On Friday, the Government of India released a testament on the enormity of public policy failure. The Socio Economic and Caste Census—and the granular caste factoids and urban story are yet to be told—presents a picture of poverty and deprivation that is shocking, in detail and in magnitude. The Census report is a chargesheet of riveting political failure.
The consequence of appalling sloth is visible across policy domains. Seven of 10 households live in rural India but nearly 56 per cent own no land. Of those who do own land, only one in four has access to irrigation, and 17 years after the launch of Kisan Credit Cards, only 3.6 per cent households have one.
The failure of India’s education policy is manifest in Bharat. Over 35.73 per cent of those living in rural India are illiterate—the figure is 315,786,931. Of those literate, 13.9 per cent have below primary level literacy, 31 per cent dropped out of school and 9.5 completed secondary school. Only 3.45 per cent are graduates.
How do they earn a living? Only one in three rural Indians is involved in cultivation. A stunning 54 per cent are manual and casual labourers or eke out a living doing domestic chores. Only one in 10 has a salaried job (government/PSU/private sector). In a political economy where millions are defined as self-employed entrepreneurs, only 2.73 per cent (or four million households) have a registered enterprise.
How do they live? Three of 10 live in one-room houses, 22 million households (about 100 million persons or four times the population of Australia) live in homes made of grass or thatch and/or bamboo or with plastic and/or polythene. Barely two in 10 own two-wheelers, two in 100 own four-wheelers. Yes, over 68 per cent own mobile phones.
How well are they doing? Barely 8.2 million of 179 million households need pay income/professional tax. In four of five households, the monthly income of the highest earning member is less than Rs 5,000. Shorn of technical definitions, over 133 million of 179 million households live on Rs 5,000 per month. Assuming five persons per household, that would be over 600 million persons—nearly twice the population of the US—living on Rs 5,000 per month.
The details are worse than the overall picture. Over 70 per cent in rural Bihar work as manual and casual labour. In Andhra Pradesh, only 1.93 per cent of the rural populace has a salaried job. In Chhattisgarh, only 1.81 per cent of households pay income or profession tax. Nearly every second person in rural Rajasthan (47.5 per cent) is illiterate. West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh account for over 180 million of the 300-million-plus illiterates in rural India.
The report of the Socio Economic and Caste Census is a memoir of six decades of neglect and denial. The failures must be seen as an opportunity to fix perennial problems. The challenges offer India a shot at delivering on aspirations. Rural poverty, for instance, is an outcome of low productivity and hence low incomes. This demands investment of technology in agriculture, in seeds of higher yield. Landowners are hurting for water. Why not allow panchayats to revive, develop and manage water bodies? Six of 10 farmers don’t have access to credit—can we use Jan Dhan to deliver credit with subsidies? The idea of micro drip irrigation can be made affordable if contract farming can be institutionalised with regulation for fruit and vegetable farms. Fallow and barren land can be leased for horticulture, biofuels or just cattle feed. The problem of milk output can deliver income solutions if the idea of Amul is expanded. Funding of cattle/animal farms will create jobs and curb protein inflation.
A large part of the workforce needs to be shifted from farms to factories or business franchisees. But ideas like industrial corridors and Make in India will be stillborn if skills are scarce. Schools without boards and classrooms without teachers is a saddening cliché. Induction of e-learning—on screen and even via charge-free data on mobiles—can help those in school and dropouts.
Nearly 45 per cent of the rural literates are school dropouts. Certification courses—for construction, manufacturing and services—will make at least some employable. Low-skill, low-cost jobs that are shifting to Vietnam and Bangladesh can be lured to India if the clearance regime is decentralised to the states and down to districts. There is a need to aggregate opportunities—how about a mobile app-based job exchange for infra projects and services?
The trouble with the discourse on poverty alleviation is that it is rendered binary—strung between the imperatives of growth and of entitlements. India needs to uninstall the culture of slogans and schemes, and replace them with solutions.
shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com
Shankkar Aiyar is the author of Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change