Dr. Devendra Kothari
Population and Development Analyst
Forum for Population Action
India’s
under-35s are a generation that holds India’s future.
The future is uncertain; however, it can be created by what we do today, not tomorrow. Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The future
depends on what you do in the present (now)”; and that’s the message that our
policy makers must adored.
We are weeks away
from notification of India’s general elections 2019. Unofficial campaigning is
well under way. Listening to the lead campaigners, it is clear that none of
them is dealing with the real challenges facing the country. There is no secret that India's
growth is much skewed and its benefits go disproportionately to few people as
gets manifested by Oxfam’s Wealth Report (2018) which points out that the nine
richest Indians own as much wealth as the bottom 50 per cent of the population.
Commenting on this, the Oxfam International Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said:
"If this obscene inequality between the top 1 percent and the rest of
India continues then it will lead to a complete collapse of the social and
democratic structure of this country." As such, healing wounds and focussing
attention on what free India’s politicians should really be aiming: how to
secure India’s place in the world as well as freedom from want for every
citizen especially those who are at the bottom of pyramid. India’s tryst with destiny still beckons. It
doesn’t have to remain just a great speech. But a big question: How to forge
ahead? This post aims in this direction.
Two
issues need urgent attention: agrarian
unrest and job crisis. Any durable solution to agrarian crises
requires non-farm jobs. When a sector with less than 15 per cent of GDP
supports a population three times its size, we have a convergence of rural and
urban hopes: jobs. One cannot lift rural incomes without absorbing at
least two-thirds of those dependent on the farm in non-farm jobs. So,
generating jobs is the biggest issue. Employment
generation, however, has remained weak. “India has struggled to convert high
rates of economic growth into jobs”, as per the State of Working India report (2018).[1]
In addition to weak employment generation, low wages are another big
issue. “On average, 82% of male and 92% of female workers currently earn
less than Rs. 10,000 ($137) a month”,
the report revealed. This suggests that a large majority of Indians are not
being paid what may be termed a ‘living wage’, and that explains the intense
hunger for government jobs including reservations.
India
has to recognize that the export-oriented, low-skill, large-scale manufacturing
jobs that developing economies have relied upon (and that was the key to much
of China’s success) are on the wane around the world. Automation is reducing
the amount of low-skill work that the manufacturing sector requires and is
adversely affecting the job market. Thus,
there are many reforms that India is required to carry out to attain competitive strength in
manufacturing and reducing the level of unemployment and underemployment. At
the same time, we have to create enough jobs to accommodate 12 million youths
joining the workforce every year. These would require changes in labour and
land laws, cutting corporate and general taxes to the level of East Asian
countries, and improving basic infrastructure including uninterrupted cheap power supply. But most importantly, unlocking the human potential is a
must and it should be the India’s priority, since India’s USP is its people.
With the World Bank ranking India at 115th out of
157 countries on the Human Capital Index
in 2018, 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 per cent as productive as she could have been if she had
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 India’s human development inputs that are preventing
children from reaching their full potential. As a result, the productivity,
measured as per capita GDP, is very
low. India
became the sixth largest economy in the world in terms of GDP in 2017 but still
it has a very-very low per capita GDP, as per IMF. It is placed at 122nd
position among 187 countries.
The
current pool of India’s manpower has very low employability mainly due to poor
quality of human capital, i.e. abilities and skills of human resources. The
country produces more than five million graduates every year. The National
Employability Report reveals that a significant
proportion of these graduates, nearly 47 percent, are unemployable, given their
poor linguistic and cognitive/analytical skills.
The Annual Status of Education
Report 2017 reveals
that nearly one-fourth of India’s government-school-going
youngsters aged 14-18 cannot read their own language fluently. The report also
reveals that 57 per cent of the children assessed struggled to solve a simple
sum of division - exposing chinks in the quality of education imparted in the
country. Further, 47 per cent of all 14 year-olds in the sample could not read
English sentences. Also, the report revealed that only 28 per cent had used the
internet—26 per cent had used computers in last one week. Further, 64 per cent
had never used the internet. In other words, India’s schools have become ‘factories’
producing unskilled labour force, thus promoting
deprivation at a large scale.
Further,
the galloping population growth and poor hygiene and sanitation have worsened an already bad situation. One has
to recognize that population is an important factor in sustainable development,
especially when it is growing out of control. It leads to a significant
diversion of state investable resources to consumption which could otherwise be
used for increasing investment and productivity and for improving the quality
of public services such as education, health, sanitation, drinking water and
for managing the environmental degradation. India’s population has grown
from 1210.6 million in 2011 to 1,342.5 million
in 2018, thus growing by around 18-19 million every year. The current
population growth in the country, however, is mainly caused by unwanted
fertility. Around five in ten live births are unintended/unplanned or
simply unwanted by the women who experience them and these births trigger continued high population growth. Around
26 million children were born in India in 2018, and out of this about 13
million births could be classified as unwanted. The consequences of
unintended pregnancy are serious, slowing down the process of socio-economic
development as well as process of change. As such, a ‘big push’ is needed
to revamp reproductive health services in unlocking the human
potential.
Due to all these factors, India
accounts a large number of deprived people. The Multidimensional Poverty
Index (MPI), developed by the
Oxford Poverty &
Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and UNDP, identifies how people are being left behind across three key
dimensions: health, education and living standards, and 10 indicators –
nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, sanitation,
cooking fuel, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets. Basic philosophy
and significance of MIP is that it is based on the idea that poverty is not
one-dimensional, rather it is multidimensional. According to the 2016 report, India has very high multidimensional
poverty. More than half of India’s population (55.3%) is living under
multi-dimensional poverty, compared to 5.2 per cent in China, 40.7 per cent in
Bangladesh and 45.6 per cent in Pakistan.
In India, there are very wide regional variations. There are more ‘multidimensional’ deprived people in the
eight states of India (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa,
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the rest of country.[2]
It means
around 700 million (70 crore)
out of the total population of 1350 in 2018 can be classified as deprived
or vanchit Indians. And, without investing in this
population of 140 million families, mainly comprising Dalits, tribals, OBCs and Muslims among others, India
cannot think of becoming an inclusive and developed economy.
How to forge ahead?
India’s under-35s are a
generation that holds India’s future. In this context, a concerted strategy is
needed. Our policy monograph - Nurturing
Human Development: A Strategy for New India [3] -
proposes a strategy and it is
christened as “HDPlus” (Human
Development Plus). It is a dynamic agenda
based on a ‘whole child’ concept, that is school-going child
and his/her family (that is HDPlus 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. To start with, the proposed HDPlus
strategy focuses on five interventions in a more closely integrated
form. They are:
·
Improving the quality of elementary
education,
·
Facilitating WASH factors (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene),
·
Enhancing primary health,
·
Reducing gender gap, and
·
Stabilizing the population.
In addition, we must recognize that shifting of
excess labour from agriculture to non-farm sectors and managing climate change
including the quality of air and water are important inputs in the process of
human development. The main features of HDPlus strategy therefore, are:
·
To start with, the focus of action will be on
government-school-going children, aged 6 to 14 (that is
I-VIII standards),
and their families (HDPlus families);
·
The focal point of various governments’ pro-poor
schemes along with HD interventions will be HDPlus families to create enabling
environment; and
·
It will be implemented by government agencies with the help
of grassroots workers in collaboration with civil societies.
In short,
the HDPlus strategy is aimed to lay foundation for the human competency
that is quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and
intellectually. The strategy ensures that 14 year olds (8th graders)
are well prepared to read, write and be efficient in mathematics as well as in
the basic digital technology before moving to further education, thus
initiating the process of empowering people.
In sum, the HDPlus strategy focuses on enhancing the richness of human life, especially those of
underprivileged, rather than simply the richness of the economy. It enables people to decide who they want to be, what to do, and
how to live. Also, it helps in transforming demographic dividend into an asset by
formation of human capital. Investments
in education, health, living environment and its determinants – the social
sector – therefore, should be made a priority, though it is a relatively long but
a certain process in achieving sustainable and inclusive development. If India wants a bright future then she needs
to act now on unlocking human potential. Time is the essence here. So stop
wasting time. Make it happen today! It is, therefore, time to shift gears, up the momentum, and be
more incisive in securing the interest of the disadvantaged people. So India’s immediate
development slogan must be: “Sattar Crore Vanchit Bharatiya ka Vikas” (Development of 700 million deprived Indians).
[1] Centre for
Sustainable Employment. 2018. State of Working India, Azim Premji University,
Bengaluru. Download from: https://cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/state-ofworking-india/
[2] https://www.indianeconomy.net/splclassroom/what-is-multidimensional-poverty-index/
[3]For details,
see: Kothari, Devendra.
2019. Nurturing
Human Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragoan International
Publishers. A copy of the publication could be obtained by contacting author.
