Ladders and snakes

But should this matter at all if nations are happily shinnying up the growth ladder? Why can’t we just continue to mind our business and let those inhabiting the sorry peripheries deal with life’s reversals as they will? Even if we were to ignore or discount the ethical and moral arguments for why greater equality between human beings is an important human good—and they are a legion thrown up over the millennia—we need only turn to the latest World Bank report for some convincing reasons why increasing disparities threaten human progress even within the paradigm of economic growth. Disparities, it warns, create inferior opportunities. They mean loss of potential output. They lead to wasted productive potential and inefficient allocation of resources. They are bad for investment, innovation and risk-taking, all of which are needed for long-term growth. They contribute to economic inefficiency, political conflict and institutional frailty. For a society to proper, the Report argues, there must be incentives created for the vast majority of the population to invest, innovate and prosper.

In both India and China, while poverty has declined in mean terms, what is striking are the deepening disparities along urban-rural lines. The ’90s slowdown in, say, child mortality levels in both India and China was the direct consequence of government cutbacks in health provisions necessitated by structural adjustment programmes, which seem to have affected the more vulnerable rural population disproportionately. In China, the dismantling of the cooperative medical system—that had ensured more equitable access to healthcare—appears to be one important reason why the child mortality level in rural China is three times as high as that in urban China. Similarly, stagnation of health spending in India—already at an unconscionably low level —has seen the annual rate of decline in child mortality register a sharp decrease from the decline in the ’80s. Rural child morality in India is 1.75 times that of urban child mortality.

Today, while the towers of Shanghai touch the skies and the gigantic metropolis finds itself somewhere in Europe in terms of human development levels, rural Guizhou has to be content with approximating Namibia. Slice up India and the frames are similar. The latest NSSO figures throws up clear evidence that consumption spending in India between the urban and rural citizen is widening, with the former spending 88 per cent more on consumer items than the latter. In the earlier round the gap was 85 per cent. Break this up further and more trends emerge: Urban India’s spending on education and customer services is 300 to 400 per cent higher than in Rural India. Even if we were to factor in the higher costs of urban life, these figures reflect the ocean of difference between the life choices and growth potential available to people inhabiting these two spheres.

There is, then, the general recognition that disparity is the consequence of a complex interplay of three broad realities: differences caused by natural conditions, those created by social and cultural practices, and those created by political, economic and administrative decisions and forces. Take Bihar, a state synonymous with mass deprivation in India, to test this thesis. While geographical realities like annual flooding, which leach wealth out of the local economy, cannot be altered substantially, crippling disparities caused by socio-cultural phenomena like caste and gender discrimination, poor, ineffectual administration, or government policies dictated by patronage driven and criminalised politics, can be made to submit themselves to change. It is true that 15 years of Laloo Prasad Yadav’s rule has run the state into the ground. But we must also recognise that the deep and abiding structural hierarchies which mark Bihar have long predated Laloo Prasad Yadav. The intergenerational immobility of castes like the Musahars will remain with the state long after Rabri Devi and her caboodle have vacated 1, Anne Marg, unless enlightened governance can systematically dismantle age-old hierarchies and create conditions of more equal access to social and economic opportunities/benefits for the most marginalised.

For all its promising economic growth, India is paying an enormous cost for its well-entrenched disparities in terms of political stability as well as social and economic well-being and progress. Plot the regions where Maoist militias hold sway and they will emerge as the very ones where the state has withered away in terms of providing for the essentials of life. Trace the regions where Japanese Encephalitis rages, and it’s the same story. A French commentator, talking about the rage of the banlieu, made a perceptive remark: “We have fallen behind the reality of the country.” He could be speaking for us. We need growth, not growth with a hole in its heart.