If India is going to make poor use of its talent pool, then its prospects for future growth are also dimmed, says Anirudh Krishna, Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Duke University, US.
Krishna, who visited the Madras Institute of Development Studies recently for the launch of his new book The Broken Ladder: The Paradox and Potential of India’s One Billion , says the book is, “The examination of the contradictions that we see all around us in India”.
“What is it, that explains the spectacular growth of GDP, the appearance of outward signs of progress and, at the same time, the reality of almost two-thirds of Indians living under the higher $2 poverty line? That’s what the book sets out to understand,” he says.
Explaining the paradox
Talking about his motivation to write the book, Krishna says, “After being an IAS officer for 15 years, I became a full-time academic researcher. I’ve been spending several months each year, living in villages in different parts of India, and in slums. For about 10 years now, I’ve had a home in a village in central India and I spend two to three months there every year. It’s the human stories that I heard and probed in all these places that form the bulk of the book. A lot of individual stories backed by the larger picture that comes out from research and policy documents.”
He says there are five major factors that explains the paradox between growing wealth and persistent poverty.
Rural-urban divide
The first is the growing urban-rural gap that has only become worse in the last 20 years. There is a growing urban-rural divide in education, healthcare and a host of other factors, he says. “All these problems are much harder to solve in villages, particularly in villages that I refer to in the book as being ‘beyond the 5 km-range from a city’.”
“Now, 50 per cent of Indians live in villages where the chances of talented young children coming up are stunted because of the under-supply of preparation. This is due to both a lack of achievement in the past and a steady erosion of the resource base.”
As the average farm size has fallen below one hectare over the years, most rural families send at least one member to urban centres to supplement the family income. “But due to the poor quality of education in villages and lack of preparation, these young people are unable to tap the opportunities available in cities,” he says.
Technological changes
The second factor is changes in technology and production processes. Given the rapid changes in technology, people from rural India find it impossible to get high-paying jobs in cities due to their low skill-sets. “So the path of imitating the West into a high-income nirvana is no longer viable for countries that are largely agrarian and have large populations.”
Downward vulnerability
The third factor is, “A high degree of vulnerability to downward mobility that lots of people in India continue to experience”. Krishna says that 3-5 per cent of people fall into poverty every year in India “because their lives are very uncertain, precarious and risk-prone”. This is because most people — almost 90 per cent — work in the informal sector with no job security and social security benefits, and high healthcare costs.
“In an earlier book I wrote, I showed that up to a third of the present poor people were not born poor but have become poor,” says Krishna.
Poor governance
The poor quality of governance at the grassroots is the fourth factor that causes the persistent urban-rural divide.
“The focus of administrative reforms has, so far, been at the policy-making level. But for 95 per cent of the people, their interaction with government officials is not at the Secretary or Chief Ministerial level but largely with the local patwari , the agricultural extension worker, the local constable, the postman, and the like.
“Now, these low-ranking officials have, over the years, become severely demotivated. They just blindly implement the policies handed down to them in an uncreative manner. There is very little scope for the grassroots level official to see the situation on the ground and fashion an appropriate policy response,” says Krishna.
So the challenge is to add more meaning and prospects for creativity to the jobs of the the grassroots-level bureaucrats to turn them into a higher-performing force.
Beliefs and attitudes
The fifth factor, says Krishna, is the attitudes, beliefs and values that hold down people, and which are hardly talked about. The persistent caste and gender inequalities are reinforced by these beliefs and act as barriers to people's progress.
“There is a need to combine economic and social policies with a move to improve the attitudes based on more realistic assessments of what is really happening and what people really are like, through a greater experiential understanding of the lives of ‘others’,” says Krishna.
Dollar vs rupee economy
“In many aspects, India is being cleaved into, what I call in the book, the dollar economy and the rupee economy. The dollar economy is inhabited by urban professionals and business people, who are largely based in the big cities which comprise just 5 per cent of India but believe it is the real India. And the remaining 95 per cent is from the rupee economy and there is very little movement of people from the rupee economy to the dollar one. That ladder is broken and that is where the title of the book comes from,” says Krishna.
No magical solution
About solutions, Krishna says, “I don’t think there are any magical solutions to these problems. But the capacity to continually deliver solutions needs to be created”.
“In India, we find space-age wealth existing along with almost ‘stone-age’ poverty, which makes governance incredibly difficult. Along with solving 19th century problems like building toilets and housing, India also has to grapple with 21st century challenges like investing in space research, bio-tech hubs and so on. So India is, at once a rich country, solving rich-country problems and also a poor country, solving poor-country problems,” he says.
To solve these problems, no uniform, standardised solutions exist but what is needed urgently is empowering decision-makers at the grassroots level. So the ladder that connects the ‘stone-age’ and ‘space-age’ parts of the economy needs to be fixed if India is serious about harnessing its talent pool optimally, signs off Krishna.