A not so High Definition- Presenting India ‘s HDI

The latest Human Development Report, or HDR, (2010), marking its 20th anniversary, is both remarkable and useful. Remarkable because it brims with intellectual confidence, born out of a sense of vindication over the “conceptual brilliance and continued relevance” of Mahbub ul-Huq’s original human development paradigm set out in the first sentence of the 1990 report — “People are the real wealth of nations.” The idea of human development, which, through the human development index (HDI), measures health, education and income instead of just income, has not only not withered away but gained in strength and sophistication.

The report is useful for India because it really does leave behind the controversy that has surrounded the measurement of poverty and its supposed level of reduction under the new economic policies initiated in the 90s. When the government claimed success for its policies by citing a reduction in poverty from 36 per cent in 1993-94 to 26 per cent in 1999-00, many issues like discrepancies between surveys and national accounts, and the design of questionnaires, arose to question the figures. A majority agreed but not all were convinced that those numbers painted too rosy a picture, particularly for rural India. Today, matters like choice of poverty line seem irrelevant. The HDR tells so much more, establishing the primacy of the idea that what matters is whether people can lead long, useful lives, get the opportunity to become educated and are able to use their knowledge and talents to shape their own lives.
The latest report, as part of the continuing effort to adopt more sophisticated and comprehensive measures of well being and its obverse, deprivation, has added three new indexes — inequality adjusted HDI, gender inequality index and multidimensional poverty index. The first is in response to the idea that an aggregate measure of development fails to tell us how much of inequality is hidden in it. Inequality detracts from the level that an arithmetical average may indicate. The gender inequality index is self-evident and underlines the idea that gender inequality lies at the core of a group’s overall level of deprivation. The multidimensional poverty index acknowledges that different deprivations (be they over health, education, housing and the like) make up the total burden and counting them individually makes for better measurement.

Where do all these measures put India after almost 20 years of new economic policies and is there a case for policy adaptations to look at the ground reality behind the shine in the growth numbers? In the two decades, among four countries which matter to India, Bangladesh has posted the maximum improvement in its HDI score, followed by China and Pakistan. India brings up the rear, with only Sri Lanka faring poorer, presumably because it had already reached a high plateau when the period began. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh leave India, China and Pakistan behind in scoring better through HDI rank than per capita gross-national-income rank. Going by the income measure of poverty (purchasing power parity $1.25 per head per day), Sri Lanka and China are way ahead of India, which is followed by Bangladesh and Pakistan.
In terms of multidimensional poverty, it is only Bangladesh that is behind India, with even Pakistan scoring better, not to speak of China and Sri Lanka. And in intensity of deprivation, not just China and Sri Lanka but Bangladesh also is ahead of India, with only Pakistan behind.

According to the inequality adjusted HDI, which captures the effect that inequality has on development, Sri Lanka and China again lead the pack, India and Bangladesh come next with Pakistan following. When it comes to gender inequality, China and Sri Lanka are far ahead, with higher ranks in gender equality than their regular HDI ranks. Pakistan and Bangladesh score only slightly better in gender equality than HDI rank. Startlingly, India’s gender rank is lower than its HDI rank.
A third of the population of developing countries, totalling 1.75 billion, lives under the burden of multidimensional poverty and over half of this number is accounted for by South Asia, though poverty rates are higher in Sub-Saharan Africa. People in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer the most from income inequality followed by South Asia. India loses 41 per cent of its HDI score due to educational inequality and 31 per cent on account of health inequality. Eight Indian states, with over 400 million people who are as badly off as 26 of the poorest African countries, account for a larger number of the multidimensionally poor than the African countries.

The HDR finds that 40 years of learning and data indicate that “focusing exclusively on economic growth is problematic” and an unbalanced emphasis on growth is often associated with negative environmental and distributional consequences, as the cases of China and, to an extent, India indicate. If growth is a means to various ends, “success” in growth must be seen to serve the broader human development goals that growth aims to achieve. For development, people have to actively participate in the development process and not remain passive beneficiaries. Their health and educational levels are enormously important and progress on these fronts can happen even when growth is elusive. Near universal as these paradigms are becoming, they should not be applied thoughtlessly as formulae. Context matters. Technocratic solutions which assume a well-functioning state and regulatory system and developed institutions can come unstuck in the absence of those. It is thus vital to experiment and learn, as the Chinese have done. Thus, India’s battle for a better lot for its people is barely half done, or may be even less.

The Indian portrait of the 2000's

India was erupt­ing in dreams.

It was the dream to own a microwave or refrig­er­a­tor or motor­cy­cle. The dream of a roof of one’s own. The dream to break caste. The dream to bring a cell­phone to every Indian with some­one to call. The dream to buy out busi­nesses in the king­dom that once col­o­nized you. The dream to marry for love, all the com­pli­cated fam­ily con­sid­er­a­tions be damned. The dream to become rich. The dream to over­throw the rich in revolution.

These dreams were by turns far­sighted and far­fetched, prac­ti­cal and imprac­ti­cal, gen­er­ous and self­ish, prin­ci­pled and cyn­i­cal, focused and vague, pas­sion­ate and drift­ing. They were tem­pered by coun­ter­vail­ing dreams and, as ever in India, by the dogged pull of the past. Some were chang­ing India pal­pa­bly; oth­ers had no chance from the begin­ning. But that was never the point. It was the very exis­tence of such brazen, unapolo­getic dreams, and their dif­fuse flow­er­ing from one end of India to the other, that so deci­sively sep­a­rated the present from the past – and sep­a­rated the India of the license raj systems from the India to which we now belong.

The Indian rev­o­lu­tion was within. It was a rev­o­lu­tion in pri­vate life, in the tenor of emo­tions and the nature of human rela­tion­ships. The very fab­ric of Indi­an­ness – the mean­ing of being a hus­band or wife, a fac­tory owner or fac­tory worker, a mother-in-law or daughter-in-law, a stu­dent or teacher – was slowly, gen­tly unrav­el­ing by the force of these dreams, and allow­ing itself to be woven in new ways.

Vegetating, are we?

Management has literally come to the marketplace. As retail chains line up across neighbourhoods offering one stop shop solutions to all our domestic needs, shopping for rations essentially turns into a task that’s as goal oriented as its time bound. So much so, that we run to the same super mart for buying everything from shaving cream to vegetables. Now, while most of us rejoice in the 5% rate cuts that are to be gained from picking up a packet of french beans, along with the detergent and frozen peas, what we fail to realise is that this discount comes at a price.

Buying at a retail store is a mechanical exercise that accustoms us to head to the same racks to pile in the same stuff and hear the beep of the barcode. It is a choice that we make to turn ourselves into robots, literally sucking the joys that our parents had the chance of deriving from a visit to the market place. Since the advent of convenience stores, how many of us have gone back to the local vegetable market. Back in the days of the venerable mandi, visiting it for rations was a part of the experience of cooking.

As human beings, our impulse is to feel and the experience is as important as the end result. From the unattractive manner of simply dumping vegetables into plastic racks to the fact that most of what arrives at these air-conditioned units is a day old or simply rotting in the artificial environment, the so called convenience of picking up your veggies from where you buy your facewash, can never compensate for what you stand to lose. All it takes is but one visit to your long forgotten vegetable mart to spot the difference. Brimming with energy and bursting with colours, these brightly lit environs are as welcoming as they are enchanting. It’s like being inside a photograph.

Picture rows of tin roofed shops with their wallpapered backdrops and brilliant bulbs. While you walk by, beaming eyes peer at you from behind columns of attractively arranged farm fresh produce. Every face tells a story and every story gets a face. Sounds of frenetic haggling, of shopkeepers persuading and helpers announcing the next big price slash intermingle with murmurs of private conversations and the cacophony of chit chats. This visit is momentous not just because of the sudden explosion of colours, odours and flavours that greets us round every bend but also because of a more sombre realisation. This twenty minute trot is perhaps the only time in the week when we look beyond our comfortable existence and interact with the other India.

Food becomes a great equaliser summoning everyone from princes to paupers and bankers to peons, to the same court. If we’re social animals who interact for inclusion and acceptance, every visit to the local mart is an exercise in community building and in feeling a sense of oneness with the mass of humanity that surrounds us. Pitched against million dollar enterprises, local traders wage a losing battle. Their invisibility makes us immune to their plight.

Protecting the local against the global requires an engagement that goes beyond words and translates into action. Have we ever dared to exact five rupee discounts from branded outlets to allow ourselves to reclaim those from the needy? How many decades old, round the corner shops have we seen perish in our lifetime? Do we want our children to lead such mechanical lives devoid of life’s simple pleasures? Adventure lies in surprises .You don’t necessarily have to turn a robot and shop mechanically at the retail chain and wince about that weekend in Goa. Adventure can happen anywhere any day. Somedays it lies in seeking the best brinjals or in choosing to not squabble with a father of five and discovering the joy of giving.

Micro states and pan nationalism- strange times, strange worlds

A year ago, tiny Georgia tried to regain control over its breakaway enclave of South Ossetia. The Russians quickly expelled the Georgian army, to almost universal opprobrium from the West. South Ossetia, together with Abkhazia (combined population 300,000), promptly declared their ‘independence’, creating two new fictional sovereignties, and acquiring in the process all the official trappings of statehood: national heroes, colourful uniforms, anthems, flags, frontier posts, military forces, presidents, parliaments, and, most important, new opportunities for smuggling and corruption.

So far, only Russia and Nicaragua recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russian recognition was widely seen as retaliation for Western recognition of Kosovo (population 2 million), the breakaway province of Serbia, earlier last year.

A thousand miles to the west of Georgia is Moldova (population 3.5 million), which lies between Romania and Ukraine. Annexed by Tsarist Russia in 1812, joined to Romania in 1918, and re-annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, it seized its independence from Moscow in 1991. It is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organisation, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and various other prestigious international bodies.

Moldova’s claim to fame is King Stephen the Great, who defeated the Ottomans in a great 15th century battle. It also produces rather good wine. An enduring memory from my own recent visit to its capital, Chisinau, is the election poster of a local politician called Lupu, who holds a pair of spectacles to his eyes, whether to suggest visions or wisdom isn’t clear.

To get to Moldova from Odessa (now in Ukraine), one must drive through the self-proclaimed ‘republic’ of Transdniestria (population 700,000), a sliver of land on the north shore of the Dniester river. A clump of peeling buildings, rusting wire, and a filthy lavatory mark the start of Transdniestrian sovereignty.

Progress through this squalid, but well manned, frontier post involved the stamping of lots of documents and a liberal scattering of bribes, a process repeated on leaving the ‘republic’. A shadowy mafia-style company, Sheriff, owns most of the economy. It is said to have close links to the president and his family. It has built a giant football stadium in the capital, Tiraspol, which seems to be some kind of symbol of Transdniestrian virility. Unrecognised by the rest of the world, Transdniestrian ‘independence’ is secured by a Russian garrison.

The world’s population is about 6 billion. Suppose it was divided into independent political units of 2 million people each. That would mean 3,000 micro-States, each refusing to accept any sovereignty superior to its own. Of course, this would be a recipe for global anarchy.

Yet the trend over the past century has been towards a continuous increase in the number of small States, mainly owing to nationalist revolts against multi-national empires: the latest bout of state-creation followed the disintegration of the USSR. Even long-established States like the United Kingdom now have strong separatist movements. In its political life, the world has been regressing to a form of tribalism, even as its economic life has become increasingly globalised.

The equation of State with nation is the arch-heresy of our time. A ‘nation’ is, at root, an ethno-linguistic — occasionally religious — entity, and because it is through language and liturgy that culture is transmitted, each nation will have its own distinctive cultural history, available for use and misuse, invention and discovery.

The State, however, is a political construction, designed to keep the peace in an economically viable territory. There are simply too many ‘nations’, actual or potential, to form the basis of a world system of States, not least because so many of them, having been jumbled up for centuries, cannot now be disentangled.

Micro-States can never be made small enough to satisfy their advocates’ exalted standards of cultural integrity. So the unravelling of multi-national States is a false path. The way forward lies in democratic forms of federalism, which can preserve sufficient central authority for the

purposes of statehood, while respecting local and regional cultures.

Today’s upsurge of micro-nationalism is not just a consequence of the revolt against empires: it is also a revolt against globalisation. There is widespread resistance to the idea that the chief function of modern states is to slot their peoples into a global market dominated by the imperatives of efficiency and cheapness, heedless of the damage to non-economic activities. This feeling is strengthened when the global economy turns out to be a global casino. National assertion is a way of combating impersonal forces and remote authorities.

Globalisation promises too much in terms of welfare gains, particularly to developing countries, to be abandoned. But the lesson from the current crisis is that we will have to develop styles of global economic governance to manage, regulate, and mitigate the creative, but often disruptive forces unleashed by the global market. In the absence of an actual world government, this can be done only through cooperation among States. The fewer ‘sovereigns’ there are, the easier it will be to secure the necessary cooperation.

The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, which laid the institutional foundation for the post-war World War II economy, was made possible because the United States and Britain called the shots. When objections were raised to Cuba being put on the drafting committee, Harry Dexter White, the American representative, remarked that Cuba’s function was to provide cigars.

Such a cavalier attitude to the demands of lesser powers to be heard is no longer possible. But all this means is that the facades will have to be more subtle and the fictions more elaborate. Provided we do not deceive ourselves about where real power lies, let presidents and parliaments be three a penny if that is what makes people feel good about themselves.

Breaking News

The line between fact and fiction and news and entertainment has merged as 24 hour news channels pitch to survive in a free market.

The era of sedate looking anchors and sombre sets that characterised much of DD news broadcasts is long over. What liberalisation

and FDI flows brought to the television industry, specifically news channels, was a sea change in settings. Private players emerged slowly but surely with Zee and Star TV being the pioneers. Today, they find themselves competing for attention with two dozen news channels in a scenario where proposals for setting up several others are awaiting final clearances. What this plethora of news channels brought with them was the 24×7 format, hitherto unknown to the Indian audience. Now, while it was easy to retain audience attention for a half hour news update, it became equally difficult to do so in this new world order where channels remained on air throughout the day and programming was round the clock. Operating costs tripled and so did the TRP anxieties. Tabloidization of news became the unavoidable answer to churning out content in a cost effective manner .Traditional competitors thus, no longer limit themselves to rival news channels but extend to the GECs. In such a climate, questions about the integrity of news per se are bound to be raised. What we are witnessing then is a blurring of lines between fact, fiction, news and entertainment.

The television news industry is shaping and being shaped in turn by a ‘sound byte society’. A sound byte society is one that is flooded with images and slogans, bits of information and abbreviated or symbolic messages- a culture of instant but shallow communication. I t is not just a culture of gratification and consumption, but one of immediacy and superficiality, in which the very notion of ‘news’ erodes in a tide of formulaic mass entertainment. It is a society anesthetised to violence, one that is cynical but uncritical and indifferent to,if not contemptuous of, the more complex human tasks of cooperation, conceptualisation and serious discourse.

There is an economics behind the politics.TV advertising is the electronic linchpin of consumer capitalism: a relentless invitation to self indulgence and unlimited consumption. The 24×7 news cum fiction format supports these ends not just in its dependence on commercial advertising but also in its content which tends to celebrate affluence and acquisitiveness as normal, while ignoring activities such as voluntarism, community activism, political engagement or other pursuits that involve self sacrifice for larger causes. Stories on the India Auto Expo or panel discussions on which laptop is better are commonplace and often fuel complete shows like Overdrive and Newsnet2.0 while chances of spotting a piece on say recycling one’s mobile or the sarva shiksha abhiyan are hard to come by. Another factor to be blamed for this turn of events is the rising carriage costs that news channels have to pay which leaves very little for programming and content. This perennial fund crunch prevents channels from sending reporters to cover elections in the north east or engage in serious investigative journalism. The law of optimal allocation of scarce resources sadly works to favour the production of soppy page 3 news stories that are both low on effort and cost. Examples include the massive media coverage meted out to the Abhi-Ash wedding and the success of Star News’ ‘Saas,bahu aur saazish’.

With advancements in telecommunications and the internet, we have become an impatient society when it comes to information gathering and the 24×7 news format reflects that. Television is essentially a kinetic medium capable of changing images and subjects quickly. Unless it compresses time this way,it will lose out on viewership. However, this compression comes at a price. A fast forward effect is generated which demands quick and final solutions to complex and intransgient problems. Anchors like Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt make sweeping assertions and reduce issues to a numbers game always asking for a one word summation or a ten point tackle. Such a breezy and bulleted simplification of complex issues cannot be called news. It is entertainment.

Because 24×7 news traffics mainly in scenes and images that are highly localised in time and space and in words that must condense their messages to accommodate the medium’s visual dimensions and severe time constraints-it is also essentially a symbolic rather than discursive medium. The communicative function of symbols is to simplify. The Indian flag and Independance day news programmes evoke patriotism and not its moral ambiguities. Entertainment merges with news and facts with fiction. India TV recently used karate shots from Chinese films to illustrate the idea that the Chinese army is growing in strength and is therefore a cause of concern for India thus bollywoodising the news experience by adding some symbolic masala .

The 24×7 news format priviledges quantity over quality. With limited budgets and a vast amount of air time at its disposal,channels are pressured into taking up stories that are light and breezy; attracting eyeballs without the hike in price. So news channels will devote several time slots for airing stories on cookery,the fashion week and celebrity gossip. The addition of shock value to stories is a compulsory requirement for the medium because the murkier the details the better is the audience response. Also constraints over the time and finances allocated to each news story prevent a research into their historical past or analysis of the future. Most stories on the Naxals focus on the violence portraying them as terrorists without as much as backgrounding the backlash as a response to the decades of displacement and exploitation at the hands of the Indian state. TV news thus creates black and white caricatures of economic, political and social actors and institutions which can hardly be said to be corresponding to factual realities.

The blurring of lines between fact,fiction and news and entertainment is dumbing down audiences. 24×7 news television scales the world down to fit on the screen. It isolates us from the larger environment and our responsibility towards it such that ‘we see without being seen and hear without being heard’. Viewers are becoming increasingly passive and devoid of the zeal to bring about change, passing the dal and curry while viewing live images of the war in Iraq as if theres nothing unsettling about it. Of course there is the ‘sms your opinion in a yes,no and maybe format’ for tokenism but is this push button campaigning representative of an educated public and informed opinion or even responsible news programming, remains to be seen.