Debasish Chowdhury
Ever since Prime Minister, Modi hit the roads of India seeking and eventually securing a mandate for the Gujarat model of development; development discourses seem to have become a familiar feature in almost all forms of gatherings whether that be a tea party at home or a public seminar. Generating much heat and little or no light, such debates usually end up bruising or boosting the ego of the participants.
With more than half of her citizens below 25 years and about 65% of her total population having an average age of 35 years or below, the decisive response of India in the last general election purportedly for development was along expected lines. The huge contingent of young citizens certainly equips India with a demographic positioning unparalleled elsewhere in the contemporary world. With her 65 million plus strong youth cluster, India, given the right opportunities, indeed is a power packed nation competent to redefine her destiny.
Yet, development for the many use and abuses of it is a hackneyed term in India. Poly cultural, multi-ethnic multi-religious India defines development using varied lenses thereby according identity concerns play a significant role in contextualising the developmental agenda to be put in place. Put naively, development as understood in India and for that matter in most of the developing countries, is political articulation of the occidental scheme of addressing poverty and related issues through non-socialist measures. Post Eisenhower and his rather ephemeral period of the domino effect phase of the early 50s in the bygone twentieth century, the term has lost much its original lustre.
The cold war era agenda of providing an alternative to arrest expansion and consolidation of socialist governments no more holds much forte post collapse of the erstwhile USSR. Political prophecies and anticipations do go wrong. The fact that socialist governments in Southeast Asian nations made little headway to raise any alarm in the capitalist world may not surprise many. Except the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and North Korea, formally recognised as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and an erstwhile Soviet-style socialist republic, national socialist governments are nonexistent in the region.
In a so called unipolar world of today, globalisation and an ever enhancing emphasis on free market economy is currently sweeping the nations all over. The GDP status of a nation that has a high or at least a rising value for this parameter, these days, assures the installed government there of her overall economic wellbeing. India and the entire Southeast Asian nations are no exception to this trend. And yet, as ground level experiences often reveal, the GDP status of a nation is not always a guarantee that everything is hunky-dory for her people. Interpreting development of a nation in terms of GDP alone may not always, given the social and economic disparities that describe the people of that nation, suffice to justify her overall wellbeing.
It may not be out of context to recall here that while neo -liberal economies have substantially endangered the welfare form of governments, it did not possibly succeed in effecting any commensurately compensating swing of fortune in favour of the socially and economically deprived sections of the society in the developing nations. Issues relating to access, equity and inclusivity as such continue to dominate the socio-economic discourses in these countries while it remains a bare reality that the benefit of the so far pursued developmental agenda with its stated intention to alleviate poverty and remove economic disparities for the larger segments of the society did not make much headway across these developing nations.
At the most, the capitalist free-market oriented developmental agenda have managed to only nominally expand the population base that could find access to, through fair or unfair means, increasingly larger national resource bases thus paving the foundation for making more and more primitive accumulation. Such primitive accumulations are often a consequence of activities that, by and large, count as legally and/or morally unacceptable. The large scale corrupt practices that describe the socio-economic canvas in most such developing nations have, almost without exception, contributed to generate few filthy rich at the cost of the larger majority. India’s evolution post-independence fits well into this scheme of things. As such, even though India houses one third of the world’s poorest, the count of her representatives in the Forbes list of hundred richest of the world too attracts attention.
India’s tryst with development as such had to travel a course that has been intriguing in many ways but was hardly a smooth ride. The latest move on demonetisation perhaps would count as one such bumpy turn. Not the first ever of its kind though, the demonetisation drive that delegitimized almost 86% of the available currency this time at one stroke indeed was a massive exercise. The move, we were told, would at one go unearth black money, cleanse the system from fake currencies and ensure stoppage of terror funding.
A month down the line since the November declaration, if officially released records are to be believed, much of that massive exercise, it seems, has yielded pretty little. With 80% of the delegitimized cash already back into the banking network with still a couple of weeks to go before the 50 days deadline expires, it appears that either bulk of the black money has found its way to legitimacy or that the volume of black money anticipated was actually far less than what is being told. The Nagrota terror strike, the new currency recovered from terrorists killed in encounter, firing across the loc almost on a regular basis post the November announcement effectively debunks the claim that terror funding is history now. The only silver lining one may see in this exercise is that circulation of fake currencies might have at least been temporarily curbed. That, by itself, is not a small thing to achieve though the price it attracted from the nation, even on a reserve estimate, appears far too incommensurate.
The loss from the lull, hopefully not a prolonged one, in the marketplace, the anticipated fall in the GDP of the year (CMIE estimates that the GDP will take a hit of about 1.28 lakh crore and may touch even 1.5 lakh crore mark by the quarter end), the huge loss of manpower days, the cost of reprinting and redistribution of the notes standing at a hooping 20000 crores if taken together, the net cost of the exercise would stand at around an outgo of 2 .0 lakh crores from the state exchequer as against a tentative recovery of about 80000 crores. Meanwhile, The serpentine queue at banks and in front of ATM kiosks, the near hundred lives lost in the bank counters in quest of cash seems to have erased the tangible gain from the leaving it clearly in the red even though assurances for the intangible gains from the exercise flowing incessantly from the proponents singing paean for taking recourse to such grand initiative continues to flood the social and other media spaces.
The claimed fastest growing economy of the world, as of now, has another major worry to tackle. The claimed growth did not match with employment generation. “India is seeing jobless growth. Last year” said honourable President, Sri Pranab Mukherjee in a recent lecture he delivered at St. Stephens, College, “employment generation is the least in the last seven years. Mere statistical enhancement of GDP is not satisfactory.” Coming as it is from our Head of the state, the observation deserves serious attention.
Technology helps to ease things out. The drive to go cashless therefore is welcome provided the required hardware to seamlessly implement the transition has been in place. Given that more than 90% of financial transactions in India are in cash; given further that 300 million Indians have no access to electricity and that only 35% of her population has access to internet services with only about 220 million of her 130 billion plus people possessing a smart phone, this attempt to move almost overnight into a cashless system is bound to have its own harrowing consequences. In a country that is yet to ensure providing primary education to a third of its children despite constitutionally committing to do so, dry statistics on progress do not really suffice. This latest and perhaps a little premature drive to go cashless may too eventually sink into history as another of the innumerable initiatives that promised India the moon and delivered only nightmares.
Besides, a largely tradition bound, sluggish and hugely heterogeneous society can hardly afford to transform itself overnight into a hardcore techno savvy capitalist one. A gradual transition from cash to less cash to cashless society would, in all probability, have resulted in much lesser bedlam than what the nation is going through at the moment. To go cashless may have its advantages but in the zeal to go cashless, let us not forget that our hard-earned money too deserve not to go for a toss.
…………..
Debasish Chowdhury is presently working as Controller of Examinations, Sikkim University.