Mrinal Pande 
Among the hundreds of terms that have been coined by the UN agencies to promote developmental strategies for the nations in second, third or fourth world, is a much used term ‘Sustainable Development’. In official committees, joint discussions between the government and the NGOs, it is used copiously to denote a certain sturdy and unshakeably static form of progress. To facilitate Sarkari interaction with ‘grass roots workers” (another term that has come in from the cold) ‘Sustainable Development’ was quickly translated in Hindi as ‘Tikaoo Vikas’ by the Sarkari Rajbhasha babus and handed down to frontline workers in the Hindi belt as the one size must fit all panacea for easing in new developmental templates prepared in Delhi.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
My late friend Anupam Mishra, an itinerant traveller and a storehouse of local practices for water, soil and forest conservation called the term an oxymoron. Time is not static he said and so vikas or development demands a constant forward movement. As the projects move in time they will unavoidably change and mutate. How can the initial blueprint for vikas then be termed tikaoo or static and deemed fit for structuring all developmental activity in future within societies that have never been homogenous?
India in 2015, soon after the Narendra Modi government came to power accepted UN’s Sustainable Development (SDGs) agenda. It lists 17 goals and 169 associated targets for 2030. Together a realisation of these agenda items aimed to eradicate poverty, various kinds of gender injustice and alongside also safeguard the well being of our endangered planet. India since 1947 has seen various changes in governments and development policy framework. One of the first acts of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2014 was to dismantle the Planning Commission and replace it with the NITI Aayog that would shape and implement its vision of development for India.
Going through the recently released NITI Aayog report on the progress India has made in achieving the above goals so far, one was reminded of Anupam Bhai’s sharp observation. Tikaoo Vikas is pulling us often in two opposite directions. An editorial has described the NITI Aayog report as “data driven”. Fact on ground is that in the last decade there has been a noticeable lack of vital data that was generated regularly by professional agencies of the Union government. But for various reason’s India’s all important decadal Census data has not available since 2011. Nor is the data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) available after 2019-21. Data on Covid is similarly unavailable.
True, the government has launched several schemes to eradicate poverty in the poorer areas and according to the report there has been an almost 15% reduction of multi-dimensional poverty. Good. But a close look at the nature and quality of this reduction against the money available, reveals that poverty alleviation schemes like free rations, gifts of cycles or laptops to students and cash handouts can not be sustainable in the long run.
With most poor families lifted out of illiteracy and rank poverty, the poor especially the young realise that farm incomes and land holdings are not their future, since they are both fast shrinking . The rural unemployed from hitherto marginalised castes want their share in the reservation pie so they can move out to cities and get work that will destigmatise their caste and provide them with pensionable jobs that will bring them a certain dignity and stability of income. This is where Tikaoo Vikas loses its breath with anomalies in new yojanas (schemes) like Agniveer. It promised short-term commissions in the Army to millions of unemployed, for four years. But as the currently raging debate over the issue of pensions and adequate compensation in case of the sudden death of an Agniveer soldier shows, the scheme so far does not address long-term problems the soon to be unemployed serving soldiers face once they retire sans pension.
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The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2023 report says the skills that these jobless young have are old fashioned. New tech driven industry now demands a good grasp of English coupled with new analytical and digital literacy. The better jobs for future are those of data scientists, cloud developers, cyber security analysts and digital HR experts and content creators whose criteria many of our IIT and IIM grads barely meet now. The unemployed young from small town India whose language skills are poor and exposure to new tech is severely limited, find the challenges of a fast changing market almost unsurmountable.
Coming to the area of woman and child welfare, the NITI Aayog report claims an overall decline in malnutrition, and maternal and child mortality. But we soon discover that by themselves these factors do not guarantee women happier, healthier and safer lives. Recent WHO reports reveal that our women are the worst sufferers from new problems — pollution of land, water resources and the air. Levels of anaemia among women of all ages have risen while job participation has declined notably even in rural areas where most landless women worked earlier as farm hands. As for the children, yes there is a certain visible improvement in teacher-student ratio, gross enrolment rates in higher secondary classes and enrolment of handicapped students. But given a wide discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the two Covid years have impacted educational progress of a section of children from poor families very badly, since they had no access to online classes. Despite schools reopening, the number of students in pre-primary and primary classes has fallen below pre-pandemic levels, indicating a decline in enrollment.
Exams are a major measure of excellence in studies and opener of opportunities for older students into a world of constantly upgraded learning practices and skills. But here again while examination systems have been overhauled and texts rewritten, there is a notable lack in tight supervisory arrangements for entrance exams. Recent allegations in the parliament and media reports about the horrifying leakages of exam papers and subsequent cancellation of various entrance exams to prestigious institutes of higher learning such as medicine, engineering and police services, should alarm all planners who disregarded the possibility of flaws in the outsourcing of preparation and distribution of exam papers over time.
Coming to saving the planet by encouraging sustainable and carbon neutral developmental practices, Tikaoo Vikas again serves to cover up facts that despite better industrial compliance on carbon growth front, the consumption of fossil fuels has increased and the forest cover has decreased significantly because of furious building activity and forest fires. Land erosion has also speeded up because in the name of vikas, religious tourism has been furiously promoted in ecologically sensitive Himalayan zone. In an age of landslides, fast and unpredictable environmental changes like sudden cloud bursts, avalanches, melting glaciers, tsunamis and cyclones, nature is mercilessly destroying all past prints of vikas.
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As for goal number 16 in SDG, striving for peace, effective governance, and a transparent and strong judicial system, even the report can not burn away from the undeniable rise in crimes against women and children annually, despite the Lakhpati Didi-like schemes. Justice shall be done we hear often. But we only have 1.93 courts and 1.53 judges per lakh of population. Laws like the hard won right to know under RTI, has been pared to the extent that blatant flouting of law by the powerful remains hidden.
Our revised Companies Act 2013 had mandated that 500 listed companies have at least one woman director on the board. Interestingly, there’s nothing more tikaoo than India’s family dynamics as many family-owned businesses embraced the mandate in spirit by appointing female relatives — mothers, daughters, wives, and daughters-in-law — to their boards, despite them lacking the necessary managerial expertise and skills. In 2018, the SEBI revised it, not totally, but to the extent that it became mandatory for all companies to must have at least one independent woman director on its board by 2019. However, given various socio-familial disruptions in their career at middle and senior levels there are very few women. An analysis by a financial daily has also found that the salaries of women executive directors in NSE listed companies have declined while those of males in similar positions have risen by 7.4%.
Sustainable Development in the age of global meltdowns? As they say in Kanpuriya Hindi: Lo kallo baat!
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.