I must confess that I might not have read An Uncertain Glory:
India and its Contradictions if it were not for the recent polarized debate on
the front pages of India’s English print media. But, I am glad I did read it,
for it focuses squarely on many of the challenges India faces today.
In 8 Steps to Innovation, Vinay Dabholkar and I emphasized
the importance of focusing a firm’s innovation efforts on challenges that
matter. To ensure this, we suggested that every firm compile and update what we
called a “challenge book,” a set of problems that the firm needs to solve. The
main virtue that I see in this new book by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen is that
it applies similar thinking at the national level to build a contemporary
challenge book for India.
Pain, Wave, and Waste
In our book, we suggested that pain, wave, and waste are
three good starting points to capture these challenges.
Dreze and Sen use the available data on reading and writing
skills, access to toilets and availability of health services to identify the
pains of the hundreds of millions of Indian citizens who have an unacceptably
low quality of life. The main question they ask is of what use is our
impressive economic growth if we can’t ensure a minimum standard of living and
dignity for all our citizens.
Amartya Sen has based a lot of his work on the importance of
freedoms that allow people to develop and use capabilities. Human potential is
wasted when our citizens lack the opportunity to develop the capabilities that
would allow them to realize their potential.
A wave underlies much of their thinking, but they urge us to
ride against this wave rather than go along with it. This is the predominant
tendency for public discourse to be obsessed with the concerns of the middle
class and the intelligentsia, and to equate the “aam aadmi” with the slightly
less advantaged among a privileged class rather than the real “aam aadmi” who
spends less than 40 Rupees a day.
Bright Spots
Though Dreze and Sen focus on problems, they spend considerable
space to point out that in our large and heterogeneous country we often have
solutions as well. At least three states of India – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and
Himachal Pradesh – have been “bright spots” on a wide range of social
indicators. As we pointed out in “8 Steps,” bright spots help identify ideas
that are likely to work, and hence give us pointers as to how we can grease the
path for innovation to happen. Bright spots also hold out hope that change is
indeed possible.
But, for bright spots to be useful as role models for
change, it is important that they are not outliers with totally different or
fortuitous circumstances that can’t be replicated. Kerala was often seen as one
such outlier thanks to several idiosyncratic features: the relative
progressiveness of the Cochin and Travancore states that ruled the region
before independence; the matrilineal traditions of certain parts of the state;
and an economy driven by external remittances that has brought in money even
though the state has not attracted much investment in industry and commerce.
In contrast, clearly, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh have
the potential to inspire fresh thinking in the rest of the country. Tamil Nadu
is a large state (I should have known this, but realized only after reading
this book, that the state has a population of 70 million – that’s equivalent to
the population of the Republic of Korea!) that started off very poor but today
is #2 after Kerala on a whole range of social indicators. Himachal may be a
small state but its location in north India shows that social progress does not
have to be the monopoly of the south. Dreze and Sen also draw attention to a
new emerging bright spot – Chhatisgarh - that has recently reformed its Public
Distribution System with improved access for all its citizens. Give the diverse
backgrounds and histories of these states, it’s difficult to anyone to say that
no solutions exist around us.
The Source of Controversy
If you have read this post thus far, you are probably
beginning to wonder why this book has raised so much controversy. Is it because
of the discomfort felt by the Indian middle class when it is pointed out how self-centered
we all are? Or is because of the inability of the Indian media to take
criticism (Dreze and Sen accuse the media of neglecting the real “aam aadmi” in
their quest for TRPs and advertising revenues)? While I am sure there is a bit
of both, the lightning rod has been the nature of solutions preferred by Dreze
and Sen.
Dreze and Sen point out that in most parts of the world the
State plays an important role in providing basic services to the people. They
are skeptical about the efficacy of market-based solutions to provide basic needs.
They are most vehement about this in the context of health care where they
argue that private insurance based solutions tend to result in very expensive
care and inadequate coverage. They are similarly skeptical about cash vouchers for
education, and direct cash transfers in lieu of the Public Distribution System.
They provide some evidence to show that these market-based solutions work well
for supplementary services once the basics are in place, but not for providing
a base level of support.
While Dreze and Sen identify the need for greater
accountability and better governance fairly early in the book, they are
somewhat idealistic about how this will come about. This is a weakness of the
book, for clearly reliable provision of basic services by the State will happen
only when the State is more effective. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal and
Chhatisgarh may provide inspiration, but achieving better governance across
other states seems a far cry today.
In the end…
I found the book an engaging read. A major plus point of the
book is the very informative tables and statistics. I found some of the
statistics mind-boggling – e.g. the hold
of the upper castes over almost all important institutions in the city of
Allahabad, and the abysmal literacy levels among dalits in India in the 1901
census (0% in most provinces).
But more than anything else, this book puts a spotlight on
the biggest problems India faces today. Thus it is an excellent guide for any
sensitive citizen of our country who wishes to contribute to the nation.
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