India's Unending Journey_Finding Balance in a Time of Change

by Mark Tully

  In 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, I attempted to measure the nation’s happiness by making a series of short films about Indians in different walks of life. The series was called Faces of India. One of these faces was that of Budh Ram, the Dalit, or former untouchable, whom we first met in Chapter 3. He lives in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a part of India that could not be described as in the vanguard of progress. In 2006, Gilly and I went back to see what India’s increased economic growth over the last nine years had meant to Budh Ram personally.

  We met Budh Ram, a small bird-like man with stick-thin legs, shuffling along the road from the village in a pair of shoes at least four sizes too big for him. ‘I’ve just finished working in the fields,’ he said, ‘so I suggested to my son that we should go to the stall on the main road for one of my nashas – a cup of tea.’ A nasha is an intoxicant, and Budh Ram has two – tea and bidis, a packet of which was stuffed into his shirt pocket. Bidis are the cheapest thing to smoke in India and are made from pungent tobacco wrapped in the leaf of a tendu tree. ‘They’re a little more harmful than tea. They do give me a cough,’ Budh Ram admitted ruefully.

  Budh Ram agreed to forsake his tea on this occasion to drive with us to the edge of the village. The lanes were far too narrow to drive right up to his hut. And a hut it most definitely was, built of mud, with two tiny rooms separated by a thin partition and a porch of scruffy thatch precariously perched on bamboo poles. In terms of housing, India’s nine years’ of economic growth seemed to have driven Budh Ram downmarket. When we last met he had been living in a more substantial mud house with a small enclosed compound. ‘My family has split up,’ Budh Ram explained. ‘This is why my wife and I live here now.’

  A charpoy was brought out. ‘It’s the same one we sat on when you came before. It’s only lost a few strings, like I have lost a few more hairs,’ Budh Ram explained, smiling and rubbing his shaved head. His cheeks had sunken because he had lost some of his teeth since I last saw him. A chair was produced for me, but it was very much on its last legs so I decided to stick to the charpoy. Inevitably, the whole of Budh Ram’s family, along with other Dalits from the village, gathered round. The women sat in silence, with their heads and much of their faces covered by their saris. Young boys wearing only tatty shorts sat beside them.

  In 1997, we had filmed Budh Ram singing a song bemoaning the fact that India had found freedom fifty years ago, yet his family had still not found freedom from poverty. He had accompanied himself on a child’s keyboard. He apologised for not singing this time. ‘Now I don’t have so much of a voice. The spirit is willing but the body is weak; I must be between seventy and seventy-three.’

  ‘You still have the strength to work at the backbreaking task of transplanting rice seedlings,’ I pointed out.

  ‘What else can I do? All my family have to be labourers – there are no other jobs.’

  We were sitting next to an emerald-green field of newly transplanted rice. Budh Ram owns a small patch of land, but it’s not enough to feed all his family. When asked, he seemed a little confused about exactly how many family members there were, but in the end there was a general consensus that twenty-seven of them were still living in the village.

  Reminding Budh Ram of his song, I asked him whether he had found freedom from poverty yet. ‘Some, just some,’ he replied.

  I teasingly suggested that the Indian villagers were always complaining. Budh Ram laughed. ‘You journalists want us to complain, so I have to, don’t I?’

  This annoyed a member of our audience, who angrily told Budh Ram, ‘We’ve got a lot to complain about and it’s our right to complain because there isn’t anything else we can do about it!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Budh Ram conceded. ‘But it’s true we’ve got something since the Sahib was here last.’ He went on to list the midday meal of dhal and rice that was now provided by the government for children. There were also two more schools now, and old age pensions for some – but not for him – and eighty houses had been built for Dalits, but again not for him. Although the staff did at least turn up to teach in the schools, Budh Ram felt that the education was poor. ‘The rich get the good education,’ he objected, ‘and that is why they stay ahead of us.’ Nevertheless, one of Budh Ram’s granddaughters had become the first member of the family ever to pass the tenth standard exams, which are school leaving exams for those who are not going to take the university entrance level exams.

  Advocates of growth as the panacea for countries like India maintain that the wealth generated will trickle down to the poor, but it was quite clear that little or no wealth had trickled into the pocket of Budh Ram or any of the other men listening to our conversation. All were still obliged to work as labourers, but as the farmers were not doing very well, there was less work around. When I asked Budh Ram whether he had a television set, he laughed yet again. ‘Why? Have they started giving them away in the bazaar? Anyway, you can see my house – where is the room to put the television set?’

  Nearby, buffaloes buried their noses deep in a brick trough while whisking away flies with their tails. One buffalo was so keen to get at her food that she tried to climb into the trough but got stuck in the process. No one seemed particularly worried about her. Thick curd made from the buffaloes’ milk was produced as our snack. It prompted me to ask Budh Ram about his diet. The staple foods were still rice and dhal, he explained, but continued, ‘That is an improvement from the days when we used to pick out the grain from the dung dropped by the bullocks on the threshing floor, wash it and eat it.’

  Budh Ram believed that the basis of his family’s economic problems was the lack of jobs – a complaint that is echoed in every Indian village. He said that all the money was in the cities, where people could afford to pay out bribes to secure jobs. He was referring specifically to government jobs, which most villagers in eastern Uttar Pradesh believe are the only ones worth having. A government job gives a man status as well as security, even if he is only a police constable or office clerk. Moreover, there is next to no industry in Budh Ram’s district of Ghazipur, so there are no opportunities in the private sector.

  I asked about a new government scheme that guaranteed work for one hundred days a year to one member of every family living below the poverty line. This scheme was designed not only to give employment but also to improve the rural infrastructure, as the beneficiaries were to work on projects designed to improve roads, irrigation and other local assets.

  Budh Ram dismissed the scheme as just another way of putting money in the pockets of local officials and contractors. ‘The money has reached the office of the Block Development Officer,’ he claimed, ‘but then he gives the list of people registered as below the poverty line to a contractor who draws up a false list of names, so that he can show on paper he has employed below-poverty-line people. But in fact he uses machines to do his work because they are cheaper.’

  I didn’t expect a Dalit from his biradiri to have any sympathy for the contractors, but one of Budh Ram’s relatives intervened to say, ‘What can they do? They have to pay so much in bribes to officials to get the contracts that they can only afford to do the work cheaply.’

  Budh Ram was philosophical about the situation. He had given up on politics and stopped actively supporting the Dalit party, the BSP. Now he devoted his free time to worship and to listening to readings of the scriptures. Apart from his tea and bidis, the temple that the Dalits had built for themselves in the village had become the centre of his life. In that temple the Dalit saint Ravi Das is worshipped as God. According to Budh Ram, ‘He is the pole of truth.’

  Before we left Budh Ram and his extended family, there had to be a photo call. Yet every time we photographed him he kept his mouth firmly shut. We couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t smile. Eventually a big smile broke out on his face and he explained, ‘I was trying to hide my missing front tooth!’

  As we walked out of the village, Budh Ram summed up his posi
tion on the growth of India’s GDP: ‘We did get some freedom from poverty in my generation; we have got something. We hope the next generation will get full freedom.’

  Budh Ram’s wish does not seem likely to come about if economists just rely on India’s growing wealth trickling down into the pockets of the next Dalit generation. This hasn’t even taken place in a rich country such as the United States, where Ronald Reagan was a strong advocate of trickle-down economics in the 1980s. The former president supported cutting taxes in order to enable the rich to create more wealth, believing that some of it would find its way down to the pockets of the poor. In fact, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

  As far back as 1958, the American Fabian socialist economist John Kenneth Galbraith issued a warning against trickle-down economics. In his famous book The Affluent Society, he argued that private affluence led to public squalor. Unfortunately, we have still not heeded that warning: in cities around the world the gap between private affluence and public squalor can be observed by anyone with the eyes to see. According to the United Nations report ‘State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007’, 998 million people now live in slums around the globe. Significantly, the last fifteen years, which have marked a period of high growth rates in Asia, have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of slum-dwellers.

  In the sixties, when Galbraith was America’s much-loved Ambassador in India, it was quite difficult to find slums in Delhi. But now you can’t avoid them. Some forty years ago, Delhi was an open city. Now, in my part of the city – Nizamuddin East – we demonstrate the gap between private affluence and public squalor by living behind bars, in a gated enclave, like the residents in almost all other prosperous parts of New Delhi. I protested when the gates first went up, but I was told by a member of the local Resident’s Association that they were necessary to keep the slum dwellers out.

  In recent years, there has been a tendency all over the world for prosperous individuals and organisations to increase the divide between private affluence and public squalor by relocating to new areas. The big Indian companies and multinationals have fled from overcrowded Delhi to Gurgaon, which is about twenty miles away. There, they have built a city of skyscrapers in what used to be a small town, once just the headquarters of a rural district administration.

  Microsoft India has offices in Gurgaon. I invited myself to lunch there to continue a discussion I had begun with the Chairman, Ravi Venkatesan. Like many of the new breed of India’s captains of industry, Ravi’s first degree was from one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. From there he went to the United States, where he got another degree in engineering, and then an MBA from Harvard. Before joining Microsoft he was chairman of the Indian subsidiary of Cummins, the diesel engine manufacturers.

  I had first met Ravi in Mumbai, after a Microsoft sales meeting at which I had spoken. I had told the meeting I was not convinced that IT would necessarily make the way governments in India worked so transparent that corruption would be drastically reduced. India is obsessed with the evils perpetrated by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats but seems incapable of doing anything about them. I related the story of a meeting I had attended in Chandigarh, a city designed by Le Corbusier and the capital of two states, Haryana and Punjab. There, too, I had expressed my doubts about the ability of computers to foil the cunning Indian babu. After I had spoken, a smartly dressed young man stood up and said, ‘I agree with Mark Tully. I am a police officer and my policemen are very happy with IT. They are now taking their hafta, or weekly bribes, by e-mail!’

  The next morning, over a hotel breakfast in Mumbai, Ravi said it was good to hear counter-cultural views, but he thought that I was underestimating the power of computers. He was convinced that the IT revolution was going to be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. I thought to myself, ‘Then I am a Luddite, because I refuse even to have a mobile phone’, and secretly vowed to get one. Wanting another opportunity to counter my Luddite views with a refreshing dose of Ravi’s enthusiasm, I asked him whether we could continue our conversation some time. That was how I came to be sitting in the Microsoft canteen.

  Microsoft India is clearly more egalitarian than many older Indian companies. There was no directors’ dining room and I could see that Ravi didn’t expect or receive the VIP treatment that most company chairmen in India regard as their right. Even the food in the canteen could be described as egalitarian; a group of staff who wanted something a little special for a celebration had to bring along their own meal.

  After we had eaten, Ravi opened his laptop and brought up a diagram illustrating three potential futures for India. There were three arrows pointing away from a crossroads. In one direction was an arrow with an elephant on it labelled ‘Bolly World’. The arrow rose sharply and then bent downwards. Bolly World,Ravi explained, was the future if India continued on its present path, with rapid economic development only benefiting a minority of the population. On the other side of the diagram, an arrow pointed straight into the sunrise. There was another elephant on the arrow, but her tail was up and she was balancing the globe on her trunk. This elephant was labelled ‘Pahle Bharat’, or ‘India First’. She symbolised an India in which everyone puts the nation first, determined that the entire country should benefit from its development. The third arrow shot straight down into the darkness and the elephant sliding down it was called ‘Atakta Bharat’, or ‘India Getting Stuck’. That dismal elephant warned of the possibility that the entire global economy might slow down, offering far fewer opportunities for the export of Indian goods and services that is fuelling the current rapid GDP growth, while within the country itself there would be little development and the little there was would be uneven.

  The elephants, I told Ravi, represented much that I believed in personally: the imbalance in the present development of the Indian economy; the need for business to create a market that included everyone; and the need for global growth – but growth that offered benefits to poor nations as well as rich ones. So Ravi showed me leaflets describing Microsoft projects designed to ensure that it would be the ‘India First’ elephant who trumpeted her way into the future. The goal of one project was to take the benefits of IT to grassroots communities by providing Community Technology Learning Centres. Another aimed to empower students, their teachers and the development community, among others, by improving their existing skills. The scheme would give them more access to the latest technologies, and their training would be tailored locally. Then there were two further projects designed to deal with particular weak spots in the Indian economy. One was aimed at energising the rural economy, which is lagging behind its rapidly developing urban counterpart. Another was designed to help make India’s small and medium-sized enterprises more globally competitive. While explaining these projects to me, Ravi was keen to stress that Microsoft was not going it alone, nor was this purely a private sector enterprise that had nothing to do with the government. The emphasis in all the projects was to be on private–public partnerships, on bringing the individual, businesses and the government closer together.

  The anti-growth and anti-capitalism lobbies would almost certainly dismiss Microsoft India’s schemes as disguised self-interest, and there is obviously an element of self-interest in them. A bigger and more balanced Indian economy would naturally mean more opportunities for Microsoft India. But a balanced view of India’s needs would accept that business interests must play a role in creating wealth. Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, has already shown through his Bill and Melinda foundation, which is dedicated to reducing inequity in the United States and around the world, that his interests are wider than just profit and loss and shareholder value alone.

  But what exactly is the development path the ‘India First’ elephant should follow? Ravi surprised me by saying, ‘It would be a tragedy if India imitated the West.’ He continued: ‘Just look at one example, road transport. If India based its economy on that – with such a huge population – imagine the energy and env
ironmental problems it would create.’

  If India were to accept without question that the Western precedent is the only way to develop, then by 2050 the number of cars in India might well exceed the number in the United States. India is a far more crowded country than the US. Whereas there are thirty-two Americans per square mile of America, there are some 840 Indians per square mile of India. If India surrenders to the road lobby, there will simply not be enough space to drive all those cars, let alone park them.

  There is also the question of all the energy that an increased number of cars and the lifestyle that goes with them would consume. At present, the average citizen of North America uses twenty-five times more energy than the average Indian. It would therefore take an awful lot of energy-saving measures and a gigantic breakthrough in the discovery of new non-fossil fuels to prevent a crippling shortage of oil and an environmental disaster if India’s growth were to follow the present Western pattern. As the situation stands, energy consumption in India and China is already pushing up the international price of oil.

  Of course, America and other industrialised countries also have to change their ways if we are to avert fuel and climate chaos. In the near future, their politicians will have to stand up to their road lobbies and wean their people off their addiction to the motor car. Rich countries simply can’t expect a country such as India to roll over and say, ‘It’s fine for you to go on consuming energy at the rate you do. We will find an alternative growth pattern, so that you don’t run out of oil’! The industrialised nations must show that they are taking the search for the Holy Grail of sustainable development seriously and are prepared to make whatever changes in their own lifestyle are necessary if they are to ask India to restrict its energy consumption. Sustainable development has been defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. We will surely compromise future generations if we don’t take note of the evidence all around us that our insistence on the primacy of GDP growth imposes far too much strain on nature. We will compromise future generations if we don’t redefine our needs and reduce our greed.