Republic of extreme inequalities
Every morning, we see Indians take a dump in the open fields. That tongue-in-cheek remark by villagers across the border in Bangladesh captures what has gone wrong with the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA).
Launched with fanfare on October 2, 2014, throughout the country as a national movement, it had aimed to achieve the vision of a ‘clean India’ by the same date in 2019. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2019-21 has proved that the country is still far from achieving the goal. Despite cash grants, half of rural Indians in the northern heartland states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh still continue to defecate in the open.
In contrast, India’s two tiny neighbours have come a long way in this regard. By the time SBA was launched, open defecation was a forgotten memory in Bangladesh. Nepal saw 85% of its homes build an improved toilet each by 2016.
While you come across a narrative in the mainstream media of India being in the midst of a tech and financial revolution, more and more Indians embracing digital transactions, online communications and e-commerce, the country poised to capture the third place world ranking in terms of the GDP, businesses eyeing a burgeoning middle-class and self-congratulation for 25 crore citizens moving out of multidimensional poverty (on the basis of a tweaked index), the vast hinterland presents a grim picture. It is one of deprivation of basic life facilities. You just have to walk ground zero with prying eyes and empathy.
Swati Narayan in her book UnEqual: Why India Lags Behind Its Neighbours does exactly that, bringing you stories from the grassroots that otherwise would not have seen the light of day. She mines for the reader what the growth data hides.
Narayan, an activist and a teacher at OP Jindal Global University, confronts a puzzle. Why is it that India’s neighbours with modest means forge ahead on human development indicators while we remain a laggard despite quite a few billionaires to flaunt and an impressive growth statistics? She sets out on a journey to find answers. Dividing her search into two geographic comparisons of contiguous regions in specific time periods, she looks at differences between India and what she calls its ‘Eastern Neighbours’ comprising Bangladesh and Nepal and ‘Southern Supermodels’ comprising Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Sri Lanka. While the first, the core of her research, looks at differences in similar situations, the second focuses on the similarities in similar cases.
Probing four thematic areas: access to education (reading skills at primary level); health service delivery (under 5 mortality); child malnutrition (stunting); and open defecation, the author has interviewed 1,600 village women across 80 villages in four districts-Panchagarh of Bangladesh, Sindhuli of Nepal and Kishanganj and Muzaffarpur of Bihar-in Bengali, Nepali and Hindi. What comes out is an amalgam of grassroots research weaved into a gripping narrative. There are locales, characters, contrasts, conflicts. They are real, heart-rending at times. They tug at your conscience.
It is not that the Eastern Neighbours and the Southern Supermodels are development paradises, but there are clear statistical evidence that they are forging ahead. So, she offers a diagnosis.
Neither Bangladesh nor Nepal is a case of large public social spending on welfare programmes, nor economic growth-fuelled development. Instead, they have been able to achieve rapid progress in many social development indicators by creating social awareness, taming gender and caste inequalities and low-cost affordable solutions.
The south, while dismantling caste inequality, has ensured that its have-nots have a share in the real sources of high status like political power, education and share in economic opportunities. The northern caste movement, on the other hand, has relied on emulation and Sanskritisation where multiple layers of inequalities of income, caste, gender and religion still reinforce each other.
So, if the open defecation-free objective remains a chimera, or stunted children in Bihar villages stand in stark contrast to their counterparts just across the borders, or if the primary-level learning levels remain woefully inadequate on this side of the border, the reason lies with a society that remains divided making it almost impossible to make development goals widely shared social responsibilities.
Narayan begins Chapter 2, ‘India Trumped’, with lines from one of the best-known poems, The Deserted Village, of Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith:
“Ill fares the land, to harnessing ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay”
The heroic couplet would suffice to catch the Indian zeitgeist of rising skyscrapers and billionaires amid a countryside beset with wants. A commendable work of narrative journalism, the book is recommended for policy makers to put on track India’s march to development which as of now seems to have gone awry.
The author is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College.
Book:UnEqual: Why India Lags Behind Its Neighbours
Author:Swati Narayan
Pp 368, Rs 799
