The Hindu Business Line : Of growth and deprivation

The World Bank's Development Policy Review 2006, in its report in India, stresses "the importance of ensuring that public money is well spent through institutional reform of the public sector that creates effective systems of accountability" and underlines the need for spreading the benefits of the booming Indian economy "more widely".

The World Bank's Development Policy Review 2006, its latest report on India released on Wednesday in Delhi, begins thus: "India's recent growth performance has been spectacular; the country remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But these achievements have created new challenges; the two major challenges (being) improving the delivery of core public services, and maintaining rapid growth while spreading the benefits of this growth more widely."

This is not something we don't know already, as we see India and Indians being looked upon outside the country with the kind of attention and respect hitherto unseen. Whether in the West or the East, the Indian passport is no longer looked at with indifference or a patronising nod, if not a supercilious expression, by Immigration authorities. We, as Indian visitors, are now getting a courteous "Welcome to ... " at passport control stations across the world.

Particularly in South-East Asia, for those of us who travelled there a decade ago and found an indifference to India, there is a sea change in the people's attitude. Till very recently and before foreign goods flooded our malls, many Indians who visited these countries went berserk in their shopping malls and which market doesn't need the crazy spender?

And yet if we take our 1.1 billion plus population, the bitter truth is that only a small segment of it has really benefited from the Indian economy's "spectacular growth". As the World Bank report emphasises, India badly needs to "improve the delivery of core public services such as healthcare, education, power and water supply for all its citizens."

The report also stresses "the importance of ensuring that public money is well spent through institutional reform of the public sector that creates effective systems of accountability" and underlines the need for spreading the benefits of the booming Indian economy "more widely".

The challenge, said Mr Michael Carter, the World Bank's Country Director for India, while releasing the report, is to make India's economic success "truly inclusive for a quarter of the country's citizens who still live below the poverty line, and improve the effectiveness of public spending for core public services to ordinary citizens."

Mr Lant Pritchett, Lead Socio-Economist in the Social Development unit for South Asia and also a lead author of the report, hit the nail on the head when he said: "For India to improve the delivery of core public services such as water and power supply, healthcare, education, and transportation, systems of accountability have to be strengthened. And this is possible only through institutional reforms."

Falling immunisation rates worrying

Taking up the core issue of healthcare, the report has some disturbing news that India's total immunization rates have fallen over the past five years. (While the Government was consulted at all stages of the report process, it has neither "approved, cleared, or shares any of the views expressed in this report.)

For those of us who are proud of our corporate hospitals that are showcasing India as an emerging destination for medical tourism, where foreigners can get quality healthcare at affordable prices and enjoy India's tourist spots too, it should come as a shock to know that the people who wrote this report think that "a typical doctor at a Primary Health Centre in New Delhi is less competent than his counterpart in Tanzania, and substantially less so than one in Indonesia." If this is the state of affairs in the Capital, one can well imagine the plight of the population seeking healthcare services in smaller towns, forget villages and remote tribal areas!

Shocking statistics on education

Our statistics quote figures of how the country is fighting the war against illiteracy and pulling millions out of that rut each year. But the harsh reality could be, as quoted in the report, that almost two-thirds of the children in "government primary schools cannot read a simple story, and half of them cannot solve simple numerical problems."

People from the metros who have visited village schools, particularly in the BIMARU States, can vouch that the government school in many villages in these regions is an apology for a centre of education. Especially in Bihar and UP, there are schools where some teachers turn up only on salary day. In Bihar one has also heard horror stories of how teachers in some remote villages sub-contract their jobs for a fraction of their salary to some educated unemployed person!

In some areas the roads are so bad, almost unapproachable during the monsoons, that it is difficult for the teacher to commute to the school. Other villages simply have no means of transport, such as the public bus service, to enable the teacher living a few kilometres away, to reach the school. In some villages in Bihar, I was told during a recent visit to Patna, the law and order situation is so bad and the Naxal problem so acute, that the villagers themselves "sympathise" with the female teachers who are too scared to make the journey from their homes to the schools, fearing for their safety.

In UP, one was informed that schoolteachers make use of their wards to go into the fields and pick mangoes or other fruits from the trees — of course, for the teacher's home — and do other odd jobs for them. The yearning among the poor and illiterate masses for some kind of education for their children is so great that it would not be surprising if such exploitation was done with the knowledge, and perhaps even approval, of the parents.

It is all very well for external agencies such as the World Bank to talk about ensuring accountability from public servants, but when you go down the pyramid, from the affluent, educated and enlightened of the urban areas to the poorest of the poor in the rural areas, the Dalits, the tribals and other socially battered and economically disadvantaged sections, the reality is depressing.

Decades of oppression and want have made them really relieve that the sarkar is their mai-baap and education for their children and healthcare for their families is not their legitimate right but largesse from the government. So who is going to hold the erring teacher or the absent PHC doctor accountable?

Other nuggets

While India's prosperous States have poverty rates comparable with the richer Latin American countries, the poorest States have Sub-Saharan African levels of poverty. And the gap is growing. While the services sector booms, agricultural productivity is declining, constraining the growth of the rural economy. Recent growth has generated very little formal sector employment. Of a total labour force of roughly 390 million in 2003, only 8 million were employed in organised private sector.

The Left is doing a decent job in demanding that the UPA Government make a serious attempt to reach the benefits of development to all sections of society. But, unfortunately, the bulk of their protest is confined to what the trade unions are harping on.

So we have the Left agitating against privatisation of airports, divestment in PSUs and the hike in prices of petroleum products. But how many Left protests have we seen demanding that teachers do what they are paid to do in government schools in villages, or that the PHC or government hospital staff delivers quality healthcare to the less fortunate sections of the population who come to these centres?

It is one thing to protect the jobs of workers who are organised into trade unions and can constitute vote-banks, but how about making those very workers accountable — the emphasis in the World Bank report is on the word accountable — to the people who ultimately pay their salaries and ensure that they have jobs?

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)