India’s development story — a farrago of distortions
The gamut of initiatives aimed at tackling the development challenges faced by India is unable to address the rising inequalities. CoVID-19 presents an opportunity to improve our policies.
Ever since gaining independence from British rule, India has evolved from being one of the poorest nations to being a global superpower. This has been largely due to a gamut of initiatives launched by the government over the years. However, 75 years of efforts have not been able to tackle the disparities in gender, wealth and access to basic amenities. CoVID-19 has exposed the governance gaps, while also providing an opportunity to retrospect and improve our development strategy.
India’s development has been a result of evolution spanning across centuries; the last 100 years have been instrumental in formulating the development policies of the country. Colonial India witnessed the emergence of several leaders in the freedom struggle, each having their own version of development for independent India. The development in the early years of independent India was strongly influenced by their ideologies. While Gandhi romanticised the frugal rural lifestyle, stating that “the soul of India lives in its villages” and promoting household industries, Nehru, one of his close aides and the nation’s first prime minister, had a contrasting opinion. He extensively promoted industrialisation and the development of urban clusters. Nehru’s ideology was evident in projects like the construction of dams and the proposal to develop a new city — Chandigarh. B.R. Ambedkar, an advocate of the rights of the subdued, lower-caste people, and one of the visionaries of the nation’s Constitution, also believed in the importance of industrialisation. One of his articles stated that “industrialization of India is the soundest remedy for the agricultural problems of India”. The policies for India’s development changed under the leadership of Lal Bahadur Shastri as the nation tried to recover from the wrath of war and famine. His contributions include the White Revolution, the Green Revolution and his famous slogan — Jai javaan, jai kisaan (Hail the soldier, hail the farmer). An account by P.N. Dhar, an economist and a close advisor of Indira Gandhi, acknowledges Shastri as an economic reformer capable of saving the nation from its miseries. Thus, governments have formulated their respective approach for the development of the nation, with the Modi government aspiring for a 15-year vision instead of the conventional five-year plan approach started by Nehru in the 1950s.
Increasing growth and disparities
Ever since its independence, India’s economy has undergone a significant transformation with the economic liberalisation of 1991 transforming it from a command economy to a free-market economy. The 21st-century has seen India emerge as a potential economic superpower, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The country’s GDP has sextupled over the past two decades, the annual growth rate exceeding 6% for most years. Its economy showed resilience even during the global economic recession of 2007–09. The economic development of India has been governed mostly by the five-year plans formulated by the Planning Commission and the proposals laid in its annual budget.
The improved economy of the nation, however, does not reflect the actual economic condition of its citizens. Immense gaps in wealth distribution exist across the nation. An Oxfam study revealed that the top 10% of the population holds 77% of the wealth, the wealthiest 1% accumulating 73% of the total national wealth generated in 2017.
The overall human development measured in the form of a human development index by UNDP reveals the deplorable condition of the Indian population. India ranks 131 out of 189 countries in the overall HDI rankings (2020). The country shows inequalities in multiple dimensions of development, including the economy, gender, healthcare, and education.
Government’s initiatives to elevate living standards
The past seven decades have witnessed a wide array of initiatives, with diverging aims and aspirations to help India make progress across different sectors of development. While the 20th-century schemes have focused on using technology and innovation to ‘build’ the nation, those launched at the dawn of the 21st century focused on ‘restructuring’ the cities and villages. The current government’s schemes aspire to leverage digital resources and information technology to drive India’s development. Examples include the PMAY, RAY, NRLM, NURM, NREGA, PMJAY, JNNURM, AMRUT, Smart Cities Mission, Digital India and Make in India initiatives.
Critique of India’s Development Story
While the above initiatives are laudable in their vision and provisions, they have been faced with criticism on grounds of ineffective implementation and monitoring. Several schemes have been criticised as having a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, resulting in their imminent failure.
The JNNURM has been criticised by Kundu (2014) as being exclusionary with the urban poor being a part of the programme only in a “cosmetic sense”, and the smaller cities limited by their capacity from taking advantage of the programme. The Smart Cities Mission, while heralding a digital revolution in administration, has failed in terms of implementation. While the selected cities have implemented some of the proposals, a transformation to truly ‘smart’ cities is far from being realised. Ramachandran (2019), in his article reviewing the implementation of JNNURM, states that only 959 out of 3700 projects under the mission had been completed over 4 years. Another article criticises the Mission as being unable to “visibly improve” living conditions and citizens’ participation in urban governance.
The more recent Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has been criticised for violating the fundamental rights of the lower-caste communities, and for its failure to end manual scavenging. A report by IndiaSpend revealed that the scheme resulted in a sudden increase in the construction of toilets across the villages and towns; it, however, failed to eliminate open defecation.
Apart from the numerous critiques on various development projects and policies of India, a recent one has been on the State’s inability to tackle the apparent jobs crisis; apparent because for long the statistics remained unavailable to the citizen. The World Bank has remarked that “India has made tremendous strides in poverty reduction in the first decade of the 21st century. However, economic growth has failed to generate enough stable and good jobs for its burgeoning working-age population.” A more pointed critique has been made by Kapoor (2017) who argues that there is an urgent need to revamp gaps in India’s employment data collection process. Further, Kher (2019) has critiqued India’s inability to address its falling Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR).
Thus, while these development strategies have had massive aspirations, there exist numerous gaps that must be addressed to fuel India’s growth.
A realistic way forward
Contemporary India faces a multitude of challenges — both local and global. The decades-old challenges of reducing poverty, improving connectivity, and providing basic amenities to the citizens are further complicated by the impacts of climate change, international pressures and global crises. Climate change and recent calamities including landslides, flash floods, and the CoVID-19 pandemic have necessitated the adoption of measures towards a sustainable and resilient future within the next decade. The pandemic further exposed the gaps in governance structures and infrastructure systems across the world. The short period of call-to-action has arguably prompted a demand for innovative solutions. This is possible only through the convergence of the different sectors of development and the formulation of strategies through cross-sectoral research.
