Life & Beyond : 15TH AUGUST 2012: EMPTY SPEECHES, HOLLOW PROMISES

Sunday, 19 August 2012

15TH AUGUST 2012: EMPTY SPEECHES, HOLLOW PROMISES – THE STATE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS (I)

The current state of affairs in India needs some real stuff now – beyond fake promises and lip-service as has become the practice in the recent political history.

The high-flying words of Pranab Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh in their addresses to the nation on the Independence Day just extended the routine show to yet another level of irresponsibility.

The present government always tries to shield itself behind the set of data. Manmohan Singh tried to present near-utopian India story riding on statistical bravado only

and ‘hopefully’ failed.

Excesses! T

wo notable statistical excesses that we come across regularly are inflation and poverty line.

The government has its propaganda machinery ready whenever inflation figures come down. They never forget to emphatically say that the measures are working and soon the situation will be under control. But given the trend in recent years, inflations figures have remained on the higher side most of the time making the government run for the face-saving ‘magic wand’ sermon. And the prevailing truth, that prices have only gone up irrespective of where the inflation heads, nails the government.

Another controversial data set is the poverty estimation. It is different political game altogether with still no official poverty line figure. Whatever that we use thanks to the Montekonomics as the poverty line standard leaves much to be done. But the government uses this abysmally low benchmark to browbeat about its poverty alleviation and social parity achievements.

A country as complex and poor as India needs holistic development and not just manipulation of statistical figures to show if the picture is really rosy. That is the cardinal reason the tools and figures used the world over fail to portray a good picture in India.

If we go by the universal set of data on quality of 'human' growth - Human Development Index (HDI) – by the United Nations (UNDP in fact), we see the absence of this ‘holistic’ factor in the India growth story – a solid basis for the analyses based on the theme – growing disparity between India and Bharat – the gap between the Indian ‘Haves’ and ‘Have Nots’.

If we take the 1991 economic liberalization that is attributed to be the alpha point of India’s economic power status of the day and see the reference years HDI, say 1991, 2001 and 2011, one can easily deduce the HDI figures tell us how poorly has India performed on its human growth story.

Now what is HDI? HDI is a composite statistic of different parameters to rank countries on their human development progress. The dimensions currently being used are life expectancy at birth, education standard in qualitative terms like mean and expected years of schooling and standard of living as reflected by per capita GNI in PPP terms.

India’s HDI rank in 1991 was 123 that has seen subsequent fall in 2001 (ranked 127) and in 2011 (ranked 134).

Its not the India has not grown economically in these years. In fact, its composite HDI points have gone up from 0.344 in 1980 to 0.547 in 2011.

YEAR HDI VALUE

1980 0.344

1990 0.410

2000 0.461

2005 0.504

2009 0.535

2010 0.542

2011 0.547

Let’s see what has been the decadal growth in HDI composite figures.

1980-1990 - 0.066

1990-2000 - 0.051

2000-2010 - 0.081

It is interesting. The decade that preceded the economic liberalization in India registered higher HDI figure growth. It might be the result of the liberalization policies adopted by Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 that were stalled in 1987 but not completely reversed as had happened with the reform attempts of 1966. But the Indian economy had started to take a rapid fall in late 80’s.

To continue..