Unequal review: How India lags behind all South Asian nations except Pakistan

Narayan, an academic and activist, explores the how and why India’s performance is low on such development indices. Her research, which spans five years and covers four countries — India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka — provides a comparative perspective on development. Her research showed that India’s neighbours have comparatively worked harder to “dilute social inequalities”. This is intriguing, as despite having a democracy and stable institutions, and being a global power — such a shadow to our ‘growth and might’ is grim reality to imagine.

India trails behind Bangladesh and Nepal

In the Foreword to the book, Jean Dreze writes, “There is an adverse relationship between social inequalities and Human development.” He underlines that human development is an outcome of various forms of social cooperation, and when society is stratified based on various caste, class, faith and gender — such cooperation is difficult to obtain – which is perhaps the one of the major cause of poor performance of northern states like UP, Bihar, MP, Chhattisgarh on various development indices.

Nobody could have imagined that until it started to happen that Bangladesh would overtake India on child mortality, sanitation, school participation, nutrition and other Human development indices. It is strikingly astonishing that except for multi-dimensional poverty (MPI), for which India’s performance has been remarkable, it trails behind Bangladesh and Nepal on almost most of these indices. But India fares better in maternal mortality because of more incentives for families to get delivery in hospitals like cash rewards.

Narayan found that Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), which committed India to be open defecation free by 2018, was a “false optimism”. As per National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in 2019-21 India’s northern “half of the heartland states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh continues to defecate in the open.” While in the last three decades, toilets have more than tripled in Bangladesh, similarly in Nepal, by 2016, 85 percent homes had already built improved toilets. Though there were a few instances of draconian measures as well in Nepal. “In one of the villages, I discovered that the local ward office had even started issuing ‘toilet cards” to families who had functioning toilets at home. Without these draconian cards, no family could obtain any services from the local government — be it certificates for marriage or for birth or death.

Kerala, Tamil Nadu fare better

Economist Ha-Joon Chang noted, “…since the 1980s… a lot of ink was spilled in order to ‘prove’ empirically that countries which had followed neoliberal policies did well.” Narayan claims that her book “swims against that tide.” She cites some interesting interventions like the ‘little doctors’ initiative — a health education programme held twice a year in primary schools across Bangladesh. Launched in 2010, this novel child-to-child outreach programme trains students to learn about soil-transmitted helminths (STH).

Interventions like these have changed a lot in Bangladesh. Narayan’s book cites many such examples that proves how state interventions changed a lot on ground and helped states to fare better in terms of development indices. For instance, the southern state of Kerala, where a prominent programme called Kudumbashree (prosperity to family) has been active since the 1990s, similar to Jeevika self-help group in Bihar, which has formed nearly 300,000 Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups. About 4.6 million women from every second home in Kerala produce simple goods for household consumption and for sale.

“The southern supermodels analysis showcases that Sri Lanka and the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have had long periods of accelerated human development, even in times of stagnant economic growth,” Narayan writes.

High school dropout rates, unaccountable teachers

Every year, we read the Annual Status of Education Report that Pratham, an NGO, has been preparing; it shows how badly we have been performing in terms of education. Narayan’s research shows similar results — while in twenty villages of Panchagarh in Bangladesh, 90 percent of grade five students were able to read two levels of paragraph, less than half students in two districts of Bihar could read as fluently as Bangladeshi students. Not just that, a post-pandemic survey by Jan Jagran Shakti Sanghatan found that “only 23% children enrolled were present”. Narayan’s study concludes that 82 percent of students of private schools and 44 percent of students of government schools spend several hours on private tuition. While in Bangladesh and Nepal, on an average, 35% and 29 % take private tuition, respectively.

India’s school dropout rate is also high, where teachers are not accountable if students are not coming to schools. While in Bangladesh “if a child was absent for more than three days, the teacher had to visit their home and then submit an ‘absenteeism form’, containing detailed explanations, to higher authorities.”

Narayan’s book is remarkable and brilliant in many ways. Not only does it sidestep any sense of staleness, it also avoids the trap of monotony, and weaves a compelling narrative. It offers a simple yet brilliant analysis — stories to comparatively look at India’s journey to growth, where we failed and where we were successful. “Since 2016, when wealth tax was abolished, India has created more billionaires than France, Sweden, and Switzerland combined,” writes Narayan.

My only quibble from this book is that its later chapters appear to be out of sync as the author goes into history while comparing southern states rather than basing her analysis on current realities. The hook is missing in the last two or three chapters.