An India For Everyone: A Path To Inclusive Development

By Amarjeet Sinha

India is the world's third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. For a country that had become mired in a mindset of being an almost-ran, it is quite an achievement. Alongside, however, are some startling statistics. It has, for instance, the largest number of poor people in a single country - an estimated 300 million below the poverty line. Literacy remains at an appalling low, with 273 million illiterates in 2011, making it the country with the largest illiterate population on earth. On the health front too, India is home to 40 per cent of the world's undernourished children. One-fourth of the world's childbirth deaths and one-fifth of its infant deaths take place in India.  In An India for Everyone: A Guide to Inclusive Development, Amarjeet Sinha, an education expert who has played a major role in designing the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the National Rural Health Mission, offers a companion dream to the economic one. An India that has truly been able to provide a decent sustenance to its billion plus people. He examines key issues of under-nutrition, health care, education and social security. Crucial to providing these is reforming the public recruitment system, decentralizing authority and increasing accountability among government servants, which will help bring about better public systems in the country. Going beyond politics and economic reforms, this book addresses the issues that truly form the bedrock of where we want to be. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350295588

Amarjeet Sinha

Amarjeet Sinha is currently posted as the principal secretary in the Department of Education of the Government of Bihar. He has played a major role in designing the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the National Rural Health Mission. A prolific writer, Amarjeet has published five books and a large number of articles as part of books, in journals like the Lancet, Economic and Political Weekly, Economic Times, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc.

Book preview

AN INDIA FOR

EVERYONE

A PATH TO INCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT

AMARJEET SINHA

HarperCollins Publishers India

To my wife, Anita,

for being my best friend, always

Contents

Preface

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India’s rise to pre-eminence over the last one-and-a-half decades has been on account of a sustained high rate of economic growth at a time when the developed world has started faltering. Recent fiscal deficits and economic crisis notwithstanding, it has made available more resources for a more inclusive development. India’s social development indicators, however, continue to dampen the spirit of India Shining. This book explores the possibility of reinventing India through an approach that makes social development the key criterion for inclusive growth along with social justice. It questions the widespread persistence of poverty and the inability of a large section of India’s young population to develop to its fullest potential. This book argues that for reinventing India there is a need to revisit public systems and invest in crafting them credibly. While there is a case for partnerships with the non-governmental sector, it argues that social development ultimately requires public systems that deliver quality services.

The book emphasizes the point that in our country we are not doing enough to strengthen public systems. Many public policy leaders are despairing about crafting credible public systems. This comes from a misplaced post-1991 analogy where ‘private’ is seen as delivering and ‘public’ is seen as failing. It misses the point that economic growth and social development require very different strategies, and that for social development there is no running away from investing in a better public system. For social development is about the pursuit of equity and equality for all by ensuring opportunities for good health, education, livelihood, water, sanitation, housing, food security, and an amiable, enabling environment for even the last man in the line—the Gandhian talisman of good governance!

This book strongly questions the assumption that neo-liberal policies that promoted economic growth will automatically secure entitlements to human development. The transformation of India’s ‘red lands’, the central Indian tribal region, calls for the pursuit of social development with strengthened public systems. Neither private provision through public funds nor public–private partnerships is necessarily the answer to inclusive growth. The book also questions the viability of mere cash transfers in human development sectors without attending to the supply side or the provision of services. While erstwhile communist/Soviet bloc nations may have changed their policies, there is a need to understand how these nations pursued social development over a shorter period of time much more effectively. The role of the state in securing basic social development entitlements needs better appreciation. The democratic polity of the country has to realize the urgency of crafting credible public systems in a transparent and accountable way, if social inclusion and human development is the goal.

The book explores various ways in which public systems can be made to deliver quality services. It makes a case for investing in the professionalizing of India’s essentially regulatory public administration and turning it into a genuine instrument for securing people’s human development entitlements. Social development requires credible public systems that are answerable to local communities, as that is the only way of reaching households of the poor to secure their entitlements in a country where over a billion people live across a million hamlets, villages, towns and cities. The global evidence clearly points to the role of a credible public system to secure social development.

This book laments the lack of prioritizing of public management skills to the understanding of leadership and motivation in public systems, or to reforms in public recruitments that could make failing public systems reinvent themselves. The book is not a defence of failing and outcome-less public systems; it makes a strong case for reinventing them by building institutions and introducing skills that are able to ensure high motivation, professionalism, outcome orientation, community monitoring, and a quest for eternal excellence. Some have doubts that democratic institutions and political and bureaucratic leadership can ever allow for an outcome- and quality-oriented public system. The power of a democracy ultimately lies in its ability to make the elected leadership pursue policies and programmes that secure entitlements for the electorate. It is true that the processes take time and are often mired in corruption. But then, other than enlightened democratic politics and a deepening of democratic institutions, there is no guarantee for sustainable well-being of the people. The deepening of democracy is an opportunity for revisiting public systems in a more accountable and citizen-centric frame. Reinventing India is about making people count; it is about securing entitlements to social development to make India truly inclusive.

For a nation with a large youth population such as India, the only way to pursue inclusive development and social justice is by providing social opportunities to every Indian to develop to his or her fullest potential. This will only be possible by ensuring that every Indian has access to health, nutrition, education, skill development and livelihood in a manner that the poor regions of the country will transform from being pools of unskilled labour to regions of diverse skills and knowledge.

Reinventing India is about getting away from the hierarchies of access in all walks of life; it is about an approach to development that views the well-being of the people as the only norm of good governance. It is an approach that necessarily bridges social and gender gaps by the pursuit of policies that provide equal opportunities to all. At a time when public resources are available and decentralized democratic institutions are getting deeper, the case for reinventing India as a truly inclusive society that makes public systems deliver quality services is stronger than ever—let India’s ‘elite’ not fail its people by imposing markets where public systems are the answer. Even sustaining high rates of economic growth needs social development with equity, where most could develop their human potential to the fullest to maximize production and earn incomes that generate higher market demand for goods and services. What is good for human well-being will also be good for economic growth.

List of Abbreviations

1

Why Reinvent India

Headlines in the morning newspaper are a good enough reason to reinvent India. There has been an ambush on a police party by the Naxalites in Chhattisgarh. Starvation looms large in Malkangiri on account of the failure of the monsoon. Not enough work is available for the able-bodied in Gaya. India slips to 134th rank in HDI, says the Human Development Report, 2011. It is difficult to survive on the poverty-line entitlements, says a National Advisory Council (NAC) member. Children are in schools; they learn very little, says NGO Pratham’s ASER report.

The urban slums are a nightmare with very few entitlements for their residents. Under-nutrition persists on an unacceptably high level, worse than even in Sub-Saharan Africa. Health and education indicators are improving but not fast enough, laments the Planning Commission. Public systems are failing to deliver quality services. Poor governance and rampant corruption have been reported in a large number of government departments and programmes, points out the CAG. The story goes on. Clearly, the high rates of economic growth since the 1980s have still not translated into well-being for a large section of the Indian society. There is indeed a case for doing things differently.

Economic Growth and Social Development

India’s performance on social development and poverty reduction fronts dampens the excitement about the Indian growth story. The flagship programmes of the government have been trying to make a difference to the well-being of the marginalized with a few early gains as well. While poor children have voted with their feet in favour of Sarva Shiksha schooling and mid-day meals (it is a different matter that they do not learn enough¹ because of poor governance, absence of competent teachers and nutrition deficits), our undernutrition levels remain unacceptably high.² Under-nutrition in India is responsible for many other indicators like high mortality, morbidity and unsatisfactory learning in schools. The gross neglect of public health care over the decades³ has continued in spite of some meaningful efforts under the National Rural Health Mission.

Livelihood guarantees have not been effective in providing 100 days of work in spite of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme and the increased availability of work for the poor in rural areas.⁴ The Jawahar Lal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, while trying to improve urban infrastructure, does not seem to have made a major difference to the lives of the urban poor as yet. While on the one hand financial resources are being made available to the public system, it appears from some of the Planning Commission discourses that the faith in public systems per se is failing.⁵ The effort to reinvent the public system by understanding its constraints in delivering quality services does not appear to be the focus and thrust.

While the Right to Information has been a big step towards enforcing accountability, it still seems inadequate to develop an effective framework for community monitoring. With all the efforts we have not been able to guarantee assured clean drinking water, proper sanitation and reasonable housing for all. The Nirmal Gram Puraskars and Total Sanitation Campaigns, though an important step forward, have not been able to make a substantial difference in guaranteeing public hygiene.⁶ Surely, our social development agenda has been addressed inadequately.

Neglect of Social Development

Given that the primordial loyalties of caste and religion often triumph in the process of capturing political power, the leaders of society have managed to make democracy survive even without paying attention to basic issues of social development and well-being.⁷ While economic policies have generated growth, it has not been an inclusive or a shared growth model as poverty alleviation and access to social development entitlements have neither been adequately financed nor prioritized in the development agenda.⁸ Post-1991, India has seen the fruits of reform in steady rates of economic growth. Institutional strengthening for business and industry has helped Indian enterprises to weather the global crisis better than those in developed nations. New captains of industry and trade are emerging who see India as a growing economy with the potential to lead the world.

However, this performance of a neo-liberal world has not had major consequences for social development and shared growth as yet. Governments have survived even though under-nutrition has persisted and public health has been grossly neglected. Even the Twelfth Plan Approach Paper (2011) is unclear as to how social development through the public system will see real action. Three key factors that explain India’s unsatisfactory HDI ranking are persistent malnutrition leading to unsatisfactory health and education indicators, a low Gender Parity index, and a differential access to quality human development services leading to inequalities. The social, gender and malnutrition gaps place India where it stands. Competing claims of farmers, government employees, fuel and fertilizer subsidies, industry sops, tax holidays for the entrepreneur, and the aspirations of the emerging middle classes have acquired precedence over basic human development of the masses. Redistribution of wealth and adequate provisioning for public services that secure entitlement-based social development have been neglected.⁹ This has created a mirage of India Shining without it really being the case for a large number of households and regions.

With the state’s ability to spend more budgetary resources, flagship programmes for social development have got a little more attention than in the past. A case for higher public investment for social development has been made out over the last decade, starting with the famous Unnikrishnan judgement in