India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  In the early years of Independence an ethic of Gandhian austerity hung heavily over the Indian middle class. In a poor country, one was not supposed to have much wealth, and certainly not supposed to display it. Even those inclined towards hedonism were stalled by the absence of choice. With the opening of the economy in the 1990s, the guilt formerly associated with consumerism has rapidly disappeared. Whether it be cigarettes, cars, whisky or sunglasses, foreign brands previously unavailable in India now flood the market. Commercial television carries appealing images of the goods on offer; and banks and credit card companies rush in to help one buy – and consume – them.19

  Although most characteristic of the big cities, the new consumption is not restricted to them. A recent ethnography of rural Kerala speaks of how consumers in this age of liberalization exercise their choices with care and discrimination, with one eye on their pocket and the other on their neighbour. Rural Kerala, of course, is anything but characteristic of rural India as a whole. For one thing, the villages blend seamlessly into the towns; for another, many villagers have spent time working in the Middle East, making the kind of money that takes them straight into the middle class. Anyhow, among these new consumers,

  styles and tastes are hierarchically arranged, brand-names acting as markers of distinction: a Keltron (Kerala Electronics; a state enterprise) television confers less prestige than an Onida, Indian made, which, in turn, is not as good as a Sony made under licence in India, with maximum prestige attached to foreign-made, imported televisions . . . Sometimes people leave their labels on consumer durables to emphasise their origins.20

  As with televisions, so too with a whole range of products from facial creams to cars – the Indian consumer is now spoiled for choice. Once, the only automobiles locally available were a 1950s model Morris and a 1960s model Fiat; now, if one has the money one can buy the latest Mercedes Benz. Middle-class Indians, once very focused on saving for the future, are now grounded much more in the present. Twenty years ago just a handful of Indians had credit cards; now more than 20 million do so. This was once a risk-averse culture, but now millions of Indians invest in property and the stock market.

  These changes in production and consumption have led to a fundamental transformation of the urban landscape. Modest homes have given way to grand apartment buildings, one-storey offices to imposing structures in glass and concrete. There are still traditional bazaars, whose makeshift stalls sell locally made pots and pans or locally grown fruit and vegetables; but there are now also large malls which offer, under one roof, such international brands as Levi, Estée Lauder, Sony and Baskin Robbins.

  V

  A second consequence of the recent economic growth has been a decline in the percentage of Indians who live below the official poverty line. There is a vigorous scholarly debate on precisely how many poor people there are in India. Some statisticians have concluded that a mere 15 per cent live below the poverty line, while the more pessimistic estimates put the figure as high as 35 per cent. The government of India’s own estimate lies in between these two extremes – at 26 per cent. While the precise numbers are in dispute, virtually all scholars accept that in both absolute and relative terms poverty has declined in the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade close to 40 per cent of Indians were ‘poor’; by the end of it the figure had dropped by ten percentage points or more.21

  Still, there are huge numbers of poor people in India – close to 300 million, if one sticks to the official estimate. Many of them are located in the cities. For beyond the glitzy malls and spanking new office buildings lie the slums and shanty towns where the majority of urban residents live. These are the people who service the middle class yet will never be part of it. They ‘sell newspapers they will never read, sew clothes they cannot wear, polish cars they will never own and construct buildings where they will never live’.22 Other slum dwellers labour long hours at low wages, in jobs perilous to their health, such as cutting metal and separating chemicals. They are usually unorganized, liable to be laid off without notice, and without insurance or pension benefits. 23

  The majority of the poor people in India, however, live in the villages. For the fruits of economic liberalization have scarcely percolated into the countryside. Agricultural growth was painfully slow during the 1990s. There were some attempts at the diversification of crops, at growing fruit and vegetables for the domestic market, and flowers for export. Yet these moves were limited in their success, largely because of deficiencies in infrastructure, i.e. the lack of electricity to process crops or keep them in storage, and the lack of roads to take them to the market.24

  Even when it came to that basic resource, food, the picture was less cheering than it might have been. Taking the country as a whole, there was a modest food surplus. ‘Buffer stocks’ of several million tones were being maintained in government godowns. Yet the distribution mechanisms in place were seriously inadequate; in times of scarcity, stocks did not move quickly enough to communities that needed them. The targeting was inefficient; grain from the Public Distribution System (PDS) more easily reached urban areas than rural ones, and rich states than poor ones. And there was terrific corruption; according to one estimate, only 20 per cent of the grain released through the PDS actually reached the intended recipients, the rest being sold on the black market. Hunger and malnutrition remained endemic in many parts, with starvation deaths reported when the rains failed.25

  Through much of the country, life and livelihood remained dependent on the availability of water. Sixty years after independence, a mere 40 per cent of cultivated area was under irrigation. For most farmers, the uncertainties caused by the year-to-year fluctuation in rainfall were compounded by the pre-emption of perennial water sources by the cities. Delhi took its supplies from the Tehri dam, 200 miles away; Bangalore from the Cauvery, 100 miles distant. Home to the privileged and the powerful, the cities got the water they demanded at a highly subsidized rate. Scarcity and discrimination sometimes promoted desperate acts. Travelling in Tamil Nadu in 1993, the journalist P. Sainath saw his train stopped in the dead of night by peasants who then took all the water they could find. Ten years later, when a drought hit northern Rajasthan, herders in Bikaner had to buy water in the open market to save their livestock from dying. The price they paid was 166 times the price a Delhi consumer was paying for his water.26

  In the last years of the twentieth century the first farmers’ suicides were reported. This was a disturbingly novel phenomenon, for while hunger and poverty had been a feature of the subcontinental landscape for centuries, never before had so many rural people gone so far as to take their own lives. Suicide, as the pioneering studies of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim had shown, was a product of the anomie and alienation caused by modern urban living. It increased in late-ninetheenth-century France, among migrants to cities dislocated from the protective care of the family and community; and it also, as it happened, increased in late-twentieth-century Bangalore, among young software professionals stressed out by the long hours of work or the rapid success of their colleagues.

  Indian anthropologists had previously reported high rates of suicide among some isolated mountain tribes.27 But what was now happening among settled peasant communities was unprecedented. Between 1995 and 2005 there were at least 10,000 suicides by farmers, these occurring in states as far apart as Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. Usually it was the male head of the household who killed himself, most often by swallowing pesticides, at other times by hanging or electrocution. In many cases he took this extreme step because of an inability to pay off debts accumulated over the years to banks, co-operatives or private moneylenders. But indebtedness had also been a pervasive feature of rural life; why, now, did it lead so often to this tragic outcome? No systematic studies yet exist to answer this question, but some preliminary speculation might be in order. Pace Durkheim, the rash of farmers’ suicides is perhaps related to the rapidity of social change in contemporary India. The new consumer society, its im
ages carried into the villages by television, does place a very high premium on success and failure. Thus, when crops fail, or a new crop does not give the yield it promised, the personal humiliation felt is greatly in excess of what it might have been in an earlier, more stable, and less acquisitive time.28

  VI

  One reason for the continuing poverty is the government’s poor record in providing basic services such as education and health care. In 1991, the year the reforms began, only 39 per cent of Indian women could read and write and only 64 per cent of men. Here, India lagged behind not merely the developed nations of the West, but also some of its Asian neighbours: Sri Lanka had educated 89 per cent of its women and 94 per cent of its men, while the corresponding figures for China were 75 and 96 per cent.

  The inability – some would say unwillingness – to educate all or even most of its citizens counted as independent India’s greatestfailure.29 In the 1990s, however, the government initiated a number of schemes to universalize education. First, there was the District Primary Education Programme, which focused on 250 districts where female literacy was less than the national average. A little later this was superseded by a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Programme to Educate All). The funds devoted to primary education from the public exchequer were increased, and there was also an inflow of money from foreign donors.

  The government was pushed to be more proactive by an order of the Supreme Court directing all state governments to provide cooked midday meals in schools. Many children who entered primary school dropped out well before they got to secondary education. A high proportion of these drop-outs were girls withdrawn by their families to help with household tasks such as cooking, cleaning and collecting firewood. In Tamil Nadu, where midday meals had first been introduced, they had helped considerably in increasing enrolment. It was hoped that a country wide extension would encourage parents to send their children to school and keep them there.30

  A number of innovative non-governmental organizations also entered the educational field in the 1990s. One NGO, active in the poorer districts of Andhra Pradesh, was able to place every child from 400 villages in school. The NGO ran a ‘bridge course’ for those who entered school late (most of whom were girls) – giving them six months of intensive coaching before placing them in the regular curriculum. Another NGO was following similar methods among the slum dwellers of India’s largest city, Mumbai. They had opened 3,000 balwadis (playschools), where children between the ages of 3 and 5 were taught to read and write. In these densely crowded slums, with space at a premium, all kinds of sites were utilized – temple courtyards, school verandahs, public parks, even offices of political parties. From the balwadis these children were sent on to regular municipal schools. By 1998, some 55,000 children had passed through this process, which was by then being extended to other cities and towns of northern and western India.31

  Within the state system there was considerable variation in implementation and effectiveness. Schools in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were very badly run, with poor or non-existent facilities – no blackboards, no chairs, no toilets for girls. The teachers were uncommitted – rates of absenteeism were high – and the parents apathetic. Among the better-performing states were Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south and Himachal Pradesh in the north. The educational progress of this last state was both rapid and unexpected. Himachal was dominated by the Rajputs, a caste who had traditionally kept their women at home. It was also a hilly state, with widely dispersed hamlets, making schools hard to site and harder to get to. However, these natural and cultural disadvantages were overcome by the state’s administration, led by its dynamic chief minister Dr Y. S. Parmar. After Himachal was carved out of Punjab in the late 1960s, Parmar made elementary education a pivotal element of public policy. Public expenditure on education was twice the national average, while the teacher-child ratio was far higher than in other parts of India. Parents were quick to realize the benefits of sending both their boys and girls to school. Concerned families and capable administrators worked to ensure that the schools were well maintained, and teachers properly motivated. The results were impressive: while, in 1961, only 11 per cent of girls in these hill districts were literate, by 1998 the figure had jumped to 98 per cent.32

  Although no other state performed nearly as well as Himachal Pradesh, the data suggested that the education sector was not as somnolent as it had once been. By the end of the 1990s the national literacy rate had risen from 39 to 54 per cent for females and from 64 to 76 per cent for males. Behind these changes in quantity lay a fundamental change in mentality. Once, many poor parents had chosen to put their children to work rather than send them to school. Now they wished to place them in a position from which they could, with luck and enterprise, exchange a life of menial labour for a job in the modern economy. As the educationist Vimala Ramachandran wrote in 2004, ‘the demand side had never looked more promising. The overwhelming evidence emanating from studies done in the last 10 years clearly demonstrates that there is a tremendous demand for education – across the board and among all social groups. Wherever the government has ensured a well-functioning school within reach, enrolment has been high.’33

  Where developments in education called for a cautious optimism, the outlook in the health sector remained bleak. Hospitals owned and run by the central and state governments were in a pathetic state: crowded, corrupt, without basic facilities or qualified doctors. And the political class seemed unconcerned. In fact, public expenditure on health was on the decline: in 1990 it constituted 1.3 per cent of GDP, by 1999 the figure had dropped to 0.9 per cent. At the same time there was a tremendous expansion of privatized health care which, by 2002, accounted for nearly 80 per cent of all health expenditure. This, however, was aimed at servicing the growing middle class. In some areas the poor were served by committed NGOs, but for the most part they were left to their own devices, going to local medicine men or village quacks to treat their illnesses.

  Some statistics may be in order here. Average life expectancy in 2001 was a niggardly 64 years. In many states, infant mortality rates remained high. In Meghalaya, for example, it was 89 deaths per 1,000. India had 60 per cent of the world’s leprosy cases (about half a million); 15 million Indians suffered from tuberculosis, a number that rose by 2million every year. To these older diseases was added a new one – Aids. By 2004, more than 5million Indians were HIVpositive.34

  In the popular mind it is the continent of Africa that is most seriously threatened by the Aids virus. In an August 2005 cover story in the prestigious Financial Times weekend magazine, a British journalist wrote that this perception was mistaken, and that ‘it will be in India, home to one-sixth of humanity, that the global fight against Aids will be won or lost’. There were already several localized epidemics; the worry was these would ‘mesh and contribute to a terrifying steepening of the infection curve . . .’ Were that to happen, ‘all bets were off’ on India joining the league of the world’s economic powers. Besides, HIV/Aids was ‘not only a growing economic nightmare, but also a growing national security issue’, with military personnel five times as likely as civilians to contract the infection. The article’s concluding paragraph ran as follows:

  India’s precarious public finances and under-resourced public system are in no state to cope with the colossal burden of a sub-continental Aids pandemic similar to that afflicting parts of Africa. India is at a crossroads in its fight against Aids and the path it takes now will be decisive for nothing less than the future of the world.35

  One is tempted to dismiss this as merely the latest in the long line of apocalyptic scenarios painted by Western journalists – except that this time it was not famine or riots or apolitical assassination that would ruin India, but a killer virus. However, there is indeed a health crisis in the country, and it is not restricted to Aids alone. In the more sober but not necessarily contradictory words of a home-grown journalist, ‘India has stopped thinking about public health and has paid a very heavy price for that�
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  VII

  Economic liberalization has improved the lives of many millions of Indians, but has left millions more untouched. And there are also some Indians who have been adversely affected by the freeing of the market and the opening of the economy to the outside world.

  Among those who have suffered from economic liberalization, the tribals of Orissa are perhaps foremost. Orissa is divided into a coastal region, dominated by caste Hindus, and a series of mountain ranges in the interior, where live a variety of adivasi communities. In the state as a whole the Hindus are in a majority, and they wield most of the political and administrative power. In 1999 Orissa overtook – if that is the word – Bihar as India’s poorest state. And among the residents of Orissa the upland tribals are the poorest and most vulnerable. Whether reckoned in terms of land, income, health facilities or literacy rate, they lag behind the state as a whole. The tribals are heavily dependent on the monsoon and on the forests for survival. With the woods disappearing, and the rains sometimes failing, they have plunged deeper into poverty, as manifested periodically in deaths from starvation.37

  The wealth in these highlands is mostly under the ground. Orissa has 70 per cent of the country’s bauxite reserves, and also substantial deposits of iron ore. These minerals are concentrated in the tribal districts of Rayagada and Koraput. In the past, these ores were worked by Indian public sector companies, but in the last decade they have been supplanted by private firms, domestic as well as foreign. The state government has signed a series of leases offering land at attractive prices to companies who wish to mine these hills.38