To whom will we apologise when the time comes? We watched our country gain independence with fervour, yet now we sit indifferent as if our colonisers had never left. We are in an absurd situation, unable to know when we will be able to stop at traffic lights and not wind up our windows to avoid looking into the eyes of our betrayed fellow beings?
As the new era begins, and a new world order forms, we cannot escape the feeling that something terrible is being hidden from us. After over 70 years of independence, with the top 1% holding 40.1% of the wealth, India exhibits one of the highest levels of wealth inequality globally, as reported by the World Inequality Lab. Is economist Thomas Piketty wrong in his comment on the impossibility of getting an accurate picture of poverty due to the lack of data about the poor in India? How are we documenting economic progress? Is it enough to measure the wealth of our middle class and walk tall?
For decades, we have not bothered to document the human condition, nor do we care much for two-thirds of our people. The World Bank data from 2021 shows that 82% of our population lived on $5.50 a day and some 220 million Indians lived on less than Rs 32 per day. Yet, we are racing up the fast lane of economic progress, overtaking France and the UK, to become the fifth largest economy in the world, while forgetting that we are 142nd out of 197 countries in the measure of our per capita income. In a 2005 study on 36 villages in Andhra Pradesh, researchers found that only 14% of households escaped poverty over 25 years, while another 12% fell into poverty. The study concluded that the macroeconomic world of industrial growth and education only had a slightly indirect effect on their poverty.
Human and economic progress
Human progress and economic progress are entirely different. Human progress concerns the well-being and welfare of individuals, addressing their living conditions and alleviating poverty, whereas economic progress focuses on the accumulation of wealth. Our planners are unable to address human needs because the care they need has no place in economic theories focused on wealth creation. Economic theories tell us that it is land and capital that are needed for making money and they need to be worked upon, not by communities but its isolated units of human capital.
Is it not time to finally give up our pretences about India’s improved economic development, or will it take some existential global storm to wake us? We have bent the Constitution to enrich a few and ignored the plight of millions of children in slums and villages. We have chosen economic governors who avoid taking responsibilities for their constitutional promises to our people. They know that providing welfare and care for the poor are not enforceable by any court. Public welfare is an optional directive principle in our Constitution. The poor have nowhere to go. There is nobody responsible for their welfare because they need care at household levels.
Also read: India’s Inequality at Historic High; Wealth Concentration Shot Up Sharpest Between 2014-5 and 2022-3
Our questions are not mere commentaries. Each one critically epitomises the deceptions of the economic growth models foisted on us by successive governments. It’s a wonder how, in this day and age, the poor across the country have managed to escape being counted. Scholars assure us the poor exist and many of them can be seen living among the unorganised, informal, unregistered sector, accounting for more than 90% of the workforce in the country. How long should we ignore those who have different stories to tell about progress, or should we just rely on more draconian laws to shut them up?
How do we square this callousness with the real India? Human suffering and poverty are not matters of macro governance. Fieldwork, house-to-house inquiries and personal interviews are needed to expose the real tragedies of human suffering. Sometimes we get a glimpse of this reality from those who work in the field. For instance, a study from Maharashtra said, “An alarming situation has been observed in many areas where healthcare costs lead to selling land, house, ornaments, cattle, and other precious things. Over 40% of hospitalised Indians borrow heavily or sell assets to cover hospital expenses, and more than 25% fall below the poverty line because of hospital expenses.”
Economic performance by GDP per capita does not distinguish between regions where health, welfare, and suffering differ. A region where many people suffer and die from disease is measured at par with a region where people enjoy long healthy lives. People are reduced to mere data entries.
Imaginary goals
If governments pursue imaginary goals of becoming world powers and leaders among global economies, they eventually do so at the cost of increasing the suffering of their populations. Instead of dreaming in the stratosphere, they need to elevate public health economics from a secondary role to a pivotal one in governance and budgetary allocations.
We can still make changes and save the majority of our people from suffering. There is still time to divert wealth extraction away from the swelling flow of macro private wealth which comfortably validates colonial economic theories. There is still time to give health economics the prime role in preparing for the future and to direct investments, through local centres, for economic prosperity and health protection, occupational safety and communicable disease control. Irrelevant gross data on industrialisation and GDP can measure our ambitions not our condition. Instead, we can prosper by establishing new healthcare and economic exchange systems in every panchayat and block, improving district-level service delivery and quality. This can be achieved by using evidence-based practices linked to individual families, with follow-ups to ensure effectiveness in clinical diagnosis, treatment, health, and facilitating micro-economic exchanges.
Also read: Poor Country With Affluent Elite, India Is Going Nowhere
The root cause of our asymmetric progress lies in the disconnect between India’s multiple, traditional, micro-economies and the modern, globally-linked, macro economy. If we don’t integrate micro and macro economies, we must face the prospect of an economic crisis, something that Europe is currently experiencing. Our economy’s claimed improvements have little to do with transforming the micro-level exchanges between communities and their welfare.
Multiple micro-economies operate daily and during festivals among individual households, villages, and panchayats, where the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services occurs in largely self-sufficient rural economies. For instance, it has been estimated that the value of mutton exchanged among 20 crore Muslims during Bakrid could be worth Rs 4 lakh crore. These micro-economies comprising farmers, small traders and the poor need to be evaluated collectively as a component of the national macro economy. Currently, they are ignored and lie outside the digital measurement of middle-class driven production, savings and consumption information.
According to Piketty, the role of our multiple micro-economies is largely guesswork for our macroeconomic governors. Only by diving down into this micro-economic world, something tireless researchers do, can we see the multiple worlds of these smaller, community-based systems that prosper or get devastated. Household micro-level surveys reveal a more accurate ground-level view of local communities that need to connect with each other to establish a new national macroeconomic base and ensure that all of them are measured and aggregated on an equal footing.
This discourse about sidestepping welfare responsibilities for human development focuses only on health and wealth. What about the problems of increasing rural unemployment or the difficulties of obtaining justice in local civil and revenue disputes? More than 87% of the 5.1 crore pending cases are waiting in district courts, which could take over 200 years to resolve. Is it any wonder that we expect major disruptions in our societal fabric? But can anybody hear us?
Romi Khosla is an architect and served as a Development Consultant to UNDP in the Balkans.
Tikender Singh Panwar is the former deputy mayor of Shimla.
