Dr. Devendra
Kothari
Population and Development Analyst
Forum
for population Action
Though India has made extraordinary
strides in the last couple of decades in reducing poverty, the country is still
home to a very large number of the poor. It is projected that India may
experience an increase in number of poor in coming years, which calls for
increased efforts to attend to the needs of the vulnerable, especially those in
the bottom 50%. According to the French Economists, Piketty and his
colleague Chancel, “over fifty per cent of India’s population still has little
or no access to basic facilities, such as quality education, health or
sanitation even after the adoption of market-friendly strategies during
the 1990s and record-high GDP growth in recent years.” [1]
As such around 70 crore or 700 million
out of the total population of 1350 million in 2018 can be classified as
deprived or vanchit Indians.
And, without empowering this population of 140 million families, India cannot
resolve the issue of poverty, since poverty is a feature of life
only where people’s opportunities to overcome it are brutally limited.
Now question arises what holds India
back from realising its potential, the best answer is its failure to develop
its human capital. With the World Bank ranking India at 115th out of 157
countries on the Human Capital Index, India cannot avoid the issue of
empowering people. HCI seeks to measure the amount of human capital that
a child born today can expect to attain by the age of 18. According to its
parameters a child born in India today will only be 44% as productive as she
could have been if she enjoyed quality education and full health as well as
quality of living environment including water and sanitation. In other
words, there are grave deficiencies in our human development inputs that are
preventing our children from reaching their full potential. Commenting on the poor quality of human development,
Bill Gates and Ratan Tata rightly noted: “Human capital is one of
India’s greatest assets. Yet, the world’s fastest growing economy hasn’t
touched millions of Indian citizens at the bottom of the economic pyramid”.[2] For this, India has to
empower its people by investing in their health, education, and physical living
conditions. Our development slogan must be “Sattar Crore Vanchit
Bharatiya ka Vikas (Development of 700 million Deprived Indians).
What will it take to help these people
to improve their potential? For this, a strategy has been developed and it is
being christened as “HDPlus”.[3] It
is based on a ‘whole child’ concept, that is child and his/her
family should be the fulcrum of human development efforts. The concept is
being described by policies, practices, and relationships which ensure that
each child is healthy, educated, engaged, supported and encouraged. For this,
integrating the child and his or her family more deeply into the day-to-day
life of school and home activities represents an untapped instrument for
raising the overall achievements including learning skills and health
parameters, and hence improving overall productivity. In other words, creating
an enabling environment at family and school levels is a way to empower people.
Looking to the prevailing situation,
HDPlus strategy will focus on five interventions in a more closely
integrated form. They are: Improving the quality of elementary
education, Strengthening WASH factors (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene),
Enhancing primary health, Reducing gender gap, and most importantly
Stabilizing the population by minimizing incidents of unwanted
childbearing incidences and bringing down infant mortality. In addition, we
must recognize that shifting of excess labour from agriculture to
non-agriculture sectors and managing climate change including the quality of
air and water are important inputs in the process of human development.
HDPlus strategy is based on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach which revolves around
people as human being; it sees development as expansion of people's capabilities – it is an enabling
(empowering) preposition. It aims to enhance people's well-being by expanding
their capabilities which is connected to freedom of choices. The main
features of HDPlus strategy are:
- The focus of action will be all school-going children, aged 6 to 14, in government schools and their families (HDPlus families).
- The focal point of various governments’ pro-poor schemes along with HD interventions will be HDPlus families.
- The framework will be implemented by government agencies in collaboration with civil organizations.
The
figure below shows as to how HDPlus strategy will lay foundation for human competency in empowering people. It will focus on children aged
6-14 attending local Government primary
schools and their families to be known as HDPlus families.
The identified families will be focal point of various
governments’ pro-poor schemes along with selected HD interventions like education,
water, sanitation, primary and reproductive health, etc. This will result in
the human competency
that is quality
of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually. The
strategy will ensure that 14 year olds (8th
graders) is well prepared to read, write and be efficient in maths as well as
in digital technology before moving to higher education.
The above analysis reveals that HDPlus strategy
rests on the assumption that people, when given tools and opportunity, can defy
the odds. “This is especially true of young people, because they are
determined to lead a better life than their parents have and eager to follow
new ideas and new technologies where they lead,” as noted by Bill and
Melinda Gates. [4] The policy makers, civil society, donor agencies
and international partners, therefore, should scale up advocacy and mobilise
support for key interventions that would not only empower people by enhancing
productivity but will also help in accelerating the process of achieving Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs). Slow progress towards HD is indeed
everybody’s problem and must be treated as a national emergency!
Courtesy: Prof.LK Kothari
[1] Chancel,
Lucas and Thomas Piketty. 2017. “Indian income inequality, 1922-2014:
From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” WID, World Working Paper Series No.
2017/11, World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics. Also refer
at: http://wid.world/document/chancelpiketty2017widworld/
[2] Gates, Bill and Ratan Tata. 2016. “New nutrition
report underscores the importance of leadership in addressing stunting in
India” at:https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-editorials/new-nutrition-report-underscores-the-importance-of-leadership-in-addressing-stunting-in-india.
[3] Kothari, Devendra. 2019. Nurturing Human
Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragoan International
Publishers.
[4] Gates, Bill and Melinda.
2018. “Our Precarious Progress on Poverty”, The New York Times, Sunday
Review, Sept. 23, 2018.
