India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  The inability – some would say unwillingness – to educate all or even most of its citizens counted as independent India’s greatest failure.45 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 A little later, this was superseded by a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Programme to Educate All).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 high school. A high proportion of these ‘dropouts’ were girls, who were withdrawn by their families to help with household tasks such as cooking, cleaning and collecting firewood.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 countrywide extension would encourage parents to send their children to school and keep them there.46

  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 in 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 or 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 used as playschools: 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 now being extended to other cities and towns of northern and western India.47

  Within the state system, there were considerable variations 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 disinterested – 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 Himachal’s first chief minister, Dr Y. S. Parmar. After the state 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.48

  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 female literacy rate had risen from 39 per cent to 54 per cent; the male literacy rate, from 64 per cent to 76 per cent. 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’.49

  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. While 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 indigenous 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 2 million every year. To these older diseases was added a new one – AIDS. By 2004, more than 5 million Indians were HIV positive.50

  ‘India’, wrote one knowledgeable observer, ‘has stopped thinking about public health and has paid a very heavy price for that’.51

  VIII

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

  Among those who suffered from economic liberalization the adivasis, or tribals, of central India were perhaps foremost. They lived in the most resource-rich areas of the country – with the best forests, the most valuable minerals, and the freest-flowing rivers. Over the years, they had lost many of these resources to the state or to outsiders, and struggled hard to retain what remained.

  A particular target of tribal ire was the Forest Department, which restricted their access to wood and to non-timber forest produce such as honey and herbs, which they collected and sold for a living. In the state of Madhya Pradesh, the trade in tendu leaves (used for making bidis, or cheroots) was particularly lucrative. The government had handed over the trade to private contractors, but the actual collection was done by the tribals. The rates were niggardly: Rs30 for 5,000 leaves. In the early 1990s, the tribals demanded higher rates; when this was denied, they stopped traffic on major highways in the state.52

  According to one study, while adivasis constituted 8 per cent of the country’s population, they constituted 40 per cent of the population displaced by dams, mines, steel mills and other such projects.53 Another study documented how, with regard to access to education and health, adivasis were even worse off than Dalits. Surveys comparing the two communities showed that while 41 per cent of the Dalits lived under the official ‘poverty line’, the figure for adivasis was closer to 50 per cent. Likewise while the literacy rate of Dalits was low, at roughly 30 per cent, that of the adivasis was 6 percentage points lower still. As for public health facilities, one in six Dalits had no access to doctors and clinics, but one in four adivasis did. Only 43 per cent of adivasis had access to safe drinking water, as compared to 64 per cent of Dalits.54

  A variety of activists were working in adivasi areas; some Gandhian in orientation, others Marxist. The issues they took up included access to land and forests, and the provision of decent schools and hospi
tals. These were, surely, the groups most neglected by the Indian state, and also the most condescended to. The colonial regime had designated an array of tribal communities as being ‘criminal’; their crime being that they lived not in settled villages but moved around in search of a living. After Independence, these tribes had been formally ‘denotified’, but the prejudice against them remained. Officials posted in tribal districts were known for their disdain towards those whom they were paid to serve. Once quiescent, under activist influence the tribals were now moved to protest; the consequence being a series of clashes with the police.55

  The most celebrated of tribal assertions in the 1990s was the ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’ (Save the Narmada Movement). Its leader was Medha Patkar, who was not herself a tribal, but a social worker raised and radicalized in Bombay. The movement aimed at stopping a massive dam on the Narmada river which would render homeless some 200,000 people, a majority of them adivasi in origin. Patkar organized the tribals in a series of colourful marches: to the dam site in Gujarat, to the city of Bhopal (capital of Madhya Pradesh, the state to which most of the oustees belonged), to the national capital, Delhi, there to demand justice from the mighty government of India. The leader herself engaged in several long fasts to draw attention to the sufferings of her flock.56

  Patkar’s struggle was unsuccessful in stopping this particular dam, but it did draw wide attention to the government’s disgraceful record in resettling the millions displaced by development projects. Official acknowledgement of the long history of adivasi suffering, meanwhile, came through the creation in 2000 of two new states of the Union: named Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, and carved out of the tribal districts of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh respectively. Also formed was the state of Uttarakhand, from the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh, likewise rich in natural resources, these likewise subject to exploitation by powerful external interests.

  One state with a large tribal population was Orissa. The state was divided into a coastal region, dominated by caste Hindus; and a series of mountain ranges in the interior, where lived a variety of adivasi communities. In the state as a whole the Hindus were in a majority, and wielded 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 were the poorest and most vulnerable. Whether reckoned in terms of land, income, health facilities or literacy rate, they lagged behind the state as a whole. The tribals were heavily dependent on the monsoon and on the forests for survival. With the woods disappearing, and the rains sometimes failing, they plunged deeper into poverty, as manifested periodically in starvation deaths.57

  The wealth in these highlands was mostly under the ground. Orissa had 70 per cent of the country’s bauxite reserves, and also substantial deposits of iron ore. These minerals were concentrated in the tribal districts of Rayagada and Koraput. In the past, these ores were worked by Indian public sector companies, but in the 1990s these were supplanted by private firms, domestic as well as foreign. The state government signed a series of leases, offering land at attractive prices to companies who wished to mine these hills.58

  One of the more ambitious projects was floated by a consortium named Utkal Alumina, which brought together Canadian and Norwegian firms with the Aditya Birla Group. This had its eye on the Baphlimali hills of the Kashipur block of Rayagada district, under which lay a deposit of 200 million tonnes of bauxite. The proposal was to mine this ore and transport it to a newly built refinery, which would process the material and export the refined product.

  Some of the land to be used for these operations was owned by the government; but some 3,000 acres were cultivated by tribals. These saw no benefit in the project, which would dispossess them of their fields and give them naught in return. A delegation of tribal activists met the chief minister and demanded that he cancel the lease. Their request was refused; instead, the government sent a team to survey the land preparatory to its acquisition. Over the next few years the tribals tried a variety of strategies to stop the project from getting off the ground. Employees of Utkal Alumina were prohibited from entering the villages. Roads were blockaded, and marches organized to raise consciousness of the environmental and social damage that mining would cause. When the company constructed a ‘model’ of the kind of house in which they intended to rehabilitate the tribals, the prospective beneficiaries simply demolished it.59

  On the other side, the administration was determined to go ahead with the project. They saw it as a source of revenue for the exchequer, some of this intended also for the pockets of parties and politicians. In March 1999, a group of social scientists from Delhi visited Rayagada, and wrote a report warning the Orissa government ‘that unless the popular discontent among local tribals over the acquisition of land was properly addressed this peaceful district may turn into a hotbed of Naxalite [Maoist] activity . . .’.60 A year-and-a-half later, the journalist Darryl D’Monte travelled from Mumbai to study the situation on the ground. He found the tribals resolute in their opposition. The mines, they told him, would ‘destroy the ecosystem of the Baphlimali plateau’. One adivasi leader said they would stop all vehicles from entering the area. ‘We are prepared for any consequences’, he insisted, adding: ‘In a conflagration, anyone ought to be prepared to get singed’. D’Monte noted that the government was equally determined to push the project through. ‘Over the past five years the district administration, in tandem with the police and politicians, has almost acted like the advance guard of the companies . . .’.61

  The conflagration came two months later, and tragically it was the tribals who got singed. On the 15th of December, the ruling Biju Janata Dal organized a meeting in the area, to canvass support for the project. Angry villagers refused to allow them to hold the meeting. Three platoons of police arrived to disperse the protesters, but were held up by a group of women. When the police lathi-charged the women, the men arrived to help them. At some stage the police opened fire, killing three tribals. Among the first to express solidarity with the victims were Maoist revolutionaries.62

  IX

  To be sure, India had long been marked by sharp inequalities. Some regions and some social groups were noticeably less poor than others. However, the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s tended to accentuate these inequalities. The economies of the states that were poorest grew slowly during the decade, while those of the states that were already better off grew faster. Through the 1990s Bihar registered an annual growth rate of 2.69 per cent, Uttar Pradesh of 3.58 per cent, and Orissa of 3.25 per cent. On the other side, Gujarat had a growth rate of 9.57 per cent, Maharashtra of 8.01 per cent, and Tamil Nadu of 6.22 per cent. Broadly speaking, the states that did well were located in the south and west of the country, while the states that fared indifferently were in the north and east. At the very bottom were the massively populous states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In 1993, these two states accounted for 41.7 per cent of India’s poor; in 2000, for 42.5 per cent.63

  It appeared that economic performance was crucially dependent on initial endowments of human capital and physical infrastructure. The states that had better schools and hospitals and hence a more skilled and healthy workforce were usually also the states that had better roads, more reliable electricity and less corrupt administrations.64 Naturally, it was to these locations that investment and investors gravitated. In a pre-reform era, the central government often chose to site industries in areas deemed ‘backward’. But private entrepreneurs were under no such obligation. They looked to where they would get the best return on their capital. These were the southern and western states, which surged further ahead as a consequence.

  That said, even in the most prosperous states it was not the entire population that prospered. The capitals of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Bangalore and Hyderabad respectively, were at the leading edge of the software boom, but their own hinterlands had been left far behind. Between 1994 and 2000, per capita consumption expenditure gre
w in rural Karnataka at 9.5 per cent annually, in urban Karnataka at 26.5 per cent. The corresponding figures for Andhra Pradesh were 2.8 per cent (rural) and 18.5 per cent (urban). Taking India as a whole, expenditure grew at 8.7 per cent per year in the countryside, but at 16.6 per cent in the cities.65

  As the economist T. N. Srinivasan observed in 2000, these wide disparities meant that ‘if one is poor in India’, then

  one is more likely to live in rural areas, more likely to be a member of the Scheduled Caste or Tribe or other socially discriminated groups, more likely to be malnourished, sick and in poor health, more likely to be illiterate or poorly educated and with low skills, more likely to live in certain states (such as . . . Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and also Orissa) than in others . . .66

  Across the country, prosperity co-existed with misery, technological sophistication with human degradation. The paradoxes of life in India were tellingly captured in a conversation between the prime minister and villagers in Orissa that took place in September 2001. From his home in New Delhi, Atal Behari Vajpayee spoke by satellite to tribals in Kashipur, whose kinsmen had died eating mango kernel because their crops had failed. ‘It is extremely unfortunate that in today’s world people die by eating poisonous material’, said the head of a government that could speak to its citizens by videophone, yet not supply them with wholesome food.67

  X

  In 2004, the Indian economy became a subject of debate in the American presidential election. This was unprecedented; more striking still was the fact that it was not the poverty of Indians but their wealth that was being discussed. In several speeches on the stump, the Democratic challenger John Kerry stoked fears of more American jobs being shipped east if President Bush were re-elected. If he was chosen by the voters, promised Kerry, he would reinstate a protectionist regime to save American jobs from being ‘Bangalored’. This too was another first; the first time that a Presidential candidate had singled out an Indian city by name as a threat to American interests.