Just through reading Naipaul’s ‘India – A Million Mutinies’ the last of the trilogy on Naipaul’s travelogue in India and I wonder, as yet another year draws to a close, if Naipaul would have seen India in a different light from the India he saw in 1990. India then was standing at the threshold of an economic growth miracle to be fueled by the opening up of the economy and the easing away of the License-Permit raj. Naipaul would today have perhaps travelled more comfortably to the rural hinterlands of Punjab, been astounded presence of the ubiquitous Nokia handset in the hands of the boy who repairs tires by the roadside or by the spending power of the burgeoning middle-class in the glitzy malls but the million mutinies that he saw then would still be there.
Two decades later while the sense of ‘nation’ has grown (and we have the British to thank for this), the country remains as fractured as ever – factures that are both old and new. The political demography of the country has seen a sea change from the heady days of independence. The rise of regional parties and the pressures of running a coalition government – never an in-thing with the family driven Congress Party has thrown an entirely different set of challenges for the nation. The replacement of Brahmin power starting from the south and extending up to the north has brought forth a new breed of politicians and political ideology that has done nothing, just as Brahmin hegemony did nothing, for the economical transformation of the deprived classes – they remain in the same state if not worse even as the nation steps firmly into its next growth curve. The acute lack of governance (‘su-shasan’ as Nitish Kumar succulently puts it) at the federal and state levels (except perhaps states such as Bihar, Gujarat etc.) has widened old economic fractures and introduced more yawing gaps between the rich and the poor. Endemic corruption coupled with poor policy measures, lack of transparency and controls has seen a galloping increase in prices of essential commodities leaving a significant part of the populace without access to very basic food let alone a minimum balanced diet. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) estimate ranks India at a low 66 out of the 88 developing countries - a score worse than many Sub-Saharan African countries! While I find the WPI (Wholesale Price Index) an inaccurate measure to gauge Food Inflation (the middlemen and hoarders are the devils in heady supply chain cocktail) the following table (Inflation in %) gives you a sense of how prices have been on a sprint.
Items | 1993 – 94 | 2004 – 05 | 2010 - 11 |
Primary Articles | 7.9 % | 9.2 % | 19.3 % |
Fuel and Power | 4.2 % | 5.9 % | 13.5 % |