India is booming, but as the Commonwealth Games brings the country to the world’s attention, can it bridge the dangerous divisions and inequality that hold it back?
TO GET A SENSE of the India that officials hoped to showcase at next week’s Commonwealth Games, before the event became mired in controversy, it is best to leave behind Delhi’s main stadium, with its collapsed footbridge, and head south. In the sprawling suburb of Gurgaon a dizzying transformation is taking place, providing as good a metaphor as any for the changing face of India.
Once little more than a cluster of villages in Delhi’s hinterland, Gurgaon is now home to swathes of the capital’s wealthy elite. Its inhabitants live in gated communities with such names as Malibu Town and Nirvana Country, where property is priced at more than 300 times the average Indian’s annual income. They work in gleaming glass towers housing multinationals such as Pepsi, Honda and Nestlé.
Drive down Gurgaon’s main artery, called Mall Road because of its endless stretch of shopping malls, and you could be in Los Angeles. With its call centres and software companies, sushi restaurants and designer outlets, this is the beating heart of a thrusting India buoyed by an economy expected to grow by nearly 9 per cent – double the global average – by the end of this year. This is the brave new India, powered by a burgeoning middle class and driven by superpower aspirations, that the world will find “impossible to ignore”, as foreign secretary Nirupama Rao puts it.
But you don’t have to look too closely to see the signs of a very different India among the glitzy malls where consumption is nothing if not conspicuous. At one busy intersection a scrawny barefoot boy weaves in and out of traffic, selling plastic-wrapped copies of Architectural Digest. Here and there are half-finished buildings where squatters have set up home. As dusk falls, the less fortunate hunker down for the night in makeshift tents beneath a nearby overpass.
The view from Gurgaon’s high-rises invariably includes teeming slums filled with families drawn from desperately poor villages on Delhi’s periphery.
Their India is a world away from the image of a booming nation that this week saw 17 freshly minted billionaires added to a Forbes rich list, or the “Incredible India” of the tourism advertising slogan. The India they inhabit is home to an estimated one-third of the world’s poor. It is a country where, government figures show, almost 40 per cent of the countrys 1.1 billion citizens struggle to survive below an official poverty line equivalent to less than €6 per month in rural areas and just over €9 in urban areas, a threshold that one Indian analyst says would be more accurately termed a starvation line.
In July, ironically on the day that India launched several advanced satellites, a UN poverty index calculated that the country’s number of impoverished people was higher than the figure for the 26 poorest African nations combined. Nearly half of India’s young children are malnourished, and more than a third of the world’s malnourished under-fives live here. Despite soaring economic growth since 1991, India has failed to reduce the prevalence of malnutrition. Meanwhile, affluent Indian parents fret about the growing trend of childhood obesity.
“There are two Indias,” said Thierry Geiger, an associate director at the World Economic Forum (WEF), earlier this month. “While there is widespread poverty, poor health and education facilities, and poor infrastructure in rural India, the other India is experiencing rapid growth.” He was speaking following the news that India had slipped two places, to 51st, in the WEF’s global competitiveness rankings, while rival China had risen to 29th.
The Commonwealth Games debacle, and the unwelcome international attention it has drawn to some of India’s deeper structural weaknesses, has acted as a timely reminder that the shiny edifice of what some term “India Inc” stands on fragile foundations that could jeopardise its future growth.
The shambolic run-up to the games has highlighted a public sector that, despite almost two decades of reforms, remains hobbled by inefficiency, corruption and incompetence, much to the chagrin of a vibrant private sector that considers itself world class.
It has also shone a spotlight on the challenge of overhauling India’s infrastructure – creaking in some areas, utterly inadequate or non-existent in others – to fit its economic ambitions. And it has thrown into sharp relief the shortcomings of a political elite whose commitment to addressing the country’s multiple woes has yet again been called into question.
MANY OBSERVERS SEEnumerous storm clouds gathering, one of the most worrying of which is the growing Maoist insurgency that has carved out a so-called Red Corridor across poverty-stricken central and eastern India. The stated objective of the Maoists is to overthrow a government that they claim – with some justification, as even some of their most virulent critics will concede – has failed to deliver equitable development. They have gained such momentum in recent years that the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has described their rebellion as India's greatest internal security threat.
More than 1,000km from the bright lights and highways of Gurgaon lies the tiny village of Takara Guda, in Chhattisgarh, a state considered the epicentre of the Maoist resurgence. The people of Takara Guda, mostly small-scale farmers who depend on crops such as rice and chickpeas, have become key actors in one of the hundreds of bitter land-acquisition and displacement dramas playing out across India’s mineral-rich belt.
Plans by Tata, one of India’s biggest conglomerates, to establish a steel plant in the area are being resisted by the residents of Takara Guda and several other villages under pressure to sell their land. Hidmo Mandavi, the village chief, is scornful of Tata’s offer of a job for one member of each affected family.
“What kind of work would we do?” he asks. “We have worked this land for generations.This is the only life we know. If we leave, where will we go? How would we survive?”
The question of how to survive in the new India is one asked with increasing urgency by the more than 70 per cent of its population that lives in hundreds of thousands of hardscrabble villages not unlike Takara Guda. The convulsions triggered by displacement constitute just one of the tragedies that have befallen rural India as it struggles to cope with harsh, often brutal, new realities.
Another is the fate of indebted farmers, thousands of whom have escaped penury by drinking fatal doses of pesticide.
For activists such as the Booker Prize- winning novelist Arundhati Roy, the mention of whose name often prompts rolling of eyes in official circles, the plight of those who struggle on the margins in villages and urban slums is the story of globalised India and its discontents. In a recent essay in the Indian current affairs magazine Outlook, accompanied by a front-page headline that sniped “Emerging Power? Ha!”, Roy wrote of “the refugees of India’s shining; the people who are being sloshed around like toxic effluent in a manufacturing process that has gone berserk”.
The prospect of wider instability looms large as disenchantment and resentment percolate among the millions whose lives remain untouched by the much-trumpeted miracle of India’s economic growth.
“There is a tremendous potential for violence, and that is exactly what is being tapped into by the Maoists,” says Ajai Sahni, director of the Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Management. “That potential for violence arises out of the extreme poverty, backwardness, marginalisation and isolation of a very, very large proportion of the population.”
India has always grappled with divisions and inequalities, whether between north and south, urban and rural, rich and poor, or women and men – and that’s not to mention the hierarchies borne of caste, clan and religion that inspired VS Naipaul’s 1991 description of “a country with a million little mutinies”.
While the changes India has seen since the start of economic liberalisation in the early 1990s have, in some cases, served to loosen the bonds of tradition, in others they have accentuated its faultlines. And unlike in the past, when villages such as Takara Guda were largely cut off from the rest of the country, the gradual advent of electricity in India’s more remote corners means that Hidmo Mandavi, and others like him, are all too aware of the excesses of boom India through TV shows in thrall to Bollywood glamour and the new rich.
“People are now realising the extent of inequality and the extent of inequitable growth and development,” says Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who heads Biocon, India’s leading biotechnology firm, and who is said to be the country’s richest woman. “A person who is living on the fringes is no longer ignorant of the fact that there are others who live very different lives . . . I think, therefore, you are going to find a lot of unrest and tension between the two economic sections of this society.”
Mindful of this, and the possibility that such a scenario may trip up its much-prized goal of a double-digit growth rate, official India’s mantra has become one of “inclusive growth”, but there is much scepticism regarding the government’s ability to translate such rhetoric into action. “There is a very strong realisation that things must change . . . but the problem is that there is a big difference between talking about something and doing something about it,” says Ajai Sahni.
In the bookstores of India's cities, numerous tomes offer prescriptions and bold visions for the future under titles such as Unleashing India, Making India Workand Imagining India.For Mazumdar-Shaw, who also acts as Ireland's honorary consul in Bangalore, the southern city often described as India's Silicon Valley, the solution lies mainly in improving education and ensuring better health provision. She believes there is much potential for job creation in meeting India's mammoth infrastructure needs, but admits that addressing the country's lopsided development will be a gargantuan task.
“You are dealing with a huge problem which you have just turned a blind eye to all these years,” she says. “And suddenly you are waking up because these people, who have been ignored and neglected for so many decades, are making it difficult for you to ignore.”
Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao believes there are lessons to be learned from China’s experience, with its focus on labour-intensive development and improving infrastructure. In contrast, India’s economic growth has been largely concentrated on services, creating better jobs for an educated, predominantly urban minority but failing to generate new opportunities for the wider population.
The number employed by its much-vaunted software companies and call centres remains small compared with the 50 per cent-plus of the population whose often precarious existence depends on agriculture. For this majority, promises that the prosperity enjoyed by the privileged few will eventually trickle down ring rather hollow.
In the meantime the two Indias grow farther apart by the day. The wealthy pay for private schools and healthcare, splurge in air-conditioned malls, and hanker for ever more ostentatious homes, such as the 27-storey residence, with a $1 billion price tag, being built in Mumbai by the multibillionaire Mukesh Ambani. The poor chafe under conditions that, according to several measures, are getting worse instead of better.
Bridging the gap between these two Indias is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the country today. “We are racing against time,” says Mazumdar-Shaw. “Because if we don’t act fast enough these problems are going to mount and escalate, and may finally overwhelm us.”
Young and hungry
Tracing India’s boom
Although only the 11th largest economy in the world, India is the second fastest-growing in the world, behind China. The genesis of India’s boom can be traced back to the early 1990s when then finance minister Manmohan Singh, who is now prime minister, introduced a series of measures to liberalise a moribund economy which had, until then, been characterised by what some disparagingly termed as “the Hindu rate of growth”.
Much of the bureaucratic architecture known as “the Licence Raj” was dismantled, tariffs and taxes were lowered, the economy was opened up to trade and investment, and globalisation was tentatively embraced. These reforms helped usher in an economic growth rate that has averaged more than 7 per cent since 1997, and fostered the emergence of a middle class now estimated to number up to 300 million.
Just over half of India’s working population is engaged in agriculture, while the services sector, which accounts for more than half of national output, employs only one-third of the workforce.
India’s overall population, currently estimated at just over one billion, is growing at 1.55 per cent a year, and many believe the demographic dividend produced by one of the world’s youngest populations will enable its economy to soon outrun that of rival China.
This series was supported with a grant from Irish Aid’s Simon Cumbers Fund
