Poverty, Governance and Development
The State of Play in India
Sailen Routray
The seventies and eighties in India saw a grappling with substantive issues in Indian social sciences that had a bearing on the lives of the vast majority of India’s population. With the surge in identity politics in the latter part of the eighties and the adoption of the a revised version of the Washington consensus by the ruling regimes of Indian after 1992 the contours of academic discourse have shifted away from questions surrounding poverty, deprivation and governance. The three volumes under consideration, all the three of them edited, are a welcome addition to scholarship.
India houses around a fifth of the world’s poor and questions surrounding poverty have a certain sense of urgency. The debates surrounding poverty in India have primarily focused on quantifying and measuring it. This is an academically and socially important endeavour. But the focus on measuring poverty (and quantifying it) has had some unfortunate consequences.
First of all this has led to seeing those surviving below the poverty line (defined primarily in nutritional terms in India) as one homogenous group. This group is by the latest count 280 million strong and therefore needs disaggregation. Secondly the focus on measuring poverty have meant that there has been a relatively lesser foregrounding in public policy debates regarding the subjective experiences of the poor and the links between the perpetuation of endemic poverty in India and the extant social structure.
The problems surrounding theorizing poverty and development map onto the disciplinary schisms that plague Indian scholarship. Whereas quantifying and measuring poverty has been primarily the preserve of economists, sociological understanding of the issue has therefore been relatively marginalized in public policy discourse. This has been somewhat reinforced by the anti-quantitative bias of Indian sociology.
Recently there have been some attempts to address these concerns. The volume edited by Munshi and Abraham is an important addition to the literature. It came out of the first three years of research work of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre in India.. It tries to disaggregate the below poverty line population in India into two broad categories; those who suffer from chronic poverty and those who do not. . The book self-consciously tries to locate itself in the public policy debates in India to figure out the ‘drivers’, ‘maintainers’, and ‘interrupters” of poverty so that interventions in the sector can be more nuanced and effective.
The first chapter of the book by the editors provides a summative introduction to the rest of the chapters and a broad overview of the issues involved. According to the editors India has the dubious distinction of having more than a third of the world’s chronically poor and number anywhere between 78 to 130 million. Residence in a very poor district, being a tribal, working predominantly as a causal labour, illiteracy and being a member of a large household, all seem to increase the probability of incidence of chronic poverty for a person.
Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are the states where the chronically poor are concentrated. Expenditure on health care costs, and the high cost of credit seem to be the main ‘drivers’ and ‘maintainers’ of chronic poverty where as migration and education seem to be major ‘interrupters.”
Sashanka Bhide and Aasha Kapur Mehta in their chapter reveal that although caste and tribal status are important correlates (tribal status especially so) of chronic poverty, they don’t determine either its persistence or the exit from it; access to land and other assets, literacy, infrastructure and the size of the village seem to be very important determinants.
Sheila Bhalla, Anup K. Karan and T. Shobha from their research on casual labourers in India conclude that rural infrastructural development accounts for the bulk of the regional differences regarding the prevalence of poverty amongst causal labourers in the rural areas. The major policy implication of this finding in an era of rising inter-state differences in poverty levels seems to be the need for a refocusing of anti-poverty strategies on the improvement of rural infrastructure in the states housing the bulk of the chronically poor.
R. Radhakrishna et al. trace the linkages between poverty and malnutrition and point out the fact that the incidence of chronic poverty (at around 14 %) is greater than that of the incidence of extreme poverty (10 %); but both seem to be overrepresented in the northern and eastern states. On the malnutrition front there have been significant gains over the last thirty years or so, but there are laggards like Madhya Pradesh and Orissa where the incidence is the same as in the early 1970s.
Although for malnutrition poverty coefficients are both positive and significant, the incidence of malnutrition is far greater than the incidence of income poverty. Thus the elimination of income poverty alone might not help in eliminating malnutrition.
In this context there is a need to further disaggregate the poor and to look at the status of specific groups like the elderly, tribals and women. S. Irudaya Rajan points out in his chapter that the work participation rates of the elderly in the rural areas is quite high, and emphasizes the fact that we need to extend existing schemes like the National Old Age Pension Scheme and the Annapurna Scheme and for starting new social security schemes for the elderly.
By narrating the example of an apparently successful resettlement of a tribal community after the creation of the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Sheopur district in the Madhya Pradesh State in India Asmita Kabra concludes that more often than not in state-tribal encounters regarding conservation and development it’s the tribals who end up being completely marginalized.
Ratna M. Sudarshan and Rina Bhattacharya posit on the basis of their research in the slums of New Delhi that one needs to unpack the household as a category to be able to critically look at the way women experience poverty. They found clear evidence of discrimination against women in the intra-household distribution of necessities like food that results in greater malnutrition and increased vulnerability to diseases amongst women and girls.
They suggest that elimination of income poverty by itself would not eliminate poverty and deprivation amongst women. They advocate interventions in terms of provision of facilities for health and education, and support for gender-based organizing at the community level for addressing issues specific to women’s experience of poverty. Thus, all the three chapters on the elderly, tribals and women point at the need to disaggregate ‘the poor’ as a category.
At the structural level N.C.B Nath after a survey of the ‘politics of poverty’ concludes that poverty as an issue is not a substantive priority for Indian political parties. The Dravidian parties in South India seem to have tackled issues related to poverty in a relatively successful manner. The recent success of parties that represent the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (primarily the BSP and the JMM) is yet to translate into substantive gains for the constituencies that they claim to represent.
P.V. Thomas and S. Mahendra Dev in their respective chapters argue that although antipoverty programmes have not been an unqualified success, they have made a dent in reducing the incidence of poverty. They also argue for a greater convergence of programmes being run by the various government departments. Mahendra Dev points at the need for strengthening public works wage employment programmes and to increase the rate of employment inducing economic growth.
In this context issues of governance assume greater salience as the need of the hour is to craft democratic institutions and public policies that are responsive to people’s needs, and help us in reducing chronic poverty rapidly. After the appropriation of the term governance by multilateral lending agencies like the World Bank, there has been a proliferation of literature on the topic.
The edited volume under consideration, Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization is an important addition to the literature as it gives us a comparative perspective between India and the European Union as well as between the government and the corporate sector.
De Swan foregrounds what she calls policy making by non-decision in the context of the European Union where a lot of important decisions about socio-cultural and linguistic affairs seem to be driven’ by the very weight and inertia of the administrative apparatus. The chapters by Angela Liberatore and Luke Martell deal with governance issues in Europe, and the national differences in thinking about the third way and social democracy respectively and make the case for looking at national policy making processes as socio-historically contingent processes.
Compared to the relatively robust picture of democratic governance pained of the European experience by the contributors of the volume the socio-political context of governance issues in India is diagnosed as grim by both Anup Sinha and Prem Shankar Jha in their respective chapters. Sinha highlights the institutional and market failures in India, and finds the shrinking space for democratic mass politics in India due to the policies of liberalization and globalization as deeply problematic. In contrast Prem Shankar Jha lays the blame at the door of the Indian constitution and an apparently fractured polity and advocates sweeping constitutional changes to ensure political stability in the country.
In his chapter that surveys the scholarship regarding administrative reforms in India and Europe Biju Paul Abraham concludes that both places have very little to learn from the actual practices of reforms followed due to the wide diversity of institutional and socio-political contexts. This conclusion seems fair after the perusal of the chapters by Hellmut Wollmann, Manfred Roeber.
But there seems to be some convergence of experience inside Europe at least; despite the diversity of experiences amongst the European countries there seems to have some fundamental changes regarding the institutions of government over the last twenty years or so. The Indian case, as pointed out in the chapters by Kuldeep Mathur, and V.K. Agnihotri and R.K. Dhar, seems to be marked by the persistence of the status quo.
According to Mathur, attempts at reforming the civil service in India have failed at improving either accountability or efficiency. For Agnihotri and Dhar, fundamental changes in the basic architecture of the state in India in terms of fundamental devolutions of power to the local bodies are an important part of deepening the democratic process by ensuring more effective governance.
With the deepening of the processes of globalization and liberalization all over the earth issues of corporate governance assume an urgency as they had never before. Darryl Reed in his chapter shows that to make democracy substantive it is necessary to evolve some form of supranational regulation of corporations through democratic control. Extending the arguments regarding democratic control Peter Abell and Diane Reyniers argue that given a level playing field, worker-controlled firms can produce goods effectively and equitably in at least some sectors where the input of labour is critical to the processes of production.
In contrast to the arguments being made by these authors Anju Seth and Asish K. Bhattacharya argue that the recent trends in the rules pertaining to the regulation of the financial and banking sectors, and the reforms in the corporate laws in India are a positive development and will go at least some way in ensuring better standards of corporate governance in the country.
But one of the gaps in the issues covered by the papers in the volume are the governance related issues in powerful multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. There is perhaps also a need to located debates of governance in within the broader framework of state-society relations and theories of state. One of the greatest insights to come out of the papers is the need to have multilateral democratic institutions to regulate the governance of large corporations so that democracy is not eroded by the imperatives of capital.
The volume Reflections on the Right to Development argues that the right to development provides a framework within which such an initiative can be located. After the adoption (in 1986) of the UN declaration on the right to development (RTD) and the recognition (in 1993) by the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of the RTD as a human right, this particular right provides a framework and tool through which the old dichotomy between the civil and socio-political rights can be productively erased and the importance of the national and international civil societies can be productively foregrounded.
As Stephen P. Marks points out in his chapter the RTD approach draws heavily from Sen’s capability approach and shows how Sen’s conceptualization of freedom provides a way in which human rights and human development can be integrated in the formulation of the RTD. Arjun Sengupta in his chapter argues for building a ‘development compact’ between the developing and developed countries to ensure the implementation of the RTD and points at the three basic rights to food, health and education on which such a compact can be focused.
Siddiqur Rahman Osmani in his chapter argues for growth as a necessary precondition for the realization of the RTD., although he falls short of actually arguing for ‘a right to growth’. In contrast Godfrey Gunatilleke’s chapter analyzing the developmental experience of Sri Lanka favours a right to growth. Into this debate the chapter by K.P Kannan and Vijaymohanan Pillai brings the Kerala experience of development. They argue the need for balancing economic growth and social development and project participation of the people in the developmental process as a basic human right.
Jayati Ghosh, in her chapter, in a way raised the question of ‘participation’ and development at the level of international economic regimes. She argues the contemporary processes of globalization and liberalization increasingly constricts the choices of developmental tools available with the nation-states, and leads to increasing disparities between the poorest and the richest countries.
Her proposed solution to the conundrum is to a multilateral democratic framework that governs investments and protects the rights of all the stakeholders in the economic decision-making and not merely that of the investors or shareholders. But this volume does not grapple with the increasingly vocal post-development scholars and scholarship that interrogates the universalistic claims of the human rights discourse.
As is evident from this review, substantive questions surrounding poverty, development and governance are very much alive in the present context and need urgent attention. The volumes discussed provide important points of departure for further scholarship; but all the three volumes suffer from a slight economistic bias.
As pointed out earlier, there is a need for integrating the sociological perspective to such debates. Indian sociology by shying away from macro-sociological work has been complicit in the domination of public policy by the discipline of economics. The issues surrounding the interface of poverty, development and governance are too multi-dimensional to be left to economics alone and can be satisfactorily handled by an integration of sociological and economic analysis and scholarship.
Details about the Books:
Munshi, Surendra and Biju Paul Abraham (Editors). 2004. Good Governance, Democratic Societies and Globalization. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications.
Sengupta, Arjun, Archana Negi and Moushumi Basu (Editors). 2005. Reflections on the Right to Development. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications.
Mehta, Aasha Kapur and Andrew Shepherd (Editors). 2006. Chronic Poverty and Development Policy in India. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications.
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