Neither India nor Bharat

Ditto for the premium placed on human life. Developed countries face population shortages, developing countries face population surpluses. Ipso facto, people will be treated better in developed countries. Look at the way pedestrians, disabled people, children or women are treated in the West and compare it with what we do in India. (Unless of course the gender ratio changes so much that Punjab has to import women from Southeast Asia as a matter of private policy and Haryana begins to encourage having girls as a matter of public policy.) There can be sophisticated definitions of economic development. But, in the final analysis, development is about how we treat people and the environment they live in. There can also be sophisticated definitions of governance. But that, too, is about how we treat people, especially the poor, the deprived and disadvantaged. The relatively better-off sections can ‘capture’ the government and governance functions, they have easier access to the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, they have privatised options. To paraphrase an expression John Kenneth Galbraith once used in a different context, they can afford to secede from the government. The poor have no such secession option.

Since 1991 (or the late 1970s, depending on your perspective), the track record of Indian economic development has been better. Without getting into a debate on poverty ratios and the like, have we begun to treat people better? What with right to information acts, citizens’ charters and civil society (including media) countervailing pressure, is consciousness about delivering better public services to India’s citizens developing? By public services, one means drinking water, sanitation, sewage treatment, preventive and curative primary healthcare, education, roads, electricity, crime prevention, dispute resolution, preservation of property rights and so on.

Despite privatisation options, most such services will have to be delivered by the government and they thus remain as public services. We have a Seventh Schedule to the Constitution and most of the items listed are state subjects. Hence, it is tempting to rank states on such (or similar) parameters and argue that Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are doing well, while UP and Bihar are performing badly. After all, there is also a data issue and most objective data are available at the state level. As a corollary, one can blame the state for not improving law and order or not introducing police reform.

But state boundaries are not the only way to look at what has been happening in India. India consists of 638,588 villages and 5,161 towns. Of these 5,161 towns, there are 35 cities or urban agglomerations with populations of 1 million or more. It is tempting to look at deprivation and lack of governance through the rural-urban prism and it is indeed true that the worst excesses of poverty are in rural areas. But quite often, this is lack of physical access, as opposed to the process itself.

If panchayats can be truly empowered, if physical access can be ensured and accountability of public expenditure improved, good governance shouldn’t be difficult with population sizes that are less than 10,000. That apart, what with Bharat Nirman, Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas, the Backward Regions Grant Fund, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), that rural arcadia is on the government’s agenda. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the large cities — Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune and Surat.

There are success stories of good governance — FIRs filed electronically, women’s courts, PILs invoking right to information acts, video-conferencing for under-trial prisoners, rating of public agencies, property tax changes, citizen interface in municipal reform and so on. Notwithstanding substantial chunks of slum population, these successes are from those large cities, because those are on everyone’s radar screen. India’s soft underbelly of development is not there, but in cities like Meerut, Asansol, Dhanbad, Faridabad, Allahabad, Vijayawada, Amritsar, Rajkot and in other cities in the 50,000 to 1 million range.

Do we have a report card on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission there, short of the Centre-state blame game? Why are urban planning, urban infrastructure and urban services completely missing there? Why do we have to wait for a serial killer to learn that the drain behind D-5, Sector-31, Noida, was last cleaned properly in 1994-95? The police paying scant attention to the National Commission for Women’s injunctions or refusing to file FIRs is not about the UP government alone. It is about India.

Any drive outside metros to these smaller cities will tell us where the blots to civilisation and the serial killers of development truly are. In the West, the expression ‘inner city’ is used as a euphemism for the poorer parts of city centres. India’s poorer parts are these outer cities. They are neither the metros, nor the villages. They remain in the twilight zone because they are on no one’s agenda. Yet, poverty pressures and lack of rural employment opportunities drive migration not to metros, but to these smaller cities. How about rotating the Republic Day parade around these cities? That way, they will begin to register in our consciousness.

The writer is a noted economist