India Whining

 

 

“We feel so dirty and unclean in the summer. We do not wash our clothes for weeks. People say these Dalits are dirty and they smell. But how can we be clean without water?’ Spoken by a low-caste Indian woman, these words capture the relationship between human dignity and water. Dignity is hard to measure— but it is at the heart of human development and our sense of well-being” - An excerpt on India from the UNDP Human Development Report 2006.

In the last week of April 2007, the Swiss investment bank, Credit Suisse, announced that India has joined the exclusive league of 12 countries with a trillion dollar-plus economy. It was another addition to glorious economic predictions about India – like the earlier Goldman Sachs’ report, Dreaming with BRICs: Path to 2050, which projected that India will be the world’s second largest economy, next only to China, by 2050. Finance Minister P.

Chidambaram, while speaking at the Annual Economic Editors Conference, claimed that India is the fastest-growing among BRIC economies.

All this may be true, but what is often not narrated by Indian policy makers or global experts is the other side of the story. Consider this: as per UNDP’s Human Development Index in 2006, India was ranked 126, below sub-Saharan countries like Namibia, Gabon and Morocco. Even an impoverished Mongolia (116) and Sri Lanka (99) had better rankings. The next year, UNDP demoted India to 128 in the same HDI ranking. Chidambaram’s growth claims notwithstanding, India’s was ranked the lowest among BRIC nations, much lower than Russia (65), Brazil (70), and China (81).

Look at some other facts mentioned in the UNDP report. India is the fourth largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, India’s sanitation coverage is lower than Bangladesh, 4,50,000 people are killed by diarrhoea annually in this country and 14 major rivers are badly polluted. Well, all these indicators don’t gel with a member of the trillion dollar club. Such dismal human development indicators on so many parameters put a question mark on the sustainability of India’s 8-9% growth rate.

No nation can deny that these fundamental factors are crucial for consistent growth rates. Ironically, the problem seems to lie with the lack of reforms and political will. This is true of agriculture, which has invariably proved to be a dampener in the past. “In water-stressed parts of India, irrigation pumps extract water from aquifers 24 hours a day for wealthy farmers, while neighbouring smallholders depend on the vagaries of rain. Here, too, the underlying cause of scarcity in the large majority of cases is institutional and political, not a physical deficiency of supplies,” stated the UNDP report. It added that “In India, 13% of the population has access to irrigation. Within this group, the richest one-third of farmers receives 73% of the subsidy.”

In an era when India strives to become a knowledge economy, the lack of education can become a huge obstacle. A survey by Pratham, an NGO, which was also quoted in the UNDP HDR, found that “37% of children (7–10 years) in government schools are not able to read simple words. Even in private schools, 16% could only recognise alphabets, or not read at all. Similarly, among children aged 11–14 years, 15% in government schools and 5% in private schools could only recognise numbers and were not able to perform any arithmetic operations.” According to the Report, one of the factors responsible for this state is the inability to initiate policies. “Delhi’s neglect of basic public health… is a serious concern of all residents.” A 2005 public perception survey concluded that only 19% of the people feel safe… while a mere 6%... felt their workplace to be secure.” What’s demeaning is a disproportionate sex ratio, where “amniocentesis was openly propagated through advertisements that proclaimed, ‘Pay Rs 500 now or Rs 5 lakhs later as dowry...”

In a similar vein, India’s contribution to global warming, especially in the context of coal-based emissions, has been attributed to the lack of reforms in the power sector. The Report stated that “research carried out by the Planning Commission estimates that India could generate the same amount of power with one-third less fuel.” This is not happening only because “the power sector in India is dominated by large monopolies that control both power supply and distribution. Most state power utilities are in a financially weak condition, with average annual losses running at 40%. Uncollected bills, the provision of heavily-subsidised electricity to agriculture, and wider inefficiencies all contribute to these losses.”

While releasing the report at the UNDP office last month, Planning Commission’s Montek Singh Ahluwalia disputed it. While maintaining that the Report ignored the fact that per capital emissions from countries like India were still very low, he added, “Any reduction strategy based solely on total global emissions, and not differentiating on the basis of per capital emissions by countries, is fundamentally flawed and goes against the tenets of equality.” This, according to him, “was not acceptable.”

In addition, Indian policy makers blame the lack of infrastructure or budget allocations to for lack of equity in social sectors. But contradicts Shailendra Sharma of Pratham “The problem is not with infrastructure but with the delivery process. Most rural schools don’t have teachers. Even when they are there, they are not present in the schools. The quality of education is very low.” Adds Siddhartha Dutta of Indicus Analytics: “There is a need for social balance for sustainable economic growth. There is no dearth of infrastructure, but the service providers are missing.”

Even Goldman Sachs had words of caution in its BRIC report. In fact, the Report laid down four conditions for growth which included macro stability, openness, institutions, and education. Concludes Anandajit Goswami, Research Fellow, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI): “Unless India takes the initiative of going ahead with structural reforms in key sectors like power and ignored sectors like agriculture, India’s economic dream has the potential to turn into a mirage in the long run.” For once, India needs to forget ‘Shining India’ and focus on the ‘Whining and Crying India.’ The Writing's on the Wall

Report by the TERI estimates that an annualised increase in investment of around US$5 billion is needed for the period 2012–2017 to support a rapid transition to low-carbon energy generation, over and above current investment plans. India is now the world’s fourth largest emitter of CO2 and all-India average for peak power shortages is 12%

Based on national averages, the projection understates the current problem in parts of India groundwater tables are falling by more than 1 meter a year, jeopardising future agricultural production

India may outperform Bangladesh as a high growth globalisation success story, but the tables are turned when the benchmark for success shifts to sanitation: despite an average income some 60% higher, India has a lower rate of sanitation coverage

The country may be heading for water stress, but 224 million people already live in river basins with renewable water resources below the 1,000 cubic metres per person water- scarcity threshold. The reason: more than two-thirds of the country’s renewable water is in areas that serve a third of the population

China produces twice as much rice as India with the same volume of water

The groundwater overdraft rate is more than 25% in China and 56% in parts of India. Correcting the overdraft would require cutting groundwater use from 817 billion cubic metres to 753 billion cubic metres, sharply curtailing the water for irrigation in many areas

Extending check dams across all of India’s rainfed farming areas would raise the value of the monsoon crop from $36 billion a year to $180 billion, for an initial investment of $7 billion

In waterstressed parts of India, irrigation pumps extract water from aquifers 24 hours a day for wealthy farmers, while neighbouring smallholders depend on the vagaries of rain. Here, too, the underlying cause of scarcity in the large majority of cases is institutional and political, not a physical deficiency of supplies

India agriculture accounts for about a third of the sales of electricity boards but only 3% of revenue. According to the World Bank the electricity subsidies accounted for about a third of India’s fiscal deficit in 2001