Whether it was a time when the state was in charge of the “commanding heights of the economy” or when the economy was increasingly handed over to the corporates after the 1990s, the most important needs of the Indian people have suffered monumental neglect. Government spending on health as a proportion of GDP remains globally among the lowest, so that out-of-pocket expenditure is the single most important cause of millions sinking into poverty.
The abysmal quality of primary education is attested to year after year by the Annual State of Education Reports (ASER). India has among the largest proportion of anaemic pregnant women and malnourished children in the world. The single most important issue angering our youth remains the unacceptably high rates of unemployment. And all of this has remained the case, quite irrespective of the dispensation in power.
Indian economic policy ever since Independence has remained obsessed with attaining higher and higher rates of GDP growth. As if by magic, it was assumed, the benefits of this growth would become available to the large mass of our people, even if only in a trickle. But as we know, GDP is blind to the good: Whether growth is inclusive, how many jobs it generates, whether these jobs are secure and meaningful and whether the incomes generated are well-distributed. GDP is also blind to the bad: Resource depletion, eco-system damage, long-term environmental risk, as also gender, caste, social and regional discrimination and injustice. GDP also cannot directly measure nutrition, health and learning outcomes, social inclusion or institutional trust. Nor is it able to capture the enormous contribution of unpaid care work or the precarity of informal work.
What we have failed to recognise is that the most important needs of our people arise from what the science of public policy calls “wicked problems”. They are called wicked for a reason: The very nature of these problems does not make them amenable to simple magic bullet solutions like government control or privatisation. Wicked problems cannot be solved without the active engagement of the primary stakeholders, who are the communities most disadvantaged and marginalised in the process of development.
Wicked problems remind us that democracy and development need to necessarily go hand-in-hand, without which development will always remain exclusionary and even destructive. We know this clearly from the fact that education, nutrition and health are superior in regions of India, such as the South, where community engagement, especially that of women, is stronger. We need to adopt the “principle of subsidiarity”, which posits that solutions must be found closest to where the problems exist.
Of course, the state needs to make massive investments to ensure that everyone receives the best healthcare and education. We must never forget that in the leading capitalist economies of the world in Europe, as also in South-east and East Asia, this is exactly what the state has done, from the very earliest stages of economic development. At the same time, mere expenditure, without engagement of local communities, has led to what I described in the 12th five year plan as the “U-without-Q” or “Universalisation without Quality” syndrome in India’s more recent development history, where there has been a much-needed focus on universal human rights but not the same emphasis on quality outcomes.
Reforms must also carefully reflect the specific character of resources like water: One, the recognition that the economy is but a small part of the larger eco-system and that proceeding with a narrow notion of economic development only leads to disastrous outcomes, as evidenced by the fate of the planet currently in this age of the Anthropocene, and exemplified most recently by the Covid-19 pandemic. Two, we cannot divide water into the silos of groundwater and surface water, as also, irrigation and domestic use, with little dialogue across these silos. This “hydro-schizophrenia” has led to drinking water sources drying up because of over-extraction for irrigation, as also to rivers drying up after the monsoon, when they fail to get base-flows from over-exploited groundwater.
Three, the common-pool resource nature of groundwater. India is by far the largest consumer of groundwater in the world. But with an estimated 50 million groundwater structures, India is hurtling towards a crisis of groundwater over-extraction and quality deterioration. It is not possible to police 50 million groundwater structures through a licence-quota-permit raj. Nor can privatisation be the answer for a resource that is already privately owned and is currently being competitively extracted by millions of individuals. Participatory groundwater management is the need of the hour, where stakeholders understand the nature of the aquifer they are exploiting and come together to manage its use through carefully designed protocols.
All these solutions have been successfully tried and tested in parts of India and across the globe. The questions facing us are simple: Will the people come together to demand real solutions to their most important needs and will governments pay attention to what the people, especially the youth, are trying to tell them?
The writer is distinguished professor, Shiv Nadar University, and a former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission
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