Thoughts on the republic day

I. Modernization project

Every visitor to India, foreigners, NRIs, over the last two decades testify to the positive changes to many of our metro cities, the highways connecting some of these cities, the wide roads, smooth flyovers, the changing skyline with more glass-and-concrete high-rise office buildings and commercial spaces. They also would notice, approvingly, a greater number of smartly turned out people on the boulevards lined with foreign banks, ubiquitous malls and multiplexes, swanky and polished cars of variegated colors, shapes and sizes swarming the well lighted arterial streets of an ever expanding city on a reclaiming and re-development spree. Also, from the sportsmen to the businessmen and bankers, to the politicians and the government bureaucrats you can discern a certain homogeneity in tastes in material accomplishments and a predisposition to bullishness towards attaining higher and higher GDP no matter whatever else happens to the minor matter of the human development indicators.

Be that as it may, the predominantly export and service industry (especially IT and ITES) propelled growth over the last twenty odd years has brought in its wake an unprecedented wave of urbanization, migration of people from the impoverished and no-prospect rural hinterland to the metropolitan areas, being towed to the caravan of aspiration. All these have led to a rapid increase in the demand for housing in the cities and on the municipal facilities that are failing to keep pace with it. One result is a growth of slum-like dwellings and a general increase in congestion, pollution, noise, pressures on the urban social life, rise in the urban poverty and destitution.

Simultaneously, traditional manufacturing centers in and around the cities are folding up having become sick for a variety of reasons. With the space occupied by the old mills fetching much more return simply as prime real estate properties for building new residential and commercial complexes, closing down the mills – and throwing out the industrial workers who used to work there – has made sound economic sense in today’s liberated environment. Apart from growing unemployment, there has been an upswing in the “semi-employment” in mushrooming unorganized informal sector of economic activities (often requiring very little skills) with more scope for exploitation by the entrepreneurs and less for collective bargaining for the workers’ rights. Thus is created a sizable reserve army of low or semi-skilled, partially employed urban poor with no stable job, no dependable income, living in shoddy unsanitary dwellings devoid of any privacy (not even a toilet space) and open to devastation in the next accidental fire or cloudburst.    

Cities are of course not just slums. In a typical city like Pune about 40% population live in the slums. From the descending airplanes the more hopeful and the optimistic disseminator of the modern India story would more conveniently focus on the neatly ordered urban spaces full of gated housing communities enjoying amenities meeting international standards. There are those behemoth highrise commercial buildings where each small cubicle could be servicing offices and private homes in the distant continents with confident and cheeky simulation of the local accents and smart affectation of the customer care. These middle class, predominantly young, men and women, working so hard and earning rather decent salaries by the average Indian standards need avenues for feeling the power of their wallet filled with cash and credit cards from several companies. Thus the city is also dotted with ATM kiosks, multi-brand supermarket chains selling bewildering variety of things of desire, multiplex cinema theatres running ten different movies in a flexible time schedule, fast-food joints and eateries with both local and international cuisine.

    

The more everything changes in our country however so much within us and without seem to remain the same. The growing perception of a lurch towards modernity, for instance, often enough shows up an awkward gait of young unformed legs burdened by a powerful bulwark of a torso controlled by a smallish hard head, not given to flaccid feel-good emotion, but rather compact and quick in calculating where to lease and when to leash those tearing legs.

Even before the deeply hurt country bade fare well last December to the young woman absolutely embodying the aspirational modern India, savaged by hoodlums (members of the reserve army ?) and succumbing to her injuries, India of the hoary traditions spoke up in many voices, from the religious gurus and the godmen to heads of cultural organization, political leaders, not to leave out the spokespersons of the police and the government administration. And these utterances, apart from establishing benchmarks of retrograde misogynic thinking (like the marshland hastily filled up and piled to erect the brand new re-development project) proved beyond doubt, if any proof were required, that India’s modernization project has been conceived in an essentially narrow, superficial and opportunistic manner. After all unleashing the famed ‘animal spirit’ of entrepreneurial zeal (a’ la John Maynard Keynes) in the economic sphere was the limited intervention planned by the political elite. The complete economic fall out of the policies, the social impact including the required shakedown of the die-hard subterranean sensibilities were wishfully thought to be falling in place all by itself !  The tragic rude jolt showed that the task was nowhere near being defined let alone completed.   

(... to be continued)

The new Indian ‘animal spirit’

As a part of his opening remarks made by the prime minister at the interaction with selected newspaper editor on June 29, 2011 he said :

“… frankly speaking in our country this constant sniping between government and opposition or if an atmosphere of cynicism is created all round I think the growth impulses, the entrepreneurial impulses of our people will not flourish and that is what worries me. We must do all that we can to revive the animal spirits of our businesses (our emphasis)”.

What the PM implied was that he was worried that the animal spirit of entrepreneurship of Indians unleashed by him in 1991 might get bottled up in the wake of the corruption controversies, media’s zeal to unearth more scams within government, industry (including proponents and beneficiaries of what has come to be known as crony capitalism), bureaucracy and of course the politicians. Clearly he did not think what he minimally described as “businessmen cutting corners” anything more serious than a weakness in our regulatory system. For him fixing loopholes in the regulatory system is all that is required to address and remedy the clear wrongdoings by parts of bureaucracy, politicians and the beneficiaries in the industry which were pointed out by the CAG, a constitutional body, essentially part of the government. For him too much criticism of the ‘elected government’ would make the bureaucracy hamstrung and lead to impeding or curtailing of the liberalizing economic reforms, affecting the enthusiasm of the entrepreneurs, industry captains and investors. Reviving this ‘animal spirits’, for him, was, has been and is a priority rather than chasing issues of corruption, ‘cutting corners’ by the spirited animals of a new India. 

It may be true that this animal spirit that has helped to drive India’s GDP growth over better part of the last two decades and provided the new-found confidence of Indians in industry, business (especially service sector) and in advertisement, entertainment, fashion and sports. However, one suspects the misplaced spiritedness also having had a hand in the rising rowdiness/arrogance of a certain section of the population highlighted by increasing number of cases of road rage and drunken driving (leading to death and disability to pavement dwellers), kidnapping for ransom, rape, acid attack and other kinds of violence against women, and finally murder for flimsy reasons. The final denouement in the Aravind Adiga novel ‘Last man in tower’ about unsheathed greed goading ordinary people to enact a chilling Macbeth like scenario does not probably appear too contrived in the backdrop of swelling testosterone of animal spirits in a new and almost unfamiliar India.

Though road rage per se is not a cognizable offence under Indian penal code (though often leading to severe assault and death which then becomes one), nor even recorded as a traffic violation, it is probably a very sensitive barometer relating gratuitous violence to apparent economic propsperity (at least to some sections of the population). Roughly 10 million cars, buses, trucks, scooters and motorbikes crowd New Delhi's roads every day, causing long traffic jams and frayed tempers. The city's roads have not kept up with the growth in traffic. While the number of vehicles has grown by over 200 percent over the past two decades, the number of kilometers of road has grown only about 15 percent, as per the transport department. People are on the road for a longer period, and everyone has become impatient. The result is a situation in which even a small verbal confrontation might soon escalate to a physical fight. Vehicles especially new spanky cars, being often a powerful symbol of a newly acquired wealth of a person, if someone on the road even inadvertently scrapes it and leaves a scratch this may feel like an assault on a person's status which is considered unacceptable and a fight ensues. [The above statistics and conditions on the Delhi roads adapted from a write up entitled “Road rage in India growing along with economy” (NDTV.COM ,December 28, 2010)]

There are enough statistics to nail the myth of the benefit of economic growth percolating to poor doing the rounds of government departments, planning commission and their appologists in the press and television. Assuming, however, it is only percolating and not exactly flooding the BPL India with food and fuel, the penetration of the TV and particularly mobile phones, on the other hand, among the Indians in the far corners of the country has been much more noteworthy. Unwittingly for the ruling classes, while these new communication media whetted the economic and social aspirations in the rural hinterland it had also brought home to them the undeniable inequality among ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the growing disparity of incomes. Nor has the growth of employment over these two decades of liberalized economy regime been anything but tardy despite the prime minister’s protestations and promise. Incidences of scams, swindling by the crony capitalists, on the other hand, grew. There has been, in recent years, a rise in the death of whistleblowers, RTI activists (anybody who resists/question cronies and criminals who usurp the spoils of the so-called liberalized economy). And of course the statistics on drunken driving, road rage, rape, kidnapping and murder show an upswing. Whether or not the famed ‘animal spirit’ of the Indian entrepreneurs is in evidence or not the animals in India, including the WHITE TIGERS, are growling. Be advised.