Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 150
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 151
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Warning (512): Unable to emit headers. Headers sent in file=/home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php line=853 [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 48]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 148]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 181]
LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Whose development is it anyway? -TK Rajalakshmi and Akshay Deshmane

Whose development is it anyway? -TK Rajalakshmi and Akshay Deshmane

Share this article Share this article
published Published on Nov 27, 2017   modified Modified on Nov 27, 2017
-Frontline.in

The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people.

THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in an economy. A combination of economic growth and redistributive justice ensues from the overall development of a State or a nation. Is Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development, touted as a model worthy of replication throughout the country, a desirable one to emulate considering the skewed impact it has had on indicators that constitute holistic and comprehensive development, which include the quality of human life? Whether the development the model propounds is “development” at all is in doubt.

Surveys conducted before the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 had claimed that 75 per cent of the top corporate honchos wanted Narendra Modi, who was then Gujarat Chief Minister, to be the Prime Minister. A PDF file available on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) website (bjp.org) describes the Gujarat model as a “vision that India awaits”. The file was prepared in view of the Lok Sabha elections with the tag line—Vote for India, Vote for Modi. The “vision” of the Gujarat model lists out “more jobs, low inflation, higher income, faster growing economy, better education, better safety and better life”. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections were fought and won on the Gujarat model agenda. Three years later, it is this model that is going to be tested in the Gujarat Assembly elections scheduled to be held on December 9 and 14. Irrespective of the outcome of the elections, it is pertinent to take a look at what development in terms of the overall quality of life has meant to the people of the State, including a look at those indicators that comprise the “vision that India awaits” as stated in the BJP document. As it appears, this model has not measured up to the yardstick of established development indices; “development” has been vulgarised to mean something quite different.

The BJP document claims that Gujarat has the “healthiest children” with only 38.77 per cent of them malnourished. It quotes a 2012-13 Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India report on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) to claim the State is ranked below five States having highly malnourished children—Bihar (82 per cent), Delhi (50 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (49 per cent), Rajasthan (43 per cent), Haryana (43 per cent). How does the description of the State with the “healthiest children” in the country fit it?

Apart from this interpretational travesty, a more recent CAG report on the “General and Social Sector” for the year ending March 2015 (Report no. 2 of 2016) conducted a performance audit of the Health and Family Welfare Department for the period 2010-15 in April and August 2015 and looked at the delivery of health-care services in government hospitals at the district level. The performance audit for Gujarat noted: “The sanctioned strength of all cadre of staff, including doctors and nurses remained much below Indian Public Health Standard [IPHS] norms in the test-checked district hospitals. The shortfall in the cadres of specialist doctors ranged between 29 and 77 per cent and that of medical officers between seven and 69 per cent vis-a-vis IPH standards.” The situation in the three district hospitals of Surendranagar, Godhra and Petlad was alarming as the shortfall was more than 60 per cent. According to the National Health Mission, “the IPHS are a set of uniform standards envisaged to improve the quality of health-care delivery in the country and have been used as the reference point for public health-care infrastructure planning and upgradation in States and Union Territories”. A Central government release on July 15, 2014, maintained that as health was a State subject, the primary responsibility of upgrading district hospitals to IPHS norms lay with State governments.

The performance audit noted: “Availability of beds in DHs [district hospitals] was neither as per IPH standards nor in consonance with the requirements.” The shortage of beds ranged between 52 and 73 per cent. “Audit observed instances of highly congested wards and patients lying on the floor; two patients were accommodated on one bed for transfusion of iron sucrose, and patients accommodated in the passageway due to non-availability of vacant beds.”

Not only this, the required stocks of essential drugs such as amoxicillin, diclofenac sodium, Hepatitis B vaccine, injection ceftazimide and insulin were not available for more than four months. Patients purchased essential drugs from the open market. The audit found that “Not of Standard Quality” [NSQ] medicines had been supplied by Gujarat Medical Services Corporation Limited and these NSQ medicines had been administered to patients.

Essential specialist services in general medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, radiology and orthopaedics were either not available or partially available owing to a shortage of specialist doctors. Similarly, accident, emergency and trauma care services were not equipped with essential equipment, the audit observed. Three district hospitals did not have intensive care units (ICUs) while in the rest of the test-checked district hospitals only one or two ICU beds were equipped with life-saving equipment. The situation was no different in civil hospitals. Higher neonatal deaths and maternal deaths, absence of life-saving equipment in the maternity wards of test-checked district hospitals, including instances of “patients on the floor”, were found in these hospitals. At the Surendranagar district hospital, the posts of paediatrician and gynaecologist were lying vacant since November 2011, and as a result the number of delivery cases had declined. In the maternity ward of the Surat district hospital, patients were seen lying on the floor. The audit report collected photographic evidence of the situation in these hospitals.

Various tests were not available in the diagnostic and imaging departments of the district hospitals and there was a lack of adequate referral management and infection control facilities. Interestingly, the audit report also highlighted the fact that the State government had an allocation of Rs.732.64 crore for building health-care infrastructure but it spent only Rs.580.08 crore, that is, 79 per cent in the period between 2010 and 2015. The audit found that the Department of Health Services had not conducted appraisals of the hospitals for conforming to IPHS despite the State government preparing a five-year plan (2012-17) for medical services and medical education in order to enhance the standards of health care services in district hospitals.

Health indices

“Health care services in a State can be evaluated on the basis of the achievement against the benchmark of health indicators,” the performance audit observed. The indicators, including crude birth and death rates, total fertility rates, maternal mortality rates (MMR) and infant mortality rates (IMR), were in some cases better than the national averages but “not among the front-ranking States of the country in terms of health indices”. The MMR at 122 and the IMR at 22 per lakh live births was rather high, falling slightly below the national average of 178 (MMR) and 44 (IMR). The IMR and the MMR for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, including the Under Five Mortality Rate, were all higher than the national average. The Human Development Index [HDI], a tool for measuring the overall development in a country, including social and economic aspects, placed Gujarat at number nine, according to the second India Human Development Report: Towards Social Inclusion (2011) prepared by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research. The top-ranking States were Kerala, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Punjab. The HDI, originally developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for its Human Development Reports, is a composite index comprising three indicators—consumption expenditure, education and health. States with high per capita income were found to rate better in HDI. Gujarat had slipped from the 10th position in 1999 to the 11th in 2007.

The economist Atul Sood and Jawaharlal Nehru University scholar A. Kalaiyarasan point out that the “healthiest children” claim and tag is not valid as midday meal and utilisation of the ICDS in the State was close to the national average but not among the list of the best-performing States. Expenditures on health and education were, again, not rated as good. Eleven States, including Kerala, surpassed Gujarat in health expenditure. In fact, Gujarat has been reducing the budget allocation for health care—it fell from 5.59 per cent in 2015-16 to 5.40 per cent in the 2016-17 (Revised Estimate) to 5.06 per cent in the 2017-18 (Budget Estimate). The public distribution system in Gujarat was among the worst in the country; not only was per capita consumption very low but the State had the highest rate of food diversion. Half of the poorest people in Gujarat did not get subsidised grain and it was the only State to register a decline in the per capita consumption of foodgrains.

Low unemployment, low wages

Quoting an Employment-Unemployment Survey of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, the BJP website in 2014 claimed that the unemployment rate in Gujarat was the lowest. In an article for Frontline (“Fiction and Facts”, April 4, 2014), Atul Sood and Kalaiyarasan pointed out that although Gujarat was the third most popular destination for private investment after Odisha and Chhattisgarh, the rate of employment was low. Even so, the share of “projects implemented” or “under implementation” had declined from 73 per cent in 2003 to 13 per cent in 2011. Between 1983 and 2010, they write, much of the employment, investment and projects were concentrated in the chemicals and petrochemicals sector. This corresponded with a decline in the State’s share of “investment intentions” from 20 per cent in 2005 to less than 10 per cent in 2011.

Rohini Hensman, a researcher and activist writing in Economic & Political Weekly (“Gujarat Model of Development, What would it do to the Indian economy”, Volume 49, Issue no. 11, March 2014), explained that employment growth was mainly in the informal sector and negative in manufacturing and services. Atul Sood and Kalaiyarasan, quoting National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data (Employment and Unemployment Round 2011-12), explained that the average real wage, for both regular and casual employment in rural and urban Gujarat, was lower than the national average. A 2016 paper by the economists Indira Hirway and Atanu Chatterjee, titled “Recent developments in Gujarat rural labour market: Critical Concerns”, showed that the unemployment rate in Gujarat among educated youths in the 15-29 age group was higher than the national average. The average wage rates for regular and casual workers were much lower than the national average.

A crucial component of “vibrant Gujarat” and the model of development has been skill development. The CAG conducted a performance audit of skill development programmes in the State between 2010 and 2015 to reveal shocking facts, including money lying unspent, fudged enrolment figures, low employability as well as youths getting paid at rates below the States’ declared minimum wages. Under the craftsman training scheme, it was seen that 4.14 lakh students enrolled but 21 per cent of them dropped out. In many of the Industrial Training Institutes, machinery was found uninstalled and instructors were not appointed.

Under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, a Central government scheme, the audit report found that while 45,000 candidates were to be trained by Project Implementation Agencies, only 3,312 were enrolled, and only 587 candidates passed. About 1,060 telephone interviews were conducted by the CAG, which revealed that after training, 39 per cent had found employment, 24 per cent were self-employed, while 37 per cent remained unemployed. Of the candidates who managed to get jobs, 44 per cent were found drawing a salary of less than the State’s minimum wage of Rs.6,960 a month.

Education and literacy rates form important constituents of human development as they denote a certain level of access to education and literacy facilities. While literacy levels were better than the national average, the gender difference (Atul Sood and Kalaiyarasan) of 20 percentage points was higher than the gap in the literacy rate between men and women at the national level. The gap in the literacy outcomes, between those in the general category and the marginal social groups, again, was higher than the national average in 2007-08.

Sexual harassment

Safety of women is claimed as one of the hallmarks of Gujarat’s development. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) (Crime in India 2015) show that Gujarat is among the States where the crime rate against women has seen a decline, but the figures also show that there is a substantial increase in cases of sexual harassment against women. The crime rates of Nagaland, Sikkim and Tamil Nadu are lower than Gujarat’s. Apart from crimes against women, sex ratios are indicative of the prevalence of sharp gender biases and the prevalence of sex-selective abortions. The sex ratio of Gujarat was lower (919) than the national average (940) and so was the child sex ratio (890) compared with the national average of 914. Mehsana in Gujarat followed by Agra, Uttar Pradesh, have the lowest child sex ratio.

Please click here to read more.

Frontline.in, 8 December, 2017, http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/whose-development-is-it-anyway/article9968130.ece?homepage=true


Related Articles

 

Write Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Video Archives

Archives

Im4Change.org हिंदी वेबसाइट का परिचय. Short Video on im4change.org...

Im4Change.org हिंदी वेबसाइट का परिचय. Short Video on im4change.org...

"Session 1: Scope of IDEA and AgriStack" in Exploring...

"Session 2: Farmer Centric Digitalisation in Agriculture" in Exploring...

"Session 3: Future of Digitalisation in Agriculture" in Exploring...

Objectives | About Us | Workshops | Disclaimer
share on Facebook
Twitter
RSS
Feedback
Read Later

Contact Form

Please enter security code
      Close