Haves and have-nots (and Jantar Mantar)
How it all boils down to inclusion

Close to two decades of liberalisation has not only enriched the middle class but also expanded it. A range of business and services – IT and telecom, for example – has created jobs for millions and the families that were loosely speaking lower middle class in 1991 are now middle middle class and so on. The households without a landline phone connection then have two or three mobile connections today. Which is a welcome development – there can’t be two opinions about an 8.5 percent growth being better than a three percent one. There’s nothing wrong if yesterday’s luxury has become necessity today.

The problem comes when even necessities of life remain luxury for a substantial number of people – even as their neighbours or masters upgrade themselves to the next level of lifestyle. In other words, has the poor benefitted from economic reforms (or ‘reforms’) as much as the middle class? Have their numbers shrunk? Official statistics on this count are arguably tinkered, so let us turn to an official expert.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, leading the gigantic effort to draw the five-year blueprint for the Indian economy, has admitted that we have a long way to go when it comes to reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots. In a paper, titled ‘Prospects and Policy Challenges in the Twelfth Plan’ (delivered as lecture last year), Ahluwalia notes: “[T]he picture of performance on inclusiveness is clearly mixed. Both the extent of poverty and the lack of access to essential services remain serious problems.” He says there has been steady improvement in recent years. “Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that we have seen slower progress in ensuring inclusion than on accelerating growth and this contrast feeds the public perception that rapid growth has only led to a concentration of income and wealth at the upper end.”

“Public perception” is, of course, bureaucratese: by his own admission, it is the reality. The reality of “concentration of income and wealth” is arguably one of the many factors fuelling the current rage against corruption.

What does this economic inequality entail? It “fosters societal breakdown … by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering,” according to British social scientists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson.

In their book, “The Spirit Level”[see a Boston Globe feature from which this column is quoting], they point out that Sweden and Japan have relatively low crime rates and happier, healthier citizens as these nations have low levels of economic inequality. In contrast, they consider the US a basket case.

Wilkinson told the Boston Globe, “What we write in the book is that our findings fit the intuition of centuries, that inequality is divisive, and that’s what we’ve shown....We realised that this pattern applied to almost all the more common problems, to health and teenage births, to mental illness and obesity. The media is full of stuff about what’s going wrong in society, and what we’ve done is finally put the bits together, collate the evidence and put it out there.”

Seen this way, economic inequality is the common denominator to a whole range of problems India faces today. Corruption, thus, would be a mere symptom of some of them. While they are at it, the anti-graft movement leaders can do well to go to the bottom of the story.