Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan
Chidambaram has trumpeted his country's vault into
modernity. Economic growth is 8.1% and is
projected to rise as high as 10% next year. India
has completed its "Golden Quadrilateral", a
multi-lane highway that links New Delhi in the
north, Kolkata in the east, Chennai in the south
and Mumbai in the west. The collective wealth of
India's 311 billionaires jumped 71% in the past
year.
"Growth will be our mount, equity
will be our companion and social justice will be
our destination," he said.
But for India's
rural and urban poor, the chasm between them
and
the wealthy only gets
wider and deeper. In this regard last
year, India slipped from 124th out of 177
countries to 127th, according
to the United Nations Human
Development Index. Life expectancy is seven years
less than in China and 11 less than in Sri Lanka.
Mortality for children under five, according to a
UN development report, is almost three times
China's rate, almost six times Sri Lanka's, and
greater than in Bangladesh and Nepal.
The
divide is best summed up in a searing editorial by
Palagummi Sainath, India's leading independent
journalist. In an April 1 opinion piece in The
Hindu, Sainath contrasts the two worlds that
increasingly make up the second-most-populous
nation on earth.
"Farm suicides in
Vldharbha crossed 400 this week. The Sensex [stock
exchange] crossed the 11,000 mark. And Lakme
Fashion Week issues over 500 media passes to
journalists. All three are firsts. All happened
the same week. And each captures in a brilliant if
bizarre way a sense of where India's Brave New
World is headed. A powerful measure of disconnect.
Of the gap between the haves and the have-mores on
the one hand, and the dispossessed and the
desperate, on the other."
For more than a
decade, the Mumbai-based journalist has
criss-crossed India by train, bicycle and foot,
chronicling the daily lives of the poor. He writes
about people such as Ganesh Bhimrao Thakre, a
small farmer in Vidharbha who struck hard times.
His daughter got cholera, his wife had an eye
operation and his son was forced to drop out of
college for financial reasons. Desperate and
unable to get a loan, he played Bhishi, a sort of
Ponzi scheme where farmers pool money to try to
win a monthly jackpot.
He lost. So he
committed suicide. Most farmers who kill
themselves do so by drinking pesticides. Thakre
hanged himself.
There are literally
thousands like him in the countryside, where in
states such as Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and
Bihar the "average" income is considerably below
the national rural poverty line of US$650 a year.
Stories such as the death of Ganesh Thakre do not
make Sainath a popular man in the corridors of
power, where "India shining" is the slogan. The
government is less interested in helping the poor,
as it is increasing military spending and building
a "blue water" navy.
India has launched a
30-year program to build a fleet capable of
projecting power into the South China Sea and
Indian Ocean. It has purchased Jaguar bombers from
Britain and is negotiating to purchase 66 Hawk
fighter-bombers for $1.43 billion. The price of a
single Hawk could supply a lifetime of clean
drinking water to 1.5 million people.
Skewed priorities The new
budget is a case study in skewed priorities.
Under the former right-wing Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) government, social-support
networks were systematically dismantled and social
expenditures declined to 19.7% from 22.9%.
But the center-left Congress-UPA (United
Progressive Alliance) government's budget is only
marginally better. Social expenditures will rise
just 1.2%. Education will jump a paltry 0.4%, and
health funding will go to 4.9% from 4.4%.
According to the finance minister, "Growth is the
best antidote to poverty."
The "growth"
formula is the so-called "Washington consensus" of
open markets and foreign investment, which has
accelerated the divide between rich and poor from
Terra del Fuego to West Africa. Latin America is
currently in the process of dismantling much of
the neo-liberal "consensus" that dominated
economic systems from Mexico to Argentina
throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
In India,
"growth" has been restricted to a relatively
narrow band of industries, such as high tech. In
the countryside, where 75% of the population
lives, living conditions have worsened. A World
Bank study in 2004 found that while the number of
Indian millionaires rose, so did the number of
poor. According to a UN development report,
inequality in India has grown faster in the past
15 years than in the past 50. The report also
found that rural poverty-alleviation schemes
generally ended up being used in the interests of
the wealthy.
In his searing book
Everyone Loves a Good Drought, Sainath
exposed how the elite manipulate rural aid to
enrich themselves and impoverish small farmers.
Wealthy landowners used government aid during a
drought to dig wells so deep that they drained off
the water small farmers were using. In exchange
for water, the small farmers had to grow what the
wealthy farmers wanted them to grow, generally
export crops such as cotton and rice.
Most
small farmers quickly found themselves squeezed
between low prices for their crops and high prices
for seed and fertilizer. Many had no choice but to
turn to the local sahukar, moneylenders who
charge usurious rates of 60% or higher.
"Banks don't [lend] money to small
farmers, although you can get all you want to buy
a Mercedes," Sainath said.
In 1991, 26% of
rural households were in debt. By 2003 that had
jumped to just under 50%, although in some states,
such as Andhra Pradesh, four-fifths of the farmers
were in arrears. Tens of millions of small farmers
ended up losing their land and became landless
laborers. If they were lucky and had a union, they
made $1 a day. If they were not, they made as
little as 33 cents a day.
In contrast,
each of those 311 billionaires takes in about
$17.5 million a day.
Since the government
has cut back on irrigation aid and dried up most
of the money for small loans, more and more
farmers have little choice but to use the
sahukars. The lenders - who many times are
big landowners - forced many farmers to sign a
document "selling" their land to the
sahukar. According to Sainath, many times
those documents are not torn up even after the
debt is paid.
While some farmers who lose
their land become agricultural day laborers, large
numbers migrate to the cities in search of
services and jobs. But services have been cut, and
the jobs are mainly for the literate and the
well-schooled. In rural areas, 38% of males and
57% of women are illiterate.
The miserly
increase in health spending is particularly
burdensome to the rural poor. Medical care is the
second-most-common cause of rural debt, and close
to the 25% of the population do not seek medical
care because they cannot afford it.
As a
share of its gross domestic product, India spends
less on health care than countries such as
Cambodia, Myanmar, Togo, Sudan, Guinea and
Burundi. According to a UN human-development
report, "Some of India's southern cities may be in
the midst of a technological boom, but one in
every 11 Indian children dies in the first five
years of life from want of low-technology,
low-cost interventions."
The medical
situation is deepened by the food crisis that many
Indians endure. A study by Professor Utsa Patnaik
of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi found
that per person food availability is lower now
than it was during the horrendous Bengal famine of
1942-43.
It is common for rural family
members to alternate days when they eat. The
result is that 46.7% of Indian children are
underweight, and 44.9% of them are growth-stunted.
In comparison, in China - which also has a wide
and growing gap between rich and poor - those
figures are 10% and 14.2%, respectively.
Ganesh Thakre's wife, Rekha, told Sainath
that the family had reached the point "where when
we take our household wheat to the mill, we leave
it there until we can pay the miller the tiny
amount it takes to grind the flour".
Urban
slum dwellers fare little better. In the same week
that the fashion shows and the stock market were
doing well, almost 5,000 urban shanties were torn
down in Mumbai.
"In the village we
demolish their lives, in the city their homes,"
Sainath wrote.
Conn Hallinan is
a foreign-policy analyst for Foreign Policy In
Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
