Digital India over Real India: India’s Misplaced Priorities
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent from a tea vendor to the leader of the world’s largest democracy makes for a phenomenal rag to riches story that left India and the rest of the world dazzled. Leveraging his background to a billion plus people fed up with corruption scandals and a languishing economy, he sold a golden dream. He promised prosperity to the nation, stability to the middle class and progress to the poor.
At a time when India is the fastest growing and the third largest market for Internet, when Indians are at the helm of tech giants like Microsoft and Google, Modi’s push for ‘Digital India’ campaign that empowers people through information technology seems natural. Mr. Modi, in the blinding spotlight of trending on Twitter and global media attention, has perhaps forgotten India’s real problems.
These problems are clearly visible in the data from the last census conducted in 2011that reveals a grim trend where basic necessities are rarer than certain gadgets that could otherwise be dubbed as small luxuries.
More than 50 percent of Indian households do not have toilets but almost the same number have mobile phones, according to the 2011 Census of India data from a survey of 246 million households. Slightly less than half of all households have drinking water access within their premises but a slightly larger number have a television.
While problems Mr. Modi inherited these problems, there has been little action from the Prime Minister’s Office to fix them.
“The policies are the same (as the last government). There is a much firmer, clearer belief that managing the economy means managing the headlines about the economy and this is not really going to work,” said Arun Shourie, former Union Minister and member of Mr. Modi’s political party, at a book launch in New Delhi last week.
Mr. Shourie who till last year had been a vociferous supporter of the Indian Prime Minister, has now called his bluff on economic development. Pointing out at the lack of new and better targeted development schemes, he also said that the Indian people had begun missing former Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. A strong anti-incumbent sentiment driven to a large extent by dissatisfaction over economic conditions had led Mr. Modi to replace Dr. Singh.
The ingenuity of Mr. Modi’s election campaign was the unprecedented scale and use of technology — the media blitzkrieg, holograms for campaigns in rural areas. And that was the reason for a landslide victory for the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Mr. Modi, winning 282 seats out of the 543 in the lower house of the Indian Parliament and reducing its main opponent the Indian National Congress to an embarrassing 44 seats.
With an absolute majority in the house, India awaited sweeping changes. While most would argue that one year is too short to judge the success or failure of the Modi government, some facts need to be highlighted.
In its very first Budget, the Modi administration allocated $36 million to the Ministry for Drinking Water and Sanitation, down to a mere 2% of the previous year’s budget and $1.8 billion dollars less than the actual utilization for the same purpose in 2013–14. At the same time, the budget allocation for smart cities was $1.1 billion and that to Telecommunications & IT was $2.6 billion.
In its second budget presented earlier this too, the allocation for water and sanitation remained the same. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told the Parliament that 5 million toilets were constructed during fiscal year 2014–15 and the government would soon meet its target of constructing 60 million toilets. The irony is obvious.
Joe Madiath, an activist pushing for sanitation in rural Odisha said India’s priorities are not the poor. “India is the biggest paradox, he said, “it is poor people who vote and bring in a government, the day after the government is formed that government only consults the bureaucracy, the captains of the industry, the rich, the powerful.”
The perfect example to showcase this inequality is the state of Maharashtra, the second most populous state in India. At $295.5bn Maharashtra’s contribution to India’s GDP is 14.42%, the highest among the country’s 29 states. It is home to Mumbai, India’s financial capital and boasts of a sizeable chunk of India’s total industry. In terms of aid from the Central government, the Budget earmarked $119 million for Maharashtra in 2014.
And yet, the Maharashtra ranks third among all states in the number homes without toilets. Nearly 47,000 houses out of every 100,000 are without a toilet in the state. It fares the worst in the country when it comes to homes without electricity. 903 per 100,000 households are without electricity.
India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh is another example. The state is the third largest contributor to India’s GDP and leads the telecom revolution with the highest number of mobile phones in the country. While almost 61,200 households per 100,000 in the state have a mobile phone, toilets are not so common. Over 64,000 homes per 100,000 do not have a toilet on their premise.
But those in the government do not acknowledge a shift in focus from basic necessities. “Sanitation and access to drinking water is surely something that should be done, but there is absolutely nothing that says that we should not have internet access until we have that (access to drinking water and sanitation),” said a highly placed government official who did not wish to be named.
Emails requesting comments from the Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development and the Secretary, Department of Water and Sanitation did not receive any response.
Allocation of funds alone cannot help reduce the gap between the demand and supply of basic necessities. The distribution of this aid is inefficient and has a lot of leakages that means that a large chunk of this money often does not reach its intended destination.
There are many real challenges before Mr. Modi that he must overcome irrespective of any hurdles faces in building India’s virtual infrastructure. After all, the mobile phone, no matter how much it changes one’s life in terms of access to knowledge and resources, is of little use if one has no power in the house to charge its battery.
