Dr. Devendra Kothari
Population and Development Analyst
Forum for Population Action
"Congratulations to Prime Minister Narendra
Modi on a decisive election victory. These next five years of Prime Minister
Modi's leadership will lay the groundwork for the next 25 years in terms of
economic growth and prosperity for the country."
Chairman
of the Board of Director
at US-India Strategic and Partnership Forum
(USISPF).
Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) to a super-sized victory in the recently held Lok Sabha
elections for a second consecutive term in office, winning a whopping majority.
The BJP has crossed the 300-seat mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha. "Such profound mandate will baffle the world," PM Modi rightly said
in his victory speech.
What is this massive victory really about? What does it
say about the politics of the day or expectations of people in the light of
unexpectedness of victory’s sheer scale and sweep? What are the voters looking
for which they have found in Narendra Modi?
Potentially, there are many explanations; some of them are thinly veiled, which
are difficult to understand. This Paper aims to analyse some of these
questions.
To have a right perspective, let us interpret the state of
economy or development in which people have voted for Modi. During his election
campaign in 2013-14, Modi raised expectations of a great economic revival, high
growth and tens of millions of new jobs for the ever-growing workforce. The new
government hit the ground running and the first two years were action-packed
with new programmes and plans. But, at the end of his five-year term, “there
are many hits as well as major misses.” [1]
The economic slowdown is visible even through the fog of
official statistics. Exports, barring a modest recent pickup, have been stagnant
for the last five years, creating pressure on the economy, and reflecting
growing lack of global competitiveness. Manufacturing is sluggish. Banking and
the power sectors require urgent reform. As a
result, the state of
economy is sharply diminishing living conditions of millions of people in
India, a country that is already home to some of the world’s poorest and
hungriest people. More than half of India’s
population (around 700 million) is still living under multi-dimensional poverty compared to 5.2 per
cent in China.[2] Further, there
are much more deprived/poor 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. But, overwhelming voters from these
states have voted for Modi.
In addition, the BJP’s big support from rural and
young voters may indicate that the talk
of agrarian and job crises are
misleading. But, these are the real
problems faced by the country, as shown by the latest data on employment
released by the Government of India after the election results were declared. India's unemployment rate hit 6.1 per
cent in the fiscal year ending 2018; reportedly the country's highest in over
four decades. An estimated 12 million young Indians join the workforce every
year, and the country needs to grow much faster in order to provide jobs for
all of them.
Another set of
figures released by the government on a day when new ministers of
the Narendra Modi cabinet took charge, showed that gross domestic product expanded 5.8
per cent in the quarter ending March, 2019. That's a sharp decline from 6.6 per cent growth in the previous quarter and
the weakest rate in two years. It also means India has surrendered the title of
world's fastest-growing major economy to China, which grew at 6.4 per cent in
the same period. Yet growth has eroded over the past three quarters after
hitting 8 per cent in the middle of 2018. But, Modi, who first swept to power
in 2014 on promises to revive India's economy and boost growth and job market, w9on election again by an bigger margin.
Then, why did the people repose faith in him? Well, that’s the million-dollar question,
isn’t it?
What accounts for the shift from
anti-incumbency in 2014 to pro-incumbency in 2019? Many theories and hypothesis could be advanced
to explain this inconceivable outcome.
On the positive side there were no
serious corruption charges against the government and inflation was managed
well during the first term (but faces upward pressure now). On the negative
side employment appears to have grown more acute, as noted earlier. Further, one
could attribute BJP’s success to better administration of welfare schemes/projects
like Ujjwala, SKILL India, Make in India, Smart City, etc. and the Balakot strikes just before
the election which retaliated against Pakistan’s sponsorship of terror groups
and pushed the spirit of nationalism. While
all these factors may have played a role they do not, even in combination,
satisfactorily or convincingly account for the magnitude of BJP’s sweeping
victory in the frustrating job market and skidding economy.
Also, the election result does not even support the
thinking of so-called liberals. They painted a gloomy picture of the nation
under his leadership. Despite being
dubbed “Great Divider” by TIME, Modi succeeded in unifying people across caste,
religious and regional lines to reelect him with a larger mandate this time. What may have
worked for BJP is that it succeeded to a large extent in turning this election
into a referendum on PM Narendra Modi. Opposition parties appear to have helped
in this process as their campaigns have primarily been about ousting Modi,
rather than offering positive alternative visions of what they will do if elected
to power. As the opposition was fragmented and offered no obvious PM candidate,
this cemented the TINA (There Is No Alternative) factor in favour of Modi. The
outcome of this election, therefore, was decided by the Modi factor tipping the
balance against anti-incumbency.
But that is not the
only reason behind his whopping success. It’s
possible some deep structural shifts are taking place in the Indian polity and
Modi was smart enough to comprehend these in his favour. It is said of India
that it is the country of the future and will remain so. [3] Indians, especially the young ones, are in a hurry to move away from ‘Third World’ space it currently
occupies. And, they sensed that Modi can do it. India could be second ‘China’
under his leadership! The BJP’s 'Sankalp Patra' or election manifesto, which was
released just three days before the general election, aims to make India a ‘developed’
nation by 2047, on completion of 100 years of Independence. "Our aim
(is) to change India from a developing country to a developed country. We want
to fight poverty rather than sit inside air conditioned rooms. Nationalism is
our inspiration and inclusion and good governance is our mantra", Modi raised
his voice while releasing the BJP election manifesto.
On the eve of India’s Independence, towards midnight on
14 August 1947, "Tryst with
Destiny" speech delivered by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first
Prime Minister of independent India. It stated: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem
our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the
stroke of the midnight
hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” It is considered to be
one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century and to be a landmark
oration that captures the essence of the triumphant culmination of the Indian
Independence struggle against the British rule in India and hoped to make a prosperous
India.
However, aspiration
for a ‘developed country’ status was not backed by much-needed grass root reforms
by successive governments for achieving it. The 2019 election result and its size indicate
that the common people are confident that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ could be achieved under Modi’s leadership.
Therefore,
the most probable hypothesis
behind the unexpected massive victory could
be that Modi’s image as a ‘doer’ is now
recognised by most Indians. Many India observers across the world have been amazed with India's pace of taking
decisions, whether right or wrong, and implementing them under his leadership.
He has demonstrated during “the last five years indefatigability by literally
working round-the-clock”, as noted by one of his closest colleagues, the former
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Seeking to encash Modi’s image of a ‘doer’, BJP
has therefore chosen the slogan of ''Modi Hai to Mumkin Hai'' ('Modi makes it
possible) for the just concluded general elections.
Despite many problems, people, in general, see in
him a ray of hope. They consider him as
a ‘messiah’ or expected deliverer of achieving the goal of
developed and prosperous India. Here, the
media played a very active and vital role in promoting that image. In fact,
Modi is in virtual reality due to digital excesses. Possibly, voters might have thought that Modi would do wonders in his second term. We have to remember that Indians generally have hope
when the situation appears to be hopeless. One may
call it hoping against hope situation but people decidedly believed that he
would deliver. And, five years later in 2019, India has again placed high hopes
in Narendra Modi. Whether will he deliver?
How
to forge ahead: In 2014, Modi asked the Indian people to give him 10 years
to transform India. Well, here is his chance. So what should
PM Modi do? His first
term was spent on political consolidation, which has been achieved by now.[4] Confronting tough economic challenges, the
Modi government must demonstrate the boldness and vision and avoid
‘controversial’ actions and decisions like three- language policy in the
draft of National Education Policy among others, which divert unnecessary
attention from the real issues. I do hope that we will see Modi in a new
‘avatar’. While addressing the newly
elected Lok Sabha members of NDA in the central hall of Parliament, Modi said: "We have worked for sabka saath, sabka vikas,
now we have to strive for sabka vishwas (trust of all)." The new slogan is meant to signal to Muslims that their future is not in danger, and he and
his government will work hard to their trust. Further, his conciliatory victory speech, in which he said: “We are now building a new India… From here on there will
only be two ‘castes’ - one caste is poor and the other caste is of those who
will contribute in every way possible to help those who need to be brought out
of poverty.” India must take him at his word. But, this needs to be backed by an action
agenda.
The next five years,
therefore, are crucial in the laying foundation of a developed India. For
this, Modi needs a pragmatic doable action plan in putting
the Indian economy in a different orbit, away from the ‘Third World’ space it
currently occupies. Here, India can learn a lot from the Chinese
experience. We all learn from each other and it is alright to make mistake, as long
as we pick overselves up and ready to learn others to solve our problems. China
adopted Buddhism, an Indian system of thought, to resolve their internal turmoil
as early as the first century A.D.
China was far behind
India during the seventies in most of the development indicators, including per capita income. But today she
is far-far ahead of India by simply focusing on a development
agenda when the country decided to become a developed nation in a generation
under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, a paramount leader of
the People's Republic of China from 1978 until his retirement in
1989. Deng led China through far-reaching market-economy reforms by
focusing on the basic ingredients of human development
to push the formation of human capital, namely: quality of primary education,
primary health including WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) factors, and no
doubt on population control. Unfortunately, “Small is
Beautiful”– an economic idea [5]that
has sadly been forgotten by India during its journey of development, whereas
China adopted it during the initial stage of its development. Right from independence, however, India strongly believed
in: Bigger is better.
In the face of big economic challenges, is ‘a
business as usual’ approach of the new government bound to flop? Incremental or
piecemeal changes will not lift sentiments. Something must be done to ignite
animal spirits in the economy, which India hasn’t seen for close to a decade.[6]
The Modi government must demonstrate the vision and courage to break free from
the statist dogma which has held India down.
During the last five
years, the Modi government has embarked
on ambitious structural reforms to enhance human capabilities through
initiatives such as Swachh Bharat (Clean India to strengthen sanitation and hygiene), Skill
India, Jan Dhan Yojana (People Money Scheme to ensure access to financial
services ), Beti Bachao, Beti
Padhao Yojana (to address gender issues
and girl education), Ujjwala
Yojana (to make cooking gas
available to poor households to empower women and protect their
health as well as reduce drudgery and the time spent on cooking,
etc.), Saubhagya Yojana (to provide
free electricity connection to poor families), and Ayushman Bharat Yojana (to provide
free health insurance to 500 million poor people) and many others, for facilitating financial inclusion and also for empowering
the people. These schemes give
new wings to aspirations of the poor.
However, it appears that these schemes could not serve the purpose as
desired since most of
these are being implemented on a piecemeal basis and in isolation from the
wider process of holistic and inclusive development. Actually, what India
needs is a comprehensive policy package in place of incremental approaches to
expedite the process of development.
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).[7] 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 craze for
government jobs including reservations.
Hence, 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. 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 especially uninterrupted cheap power supply. But most importantly, unlocking the
human potential is a must and it should be 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 fifth largest economy in the world in terms of GDP in 2018 but still
it has a very-very low per capita GDP, as per IMF. It is placed at 122nd
position among 187 countries.
As a result, 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.
So what India should be doing: Too many of us in India seem to believe that the future is inevitably ours — that a few more highways and a few tax concessions or freebies will be sufficient for India to replicate China’s path to power and affluence. India cannot get a break through unless it empowers its people.
Let
us consider some facts. India has done well over the past decade or so to get
most of its children into school. It has done less well at getting them to
learn anything. Analysts are, therefore, already worrying that India’s
demographic dividend — its vast pool of young people — will become a curse:
Without jobs, all those young people could drag down the country instead of
pushing it towards upper-middle income status. The problem is that they are
desperately short of preparation for both the old economy and the new. [8] In
addition, high population growth is adding salt to the wounds. The
current population growth in India is mainly caused by unwanted
fertility. Around five in ten live births are unintended/unplanned or
simply unwanted by the women who experience them which 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. Further, based on the National Family Health Surveys (1 to 4),
it is estimated that in 2018 around 445 million people out of 1,350 million in India were a result of
unwanted pregnancies. [9]
With a large number of people resulting from unwanted pregnancies, how can one
think about using them for nation building? The consequences
of unwanted pregnancy are being reflected in widespread malnutrition, poor
health, low quality of education, and increasing scarcity of basic resources
like food, water and space. [10]
So India urgently needs a doable human development
strategy. My policy monograph -
Nurturing Human
Development: A Strategy for New India [11] - proposes a strategy for human development
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 tol 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 to be HDPlus families to create enabling environment; and
- · To be implemented by government agencies with the help of grassroots workers in collaboration with civil societies.
In conclusion, what the country does in the next
five years will determine not only the destiny of the country but also of PM
Modi. A person like Modi knows about it that the people elected him with intense hope. The hope that they too will have
better living conditions tomorrow under his leadership.
A top American corporate leader and a well-wisher of Modi, Padma Bhusan John
Chambers, has asserted, while congratulating Prime Minister Narendra Modi on
his election victory that “in the next five years, PM Modi will lay the
groundwork for India's economic growth and prosperity for the next quarter
century.” And, there is no reason to doubt
his observations.
Investments in
education, health, living environment and its determinants – the social sector
– therefore, should be made a priority in the next five years to lay the foundation
for a developed India by 100th birth anniversary of India. 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 deprived people who have overwhelmingly voted for PM Modi,
since they believe ‘‘Modi
Hai to Mumkin Hai''.
[1] Raghotham, S et al. 2019. Modi’s 5 years: A report
card. Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/specials/sunday-spotlight/modi-s-5-years-a-report-card-726064.html
[2]
https://www.indianeconomy.net/splclassroom/what-is-multidimensional-poverty-index/
[4] Refer TOI Editorial “It’s Now Or Never’ at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/its-now-or-never-modi-can-seal-his-legacy-by-transforming-indias-economy-in-his-second-term/
[5] EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful
was the first book on political economy I read as a student at the Harvard
University in the early seventies. It is a dense mixture of philosophy,
environmentalism and economics; I can't think what I could possibly have understood
of its deeper meaning at that time.
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics
As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by German born
British economist Schmacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful"
came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr. It is often used to
champion small, appropriate policy interventions and technologies that are
believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger
is better".
[7] Centre for
Sustainable Employment. 2018. State of Working India, Azim Premji University,
Bengaluru. Download from:
https://cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/state-ofworking-india/
[8] Refer Bloomberg Opinion article: India isn't going to
become China just by magic by Mahesh Sharma at:
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/india-isnt-going-to-become-china-just-by-magic-728128.html
[9] Calculated by the author using data obtained from the
Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India and National Family Health Surveys.
[10] Kothari, Devendra. 2014. “Managing Unwanted Fertility in India:
Way Forward”, -- in Suresh Sharma and
William Joe. (eds.): National
Rural Health Mission: An Unfinished Agenda, Bookwell,
New Delhi.
[11] For details,
see: Kothari, Devendra.
2019. Nurturing
Human Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragon International
Publishers. A copy of the publication could be obtained by contacting author.
