed well. And I’m really amazed that there is so little discontent in this country about the intellectually inadequate idea of “austerity”. It can’t be a tribute to democracy in Britain that Labour leaders should be tempted to endorse austerity just as most of the best economists in the world have rejected it. That the Labour Party thinks that by embracing the “wisdom” of austerity it can capture votes is not a tribute to the functioning and practice of democracy in the United Kingdom. That should not be the case. So all democracies have limitations. But the limitation in India is much more detrimental to the good life of the people than even the eccentricity of the opposition party backing austerity today. And that’s bloody eccentric!
JD: There’s another aspect of your views about democracy and democratic participation that intrigues me. There are moments where you come close to holding that democratic participation itself is part of what it is to live a flourishing human life – that’s an almost neo-Roman or republican view. Is that your view?
AS: I regard the advocates of that kind of view to be saying something important – namely that participation is important in our lives. But it can’t be the only thing that we value. You cannot say that if I lived in an authoritarian system, that had happened to generate for me a better level of education, healthcare and immunisation, that that isn’t an achievement because it wasn’t achieved through republican methods, I won’t accept that! You’ve achieved something. It would have been better if it had better had it been achieved through neo-Roman self-government, but it is better to have achieved it than not at all.
JD: And this is an insight that is derived from the example of the Asian economies that we discussed earlier, because one of the things they show is that having a market economy doesn’t entail having a particular set of political institutions. Market economies, in other words, flourish in a variety of institutional contexts.
AS: Yes, but it would difficult to think of any successful market economy in which the state doesn’t play an important part. And that was a point that was made already by Adam Smith in 1776! It’s true of Germany, of the United States, it’s true of Britain when it was doing very well, it’s true of Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and so on. So I think, there could be variations, but a certain there is a certain necessity for the state to play its part, along with people having the freedom to pursue market opportunities.
JD: I was thinking more of the fact that Singapore and Korea in the 1980s were authoritarian market states, in which individuals had the freedom to pursue market opportunities but political freedoms were curtailed. So civil society flourished alongside authoritarian political institutions.
AS: I think that’s right. Historically, democracy was a big change that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries in the West. But there had been degrees of democratic participation in authoritarian states. The point was made very clearly in the 7th century AD by Shotoku, the prince of Japan. He said that in order to have good governance we have to talk and consult with people. This was 600 years before Magna Carta. In some ways there has to be consultation. Magna Carta was just about that – it wasn’t about making Britain a democratic state. But it was a contribution to that Millian perspective according to which democracy is government by discussion. Look at China. I happen to be closely associated with two Chinese universities, Peking University and the People’s University. On the subject of healthcare, which interested a number of economists in Peking University, these economists were not being listened to. But eventually the Chinese government saw fit to hear their technical arguments, including about inequality, that they had to rein in inequality. So the point is this: would I prefer have the Chinese form of government rather than the Indian? No I wouldn’t. On the other hand, would I say that it’s authoritarian in the sense that it’s like Genghis Khan deciding what he wants to do? No. It isn’t like that.
JD: I find this fascinating. For it seems to me that our vocabulary is rather impoverished when it comes to trying to describe what it is, exactly, that the Chinese have. We reach for a shorthand such as “authoritarian market state” which, if you’re right, doesn’t come close to capturing the reality of things there.
AS: The point is that China is successful. And that success is based on enlightenment. Listen, democracy or government by discussion is a very important contribution to enlightenment. But enlightened decisions make a contribution even if they don’t happen to have been arrived at through democratic means. I irritated some people when I said once that I believe Keynes had the right things to say on austerity but that, on the other hand, he does not sufficiently defend the role of the state – namely that it has to do things like healthcare, social services and the basic welfare state. And I irritated some of my friends when I said that on this subject, Keynes had less to say than Bismarck did. Now Bismarck was not a democrat, but he was enlightened on this subject. I don’t see anything puzzling about China. Can I give an example of their making a mistake? Of course. I can mention famine. I can mention their abandonment of universal healthcare in 1979. That was a huge mistake.
So it’s fragile, but right now they’re in terrific shape and we have a lot to learn – about what they’re doing rather than the undemocratic procedures that lie behind it. I think we should be able to distinguish between why a policy is right and whether it was arrived at by the right procedure. My hope is that because the intellectuals in China are quite strong and because the commitment to government by discussion (this is actually a term of Bagehot’s) is very strong, it won’t be easy for the Communist Party to change things, even if they wanted to. So I’m completely at peace. I don’t see any contradiction there. I don’t see that I have anything to explain. It’s not as if I’ve said that China has an authoritarian system and they’ve never had any problems. I didn’t. Democracy is not the only thing we should be looking at. After all, the Soviet record in education was extraordinarily good. Look at those bits of Asia today that were part of the Soviet Union. They have enormously better levels of education than the neighbouring states. The Soviets did know something. And in this case communist ideology and Marxism made a major contribution. It had nothing to do with democracy.
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