Experiment with change

(BL Jun 8 2009)

As I had mentioned in these columns earlier, according to the World Bank Institute, removal of disparity is the third of the three main features of good governance. Throughout history, disparities have been predominant in all nations. Only in recent years have they been kept in check, mainly in developed countries. India is far from egalitarian; with its caste system, it has sanctified disparity from the moment of birth and is now paying a heavy price to curtail it.



The Indian government has an accredited policy of combining access, equity and quality. If truth be told, there is more disparity today between the rich and the poor, urbanites and villagers, between rich urbanites and the poor ones, between Hindus and Muslims than at the time of Independence. It might appear that male-female disparity is less and so is the disparity between the upper castes and the lower ones. At the same time, it appears that the disparity between richer backward castes and the poorer ones is more now than ever before; so it is between richer and poorer regions.


Several of these disparities are inherited; no amount of effort can remove them completely. However, zero disparity cannot be state objective because that will eliminate all attempts at growth. Thus, we do need some disparity — enough to push people to strive harder but not so much that it will stop them from trying.


Reservation vs quality


Reservation is the solution that politicians of all kinds have proposed to remove this disparity. In truth, reservation benefits very few of the poor, possibly no more than 5-10 per cent but leaves out the remaining. Its popularity may be due to the fact that the primary beneficiaries are often the richer elements, particularly politicians and their immediate supporters.


To be accurate, social justice should help the able among the poor to access sources of wealth. It should do so without hurting quality. Unfortunately, the three factors — access, equity and quality — are often in conflict; it is not easy to promote any one of them without hurting the other two. In particular, reservation does improve access, may improve equity but generally hurts quality. In practice, quality is the factor that is generally neglected in the pursuit of social justice.


People forget that reservation is being applied not merely in access to education, to jobs, to promotions but also in the distribution of national resources. Much more money is being spent in the richer parts of cities than in its poorer parts; disparity is worse when cities and villages are compared.


These kinds of disparity are an important ingredient of public policy. Public and private finances are reserved mainly for developing the richer parts of cities to the neglect of the poorer parts; they are reserved for cities than for villages. Does that minimise disparity the way it should be? Does it contribute to access, to equity and to quality of life?


After decades of reservation, roads and transportation are so poor that an overwhelming majority of our population has next to no access to schools, hospitals, markets, civic services and recreation of acceptable quality. Outside our large towns, there are few schools or hospitals of even minimum quality. There is practically no town or village in the country that can be called truly modern with civic services of acceptable quality. Hence, reservation may help backward castes but it appears to hurt civic quality, particularly for the poorer sections of the population.


In particular, in our country, reservation has been used to uphold the less competent and suppress the more competent. It makes the country less competitive. It is a moot question how far reservation will help our country to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy.


The TINA excuse


The excuse is often given that There Is No Alternative to present policy. Is that TINA really true? Why should the capital city of Delhi get investment of Rs 10,000-15,000 per capita, and get it at 0.5 per cent interest spread over 30 years merely to add to its transport sector whereas a village cannot get even a hundredth of that investment and at interest rates that are 20-40 times higher? Thus, we are not talking of small disparities but very large ones that have become inherent to public policy.


Even within a city, slum dwellers get water with great difficulty and that too in small quantities which they have to collect by themselves whereas the rich get far larger quantities in their taps. Richer parts of the city are kept clean; slums are generally dirty.


Rich families live in large luxurious houses and flats; the poor cannot often get a small fraction of that space, and even that without basic amenities, even walls at times. Thus, it is public policy that is increasing and not decreasing intra-urban disparity. Is that fair?


Improve, not enlarge


Hence, an issue that deserves to be discussed (and is not discussed) is whether there are tools other than reservation to fight disparity, or whether we need some other tools which, when added to reservation, will add value to it, or whether reservation is being applied at the wrong places and not where it will have the greatest benefit.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is a prime factor in India’s governance. It offers 100 days of employment at Rs 100 per day. It is a popular scheme but will that empower the poor to rise above the poverty line? The same criticism can be made about other schemes for reducing disparity, such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. How many politicians will send their children to study in schools controlled by the Abhiyan?


The Indian government is launching, with much enthusiasm, expansion of old schemes. That is understandable because those schemes have given it large political success. However, it should ponder whether it will get similar success next time by simply repeating in a larger measure the same schemes.

Poverty is minimised not simply by allocating more funds but by using available funds more wisely. For instance, how can bright children in villages, even if they are not poor, have any hope of joining the IITs with the present system of education? Will spending a little more money on existing schools improve their fate? Will compelling young doctors to serve in villages improve the healthcare of rural folk? Will merely having a poor quality 10-ft wide road make a village better off? Will slums vanish even as city populations increase 5-7 per cent a year?

I suggest that if the present government were to repeat its memorable success, it should improve — not merely enlarge — its policies. For reasons of stability, the government is generally reluctant to change. At the same time, it can experiment boldly.

Wherever it has done so, the country has benefited enormously — for instance, in space research, in nuclear energy and even in defence. If India is poor and riven with disparities, that is because it has not tried similar large-scale experiments in the fields of education, healthcare, transport, civic development and the like. It remains to be seen whether the government will experiment with new kinds of schools, hospitals, roads, transportation, civic/rural development as well as new forms of management.