India: Why the world’s biggest democracy still fails too many of its people

Why the world’s biggest democracy still fails too many of its people

Jun 29th 2013 | DELHI |From the print edition

An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. By Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze. Allen Lane; 434 pages; £20. To be published in America in August by Princeton University Press; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AS A conundrum it could hardly be bigger. Six decades of laudably fair elections, a free press, rule of law and much else should have delivered rulers who are responsive to the ruled. India’s development record, however, is worse than poor. It is host to some of the world’s worst failures in health and education. If democracy works there, why are so many Indian lives still so wretched?Social indicators leave that in no doubt. A massive blackout last summer caught global attention, yet 400m Indians had (and still have) no electricity. Sanitation and public hygiene are awful, especially in the north: half of all Indians still defecate in the open, resulting in many deaths from diarrhoea and encephalitis. Polio may be gone, but immunisation rates for most diseases are lower than in sub-Saharan Africa. Twice as many Indian children (43%) as African ones go hungry.

Many adults, especially women, are also undernourished, even as obesity and diabetes spread among wealthier Indians. Despite gains, extreme poverty is rife and death in childbirth all too common. Prejudice kills on an immense scale: as many as 600,000 fetuses are aborted each year because they are female. Compared even with its poorer neighbours, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s social record is unusually grim.

“An Uncertain Glory”, an excellent but unsettling new book by two of India’s best-known development economists, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, sets out how and why this is so. They argue that Indian rulers have never been properly accountable to the needy majority. Belgian-born Mr Drèze has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002. Now at Allahabad University in the north, he is influential among Indian policymakers, particularly for pushing a right-to-information law. Mr Sen, a Nobel laureate, now at Harvard, famously showed how famines have never happened in democracies. The two men want a debate on India’s social failures and how to fix them.

Their opponents point out that India has long suffered from slow economic growth, but has seen a steady upturn since the early 1990s. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, both professors at Columbia University, and long (and, at times, bitter) sparring partners with Mr Sen and Mr Drèze, argued forcefully in a recent book (seereview) for more liberal reforms, notably to labour laws and land ownership. They say that pushing GDP growth back above the current 5% level, creating jobs, letting business flourish and raising revenue for government would all cut poverty.

They are surely right. But Mr Sen and Mr Drèze hope to go much further, faster. The lesson of just about every emerging economy—China and Brazil today, Europeans before—is that as economies grow, big public interventions aimed at lifting health, education and other standards result in rapid social gains. India, however, is the exception. Worse, its lagging social problems actually serve to drag down economic growth.

Indian public health is especially disturbing. Southern states like Tamil Nadu do well, but generally the country gets what it pays for: a pitiful $39 per person per year for public health, compared with China’s $203 or Brazil’s $483. In India the total amounts to 1.2% of GDP, as against a global average of 6.5%. Some of the shortfall is made up privately, as both rich and poor Indians pay doctors and quacks. But even good private providers do nothing for preventive care and better health education.

Money could be found. The government spends more subsidising fertiliser for farmers than on all public health care. Fuel subsidies, mostly helping the better off, are equally costly. Ways to raise funds exist. Taxing gold and diamond imports, for example, would bring in nearly $10 billion in annual revenue, the authors argue.

State-provided education, too, is in a shocking state. One survey of state schools in seven big northern states found no teaching activity in half of them. But sacking a teacher in India is hard. Teachers are well paid and many new schools have been built. Yet quality of instruction, the authors say, remains generally “horrifying”. Even the poor prefer private tuition; at least the teachers show up.

The diagnosis is gloomy. The authors argue that the state fails mainly because of deeply entrenched inequality. A ruling elite defined by caste, but also by gender, education and income, has an utter lack of interest—verging on contempt—in improving matters for the rest. Newspaper editors and readers, judges, NGO activists and academics are also drawn largely from privileged backgrounds, and care little.

Given the feeble state machinery and the ingrained prejudice, is there any way out? Despite the gloom, Mr Sen and Mr Drèze remain optimistic about the long-term outlook. They point to evidence that India’s bureaucrats, when properly led and held accountable, can function well. Even northern states like Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have recently inaugurated flourishing public schemes, distributing food rations on time and cheaply, for example. India is only doomed, they argue, if nobody tries to make it work.