This year the government of India will be spending Rs186,534 crore or about $36.7 billion on schemes aimed at lifting the level of human development in India. If the money allocated was the GDP of a country, it would rank No 82 on the list of 190 countries. And it is not a one-off stand! Since it came to power, the UPA ramped up spending on the social sector from Rs 2 lakh crore to Rs 5 lakh crore. Between 2005 and 2011, the Centre and the states spent over Rs 21 lakh crore on the social sector. Now, that would be $411 billion or as much as the GDP of Norway ranked at the top of the UNDP rating for human development. So we are not talking about small change here. Yet India’s ranking has dropped from 119 to 134 between 2010 and 2011.
Of course, that is still good news for it’s the national average. If one takes a look at the state-wise ranking, there is more grief in store. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh (among the most populous states), Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Assam are trailing the national average by margins of as much as 30 per cent. With those scores, they would rank among what the UNDP describes as low human development group. Some would fare worse than sub-Saharan Africa. If it were not for states like Kerala and Himachal Pradesh, India would rank even lower.
And the spectre of deprivation is astounding. Nearly 70 per cent of the poor in Bihar suffer deprivation of basic sanitation facilities. Over 47 per cent of the children under the age of five suffer from what the UNDP characterises as “stunting”. Globally, every year, smoke from solid fuel used for cooking claims 2 million lives and 25 per cent of these deaths are in India. On an average for every one lakh births, maternal mortality claims 230 lives. It definitely cannot be about money. After all, Kerala which has a lower growth rate than most states has been able to bring down the ratio of maternal mortality to an astonishing seven per one lakh births. In Himachal Pradesh, the number of rural families with access to toilets doubled from 2.6 million to 5.2 million in just four years. So what is it that deters the other states from adopting the best practices? The answer is absence of good governance.
For all its bombast about the allotted space in front rows for the photo opportunity at the summits of G-20 and ASEAN and like, about being the fastest-growing free market democracy and the branding of emerging eco-tech power, India shows up miserably on the critical factor of human development. It trails all its groupies in the BRIC nations—Brazil is ranked 84th, Russia is ranked 66th, China is ranked 101 — and even South Africa, the new racer on the F1 track of emerging economies, is ranked 123 ahead of India. Even Sri Lanka, war-torn for over a decade, is ranked ahead of India at 97. Yes, India has improved its score since 2000 but trails even Myanmar in its rate of improvement.
One can’t argue that rankings are low because India is a poor country. Not everything can be redressed by spending power, but there is little to show even where moolah-power has been expended. India’s governments annually spend over Rs 2 lakh crore on education. And how do we do on education? India’s literacy rate for adults over 15 years is at 62.8 per cent — lower than Tajikistan which has a literacy rate of 99.7 per cent and lower than even Indonesia which has a literacy rate of 92.2 per cent. The index “mean years of schooling” is another stark indicator. In Norway, on an average a person over 25 years would have spent 12.6 years in schooling/education. An average Indian of 25-plus years in contrast spends barely 4.4 years schooling. Indeed, in the index for mean years of schooling, India trails Nigeria, Haiti, Uganda and even Bangladesh.
India is among the rare countries to boast of a woman President, a woman Speaker, a woman chief of the ruling party, a woman Leader of the Opposition and three woman chief ministers. India is also terribly proud of its tradition where Stree Shakti is worshipped. Yet on gender equality, India is ranked 129. Over 74 per cent of women do not get to secondary school and 67 per cent of them do not get a shot at earning their own income. Even that doesn’t quite tell the story. The shocker is that on gender equality, it trails Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, Morocco and even Mongolia.
Something is surely rotten in the state of affairs. In 2010, the CAG declared there is no audit of money spent on social sector. When Parliament meets next week, the first question that needs to be asked is where is all this money going. In 2006, the Government promised an outcome budget that would tell citizens what exactly the spending achieved. Five years later, there is no sign of it.
There is little pride in being the fourth largest economy, if as a nation India hosts the largest number of poor, the highest proportion of illiterates, a lower life expectancy than Cape Verde, states with a human index lower than sub-Saharan Africa and the largest number of open-air defecators. Why would it be so difficult for the Government to put together a blue book of best practices, find the officers from Kerala and Himachal Pradesh who engineered the change and ask them to lead the charge? Political leaders need to recognise that the much-reviled anti-incumbency factor is essentially their failure to ensure translation of money into results. For once, there is an opportunity to align self-interest with the interests of the Republic.
The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own Shankkar Aiyar is a senior journalist who specialises in the politics of economics.