India at 60: Republic of pending dreams

This week, the Republic of India will be 60 years old. There will be much celebration and there is a lot to celebrate: for surviving the predictions of colonial Cassandras, for sustaining democracy and for preserving the idea of India. But there is also much to lament about. No the lament isn’t about what India could not do but about what it could but did not do. The distinction is essential because often Indians confuse what could not be done for lack of resources or capacity with what did not get done because of apathy. The litany of failure could stretch for decades but let us look at the most basic ones.

When the Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution, India solemnly resolved to secure for all its citizens – social, economic and political justice. India also resolved to secure equality of status and opportunity. Did the successors of the founding fathers live up to the commitments made at the birth of the republic? Has India really delivered on the promise of the tryst with destiny? There could be many measures to judge India’s success and failure. The best would be to test how much of the promise embedded in the preamble was delivered.

The Republic has failed its people on both justice and equality, on delivering the basic standards of humanity. Remember this is a nation which defines the child as divine. One million infants die – every year – before they are a month old. For a perspective of how shocking this is, divide the figure by 365 days and then by 24 hours. Every hour 114 infants die in India. Add to this another million kids who die before they are five years. Now do the math. This is a country – which for all its tech capability, trillion dollar GDP and nuclear capability – allows 218 children to die every hour of the day. Life expectancy at birth, UNICEF data tells us, is better for those born in Iraq and Guatemala!

The founding fathers promised education for all under 14 before 1960. They also promised that children will not be exploited and forced into avocation (Article 45 and 39, Directive Principles of State Policy). In 2010 nearly 20 million children are out of school, every second child or over 80 million children suffer from malnutrition and 10 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are forced to work. And believe it or not there is not just the promise of Article 39 but a law since 1986 prohibiting employment of children.

The defining image of India in 1947 was the spectre of poverty and illiteracy. When India conducted its first census less than 18 per cent of the population was literate, rather over 300 million people were illiterate. Over 165 million people, nearly half its population lived below poverty line. The promise of social, economic and political justice and the commitment to equality of status and opportunity obliged those in power to place eradication of poverty and illiteracy as the focus of all governance.

On the 60th Anniversary of the Republic India can boast of a literacy rate of 74 per cent but cannot hide from the sordid fact that one of four Indians or 314 million people are illiterate. The shame is that even smaller countries like Thailand and Indonesia have beaten India on literacy. For those who may cite magnitude as an alibi must know China attained 74 per cent literacy in 1980s. India is now a trillion dollar economy yet neither the ratio of poor nor the absolute number of poor people has come down. Depending on which measure you adopt, over 400 million Indians cannot feed themselves twice a day – essentially every third Indian lives on the threshold of hunger. And don’t tell me it takes time. Indonesia which had a poverty ratio of 58 per cent in 1970 brought it down to less than ten per cent by 1990.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of the system’s failure and symbolic of shamelessness is the statistic on sanitation – 69 per cent of Indians have no access to sanitation. Doesn’t quite tell the story does it? Let us try again. World over 1.2 billion people who don’t have toilets at home defecate in the open. India has more people defecating in the open than all the countries put together. The number: 69 per cent of 1210 million. Of course every few months there is hoisting of lament and foisting of blame by declaring failure of governance as a “national shame” as if those tasked with the responsibility had no part in failing the nation.

How did India get here? Surely there is an element of feudal elitism that is responsible for this shameful failure. The run up to the celebration will see the projection of positives, what India has achieved despite the odds. Some of it is course true. There will be the inevitable comparison with China. Yes of course India can grow at 9-plus per cent. But is everyone growing? Agriculture which hosts six of ten Indians has grown at an average of 2.8 per cent across 60 years. Of what use is velocity which leaves the mass behind.

Perhaps it is time for introspection. And there is nothing like an anniversary to chin-wag on the future. It is time India re-looked at the tablet of promise and redid the route for a tryst with destiny.

The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own.

Shankkar Aiyar is a senior journalist who specialises in the politics of economics.