Divide and survey

Lower-income Indians are less satisfied with reforms

Of the world’s large economies, only in China and Germany are more than two-thirds of people satisfied with the way their national economies are going, according to the 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey. In India, it’s just under half; in the United States, it’s under a third of people. The Pew survey has often been criticised for shallow sampling, but this is nevertheless a useful indicator of the dissatisfaction with government policy sweeping across the world. Even in prosperous Germany, for example, 37 per cent of people think that their government is to blame for economic problems; in Turkey, doing well by most standards, two-thirds of people do — but India is the highest among large economies when it comes to blaming the government, with 77 per cent of respondents doing so. A legitimate criticism of interpretations based on Pew surveys is that they reflect cultural differences between countries more than the political or economic state of play there. China, India and the United States, some sociologists would argue, have a completely different approach to how much they expect from the government, and the degree to which they will then hold it responsible. Most often, therefore, intertemporal and within-country comparisons based on successive attitude surveys are more useful than international comparisons.

 

India’s numbers, therefore, are particularly indicative when broken up by income. When analysed thus, they should worry most proponents of economic reforms and the freeing up of markets. Across questions, it appears that those with higher incomes — above Rs 10,000 per month — are more pro-reforms than others. For example, in a question about social and economic mobility — “is it easy for a young person to get a better job or become wealthier than their parents” — the overall proportion of those answering in the affirmative in India is 30 per cent, according to the survey. However, when decomposed, a worrying attitude to social mobility comes in: those with low incomes, earning less than Rs 5,000 a month, are 15 per cent less likely to answer “yes” to that question than those with high incomes. Clearly, reforms have not caused less advantaged Indians to feel that opportunities have opened up sufficiently for them.

That perception, that opportunities are still closed off, might explain also why only half of Indians with incomes under Rs 5,000 a month feel they are better off in a freer economy, as compared to three-fourths of those with incomes above Rs 10,000 a month. Indeed, the differences between the lowest and highest income brackets in the survey extends even to questions such as whether success depends on working hard, and whether the economy will improve over the next 12 months at all. The continuing lack of optimism about the future among India’s poorer sections should be a matter of concern not just for the current government but for all political parties. A continuing inability to either complete the reforms project to make it more broad-based, or to articulate a political platform that explains the benefits of reform, will naturally lead to divided perceptions between income classes. It is increasingly clear that this inability is putting the entire reformist project in jeopardy. The Pew survey confirms that lower-income Indians will not stay patient forever.