Getting India Back on Track; Bibek Debroy, Ashley J. Tellis, Reece Trevor random house; Price: Rs.499; 333pp
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WHY HAS POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA, A landmass endowed with abundant resources, tested entrepreneurial traditions and participatory democracy, fallen so low that a third of the population suffers basic deprivations of food, clothing, shelter, education, primary healthcare, law, justice, clean water and sanitation among other appurtenances of civilised life? Several informed answers to this baffling conundrum are provided in this excellent but largely unsung compilation of 18 essays published on the eve of General Election 2014. There’s much to learn from the authors’ valuable analyses which could be the prelude of a socio-economic reform agenda for the new BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government swept to power in New Delhi in May.
A near-fatal misjudgement made by the newly independent Indian state 67 years ago was to adopt the socialist centrally planned, command and control model of economic development. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s powerful first prime minister — and supine captains of Indian industry who endorsed the Bombay Plan of 1948 — wholly ignored the glorious private enterprise, business and trading traditions of the subcontinent which enabled it to contribute 20 percent of global GNP right until the mid-18th century. Instead, the task of national development was entrusted to an army of business-illiterate clerks in massive public sector enterprises which were established de novo, and given the go-ahead to capture the “commanding heights of economy”.
Simultaneously this army of government babus was given the authority to suppress the growth of private enterprise through a comprehensive licence-permit-quota regimen. Unsurprisingly this army of bureaucrats failed to get the country’s 300 plus capital-intensive central public sector enterprises and an equivalent number in the states going. But they succeeded brilliantly in chaining private business enterprises for over four decades. This foolish wrong-turn of post-independence India is forthrightly recounted by US-based political scientist Ashley Tellis in the introductory essay.
Inorganic neta-babu socialism which struck deep and poisonous roots in the Indian polity, not only mired the economy in the so-called Hindu rate of GDP growth (3.5 percent per annum) for over three decades, it also created a wasteful State with premature welfare pretensions. Just how wasteful is detailed by Surjit Bhalla who recites the huge annual wastage of 25 million tonnes of foodgrains procured by the public sector Food Corporation of India for canalisation into the public distribution system (PDS) established to provide subsidised staples to the poor.
According to Bhalla, 50 percent of the foodgrains purchased at government mandated prices vanishes in transit, and another 25 percent rots in the inadequate storage facilities of the corporation. Of the remaining 25 percent only 10 percent reaches the targeted beneficiaries. In one of its last initiatives before it demitted office in May, the Congress-led UPA government enacted the populist National Food Security Act which expands the PDS and is likely to require an annual budgetary subsidy of Rs.200,000 crore — more than twice the Centre’s expenditure on education and health — writes Bhalla.
The limitations of the command-and-control development model also starved Indian agriculture which even to this day employs almost two-thirds of the population, of investment, restricting its average growth to a mere 3.4 percent per annum for the past half century, writes economist Ashok Gulati in his critique of Indian agriculture. He highlights the fact that China began its reform process in 1978 with a strong focus on the farm sector, achieving annual agri-GDP growth rates of 7-14 percent per annum after that year.
Despite massive investment in industry at the cost of agriculture made under the centrally planned Soviet model, the manufacturing sector of the Indian economy is a huge disappointment. As Rajiv Kumar of the Centre for Policy Research clearly points out in his enlightening essay ‘Revisiting Manufacturing Policy’, the contribution of the public sector dominated manufacturing sector hobbled by red tape, labour deployment rigidities, deficient infrastructure, regulatory delays and lack of transparency was 15.1 percent of GDP in 2012-13, and has never exceeded 18 percent in post-independence India. Against this, the manufacturing sector of Asian countries such as Thailand (36 percent), South Korea (31 percent), and China (30 percent) routinely contribute 30 percent plus of GDP.
The heaviest impact of low rates of growth in agriculture, manufacturing and overall GDP year after year has fallen upon the huge young population — the country’s favourable demographic — which has to suffer prolonged unemployment, under-employment and low wages. Omkar Goswami makes this connection in his incisive essay ‘Generating Employment’. According to him, the Indian economy needs to create 8 million jobs annually until the year 2040. “The panacea for employment ills in India is sustained (GDP) growth of 7-7.5 percent per year over a ten-year period,” he writes.
Apart from destroying Indian agriculture, manufacturing and the country’s fiscal system by persisting with “bad subsidies”, the deadly incubus of neta-babu socialism has also ruined the country’s education and health systems. Instead of increasing public expenditure on education and health (“good subsidies”) for a strong foundation for growth and productivity, successive governments have routinely preferred to dole out bad subsidies (food, fertilizer, fuel etc). Moreover instead of leaving education to educationists, Central and state governments have assumed the burden of setting syllabuses, controlling exams and strictly regulating higher education.
Getting India Back on Track is a sharp and readable compendium packed with new ideas, deductive logic and bristling with updated statistics, and is essential reading for the small minority with real reform of the sinking Indian polity and economy on their minds. If at all it has a drawback, it is that all the authors don’t trace the ills afflicting their areas of expertise and interest to the original sin of adoption of an inorganic centrally planned socialist socio-economic model development model, which was imposed upon a nation with an ancient private enterprise tradition, six decades ago.
This mother reform is the prerequisite of getting India back on track. It’s a nettle that has to be grasped, sine qua non.
Dilip Thakore
Back to the future
Education in Colonial India; Deepak Kumar, Joseph Bara, N. Khadria & R. Gayathri manohar publishers; Price: Rs.1,250; 450pp
AT A TREND RATE OF 3.5 PERCENT of GDP, India’s public expenditure on education is woefully meagre. Yet, with the emergence of global knowledge societies it’s imperative to regard education as a prime catalyst for achieving socio-economic transformation. The essays included in this volume edited by seasoned academics, focus on important issues relating to contemporary learning and pedagogy in the historical context of the production and dissemination of knowledge since the dawn of the British raj in India.
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The 19th century witnessed several changes in the content of knowledge as well as in its dissemination, because colonial knowledge systems attempted to nullify pre-colonial institutions. The ‘knowledge is power’ philosophy underlay colonial education policies and the spread of Western learning in India. Ubiquitous ‘liberal’ ideals shaped British perception of their civilising mission, which became increasingly interventionist post-1857, when consolidating imperial power became a primary motive. Vernacular and popular education was deliberately neglected to promote an ideology of difference which could be cultivated through discriminatory practices.
This book seems to suggest that if contemporary India intends to understand the complexities relating to transmission of knowledge, it has to focus on reorienting education in terms of institutions, pedagogy, practices and curriculums. There was appreciation of this line of thinking in the first decades of the 20th century when Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghosh, Lajpat Rai, Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, generated influential literature and models for assimilative civilisational discourse, and an integrated education system that could fuse India’s syncretic culture with the broader vision of modernity. Nevertheless even then — as now — the Indian education scenario was plagued by controversies and differences of opinion, ambivalence about goals and intentions, which prompted confusing shifts in education policy.
The 14 chapters in the book are divided into three parts. Part I asks what is a knowledge society and the changes it envisages. Like the vision of a new India 2020, a physical document prepared under the chairmanship of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam at the dawn of the millennium, the discourse of development at the beginning of the 20th century was based on a blueprint prepared by an educated and mentally colonised Indian middle class. Deepak Kumar outlines how the slogans of swadeshi and swaraj were not essentially political, but symbols of change that indicated a desire for “techno-scientific knowledge” pioneered by scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray in the last two decades of the 19th century. They accepted English as the language for assimilating and diffusing scientific ideas important for economic growth and social upliftment.
Techno-scientific knowledge acquisition was linked to the language of instruction on which hinged the Anglicist/Orientalist debate. The chapter ‘Sanskrit Learning in Colonial Mithila’ showcases how western knowledge systems, a market driven by the industrial economy and the official policy of promoting vernacular languages together with English led to the decline of Sanskrit as a medium of advanced learning. State encouragement of popular education had a hidden agenda which devastated the structure of indigenous educational institutions like pathshala, chatuspathi, and madrasa.
It’s through education institutions that knowledge is transmitted in any society and so Part II of this collection focuses on institutions. From discussions of ‘Christian Missionary Manoeuvres’ to ‘Artisan and Technical Education’, from ‘The Genesis of University Education in Assam’ to ‘Vernacular Medical Education’, these chapters provide enlightening insights into colonial policies which entrenched discrimination and hierarchy.
This is amply revealed in Dilip Chavan’s comparative study of the setting up of two institutions in Western India — Sanskrit Pathshala in Pune and Elphinstone Institute in Mumbai during the second and third decades of the 19th century. The objectives of colonial promotion of literacy were suspect, and differentiation in language policy and shifts in official patronage to education institutions reveal colonial ambivalence.
Information asymmetries in the transmission of knowledge are traced back to institutions and policies that are colonial legacies. To restore social and economic equity it is imperative that the conflict between indigenous and Eurocentric knowledge systems is reconciled by re-examining societal expectations and consumer interests, individual enterprise and institutional profiles.
This book offers several perspectives for handling education problems in our culturally plural society. Its broad message is that it’s necessary to understand the past to reorganise the present and create an inclusive development model for the future.
Jayati Gupta