India After Gandhi (121 page)

One reason for the continuing poverty is the government’s poor record in providing basic services such as education and health care. In 1991, the year the reforms began, only 39 per cent of Indian women could read and write and only 64 per cent of men. Here, India lagged behind not merely the developed nations of the West, but also some of its Asian neighbours: Sri Lanka had educated 89 per cent of its women and 94 per cent of its men, while the corresponding figures for China were 75 and 96 per cent.

The inability – some would say unwillingness – to educate all or even most of its citizens counted as independent India’s greatestfailure.
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In the 1990s, however, the government initiated a number of schemes to universalize education. First, there was the District Primary Education Programme, which focused on 250 districts where female literacy was less than the national average. A little later this was superseded by a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Programme to Educate All). The funds devoted to primary education from the public exchequer were increased, and there was also an inflow of money from foreign donors.

The government was pushed to be more proactive by an order of the Supreme Court directing all state governments to provide cooked midday meals in schools. Many children who entered primary school dropped out well before they got to secondary education. A high proportion of these drop-outs were girls withdrawn by their families to help with household tasks such as cooking, cleaning and collecting firewood. In Tamil Nadu, where midday meals had first been introduced, they had helped considerably in increasing enrolment. It was hoped that a country wide extension would encourage parents to send their children to school and keep them there.
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A number of innovative non-governmental organizations also entered the educational field in the 1990s. One NGO, active in the
poorer districts of Andhra Pradesh, was able to place every child from 400 villages in school. The NGO ran a ‘bridge course’ for those who entered school late (most of whom were girls) – giving them six months of intensive coaching before placing them in the regular curriculum. Another NGO was following similar methods among the slum dwellers of India’s largest city, Mumbai. They had opened 3,000
balwadis
(playschools), where children between the ages of 3 and 5 were taught to read and write. In these densely crowded slums, with space at a premium, all kinds of sites were utilized – temple courtyards, school verandahs, public parks, even offices of political parties. From the
balwadis
these children were sent on to regular municipal schools. By 1998, some 55,000 children had passed through this process, which was by then being extended to other cities and towns of northern and western India.
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Within the state system there was considerable variation in implementation and effectiveness. Schools in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were very badly run, with poor or non-existent facilities – no blackboards, no chairs, no toilets for girls. The teachers were uncommitted – rates of absenteeism were high – and the parents apathetic. Among the better-performing states were Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south and Himachal Pradesh in the north. The educational progress of this last state was both rapid and unexpected. Himachal was dominated by the Rajputs, a caste who had traditionally kept their women at home. It was also a hilly state, with widely dispersed hamlets, making schools hard to site and harder to get to. However, these natural and cultural disadvantages were overcome by the state’s administration, led by its dynamic chief minister Dr Y. S. Parmar. After Himachal was carved out of Punjab in the late 1960s, Parmar made elementary education a pivotal element of public policy. Public expenditure on education was twice the national average, while the teacher-child ratio was far higher than in other parts of India. Parents were quick to realize the benefits of sending both their boys and girls to school. Concerned families and capable administrators worked to ensure that the schools were well maintained, and teachers properly motivated. The results were impressive: while, in 1961, only 11 per cent of girls in these hill districts were literate, by 1998 the figure had jumped to 98 per cent.
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Although no other state performed nearly as well as Himachal Pradesh, the data suggested that the education sector was not as somnolent as it had once been. By the end of the 1990s the national
literacy rate had risen from 39 to 54 per cent for females and from 64 to 76 per cent for males. Behind these changes in quantity lay a fundamental change in
mentality
. Once, many poor parents had chosen to put their children to work rather than send them to school. Now they wished to place them in a position from which they could, with luck and enterprise, exchange a life of menial labour for a job in the modern economy. As the educationist Vimala Ramachandran wrote in 2004, ‘the demand side had never looked more promising. The overwhelming evidence emanating from studies done in the last 10 years clearly demonstrates that there is a tremendous demand for education – across the board and among all social groups. Wherever the government has ensured a well-functioning school within reach, enrolment has been high.’
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Where developments in education called for a cautious optimism, the outlook in the health sector remained bleak. Hospitals owned and run by the central and state governments were in a pathetic state: crowded, corrupt, without basic facilities or qualified doctors. And the political class seemed unconcerned. In fact, public expenditure on health was on the decline: in 1990 it constituted 1.3 per cent of GDP, by 1999 the figure had dropped to 0.9 per cent. At the same time there was a tremendous expansion of privatized health care which, by 2002, accounted for nearly 80 per cent of all health expenditure. This, however, was aimed at servicing the growing middle class. In some areas the poor were served by committed NGOs, but for the most part they were left to their own devices, going to local medicine men or village quacks to treat their illnesses.

Some statistics may be in order here. Average life expectancy in 2001 was a niggardly 64 years. In many states, infant mortality rates remained high. In Meghalaya, for example, it was 89 deaths per 1,000. India had 60 per cent of the world’s leprosy cases (about half a million); 15 million Indians suffered from tuberculosis, a number that rose by 2million every year. To these older diseases was added a new one – Aids. By 2004, more than 5million Indians were HIVpositive.
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In the popular mind it is the continent of Africa that is most seriously threatened by the Aids virus. In an August 2005 cover story in the prestigious Financial Times weekend magazine, a British journalist wrote that this perception was mistaken, and that ‘it will be in India, home to one-sixth of humanity, that the global fight against Aids will be won or lost’. There were already several localized epidemics; the worry was these would ‘mesh and contribute to a terrifying steepening of the
infection curve . . .’ Were that to happen, ‘all bets were off’ on India joining the league of the world’s economic powers. Besides, HIV/Aids was ‘not only a growing economic nightmare, but also a growing national security issue’, with military personnel five times as likely as civilians to contract the infection. The article’s concluding paragraph ran as follows:

India’s precarious public finances and under-resourced public system are in no state to cope with the colossal burden of a sub-continental Aids pandemic similar to that afflicting parts of Africa. India is at a crossroads in its fight against Aids and the path it takes now will be decisive for nothing less than the future of the world.
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One is tempted to dismiss this as merely the latest in the long line of apocalyptic scenarios painted by Western journalists – except that this time it was not famine or riots or apolitical assassination that would ruin India, but a killer virus. However, there is indeed a health crisis in the country, and it is not restricted to Aids alone. In the more sober but not necessarily contradictory words of a home-grown journalist, ‘India has stopped thinking about public health and has paid a very heavy price for that’.
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Economic liberalization has improved the lives of many millions of Indians, but has left millions more untouched. And there are also some Indians who have been
adversely
affected by the freeing of the market and the opening of the economy to the outside world.

Among those who have suffered from economic liberalization, the tribals of Orissa are perhaps foremost. Orissa is divided into a coastal region, dominated by caste Hindus, and a series of mountain ranges in the interior, where live a variety of adivasi communities. In the state as a whole the Hindus are in a majority, and they wield most of the political and administrative power. In 1999 Orissa overtook – if that is the word – Bihar as India’s poorest state. And among the residents of Orissa the upland tribals are the poorest and most vulnerable. Whether reckoned in terms of land, income, health facilities or literacy rate, they lag behind the state as a whole. The tribals are heavily dependent on the monsoon and on the forests for survival. With the woods disappearing,
and the rains sometimes failing, they have plunged deeper into poverty, as manifested periodically in deaths from starvation.
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The wealth in these highlands is mostly under the ground. Orissa has 70 per cent of the country’s bauxite reserves, and also substantial deposits of iron ore. These minerals are concentrated in the tribal districts of Rayagada and Koraput. In the past, these ores were worked by Indian public sector companies, but in the last decade they have been supplanted by private firms, domestic as well as foreign. The state government has signed a series of leases offering land at attractive prices to companies who wish to mine these hills.
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One of the more ambitious projects was floated in 1992 by a consortium named Utkal Alumina, which brought together Canadian and Norwegian firms with the Aditya Birla Group. This had its eye on the Baphlimali hills of the Kashipur block of Rayagada district, under which lay a deposit of 200 million tones of bauxite. The proposal was to mine this ore and transport it to a newly built refinery, which would process the material and export the refined product.

Some of the land to be used for these operations was owned by the government, but some 3,000 acres were cultivated by tribals. These saw no benefit in the project, which would dispossess them of their fields and give them naught in return. In 1993 a delegation of tribal activists met the chief minister and demanded that he cancel the lease. Their request was refused; instead, the government sent a team to survey the land preparatory to its acquisition. Over the next few years the tribals tried a variety of strategies to stop the project from getting off the ground. Employees of Utkal Alumina were prohibited from entering the villages. Roads were blockaded and marches organized to raise consciousness of the environmental damage that mining would cause. When the company constructed a ‘model’ of the kind of house in which they intended to rehabilitate the tribals, the prospective beneficiaries simply demolished it.
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On the other side, the administration was determined to go ahead with the project. They saw it as a source of revenue for the exchequer, some of this intended also for the coffers of parties and politicians. In March 1999 a group of social scientists from Delhi visited Rayagada and issued a report warning the Orissa government that, ‘unless the popular discontent among local tribals over the acquisition of land was properly addressed, this peaceful district may turn into a hotbed of Naxalite [Maoist] activity’.
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A year and a half later the veteran environmental
journalist Darryl D’Monte came from Mumbai to study the situation on the ground. He found the tribals resolute in their opposition. The mines, they told him, would ‘destroy the ecosystem of the Baphlimali plateau’. One adivasi leader said they would stop all vehicles from entering the area. ‘We are prepared for any consequences,’ he insisted, adding, ‘In a conflagration, anyone ought to be prepared to get singed.’ D’Monte noted that the government was equally determined to push the project through: ‘Over the past five years the district administration, in tandem with the police and politicians, has almost acted like the advance guard of the companies.’
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The conflagration came two months later, and tragically it was the tribals who got singed. On 15 December 2000 the ruling Biju Janata Dal organized a meeting in the area to canvass support for the project. Angry villagers refused to allow them to hold the meeting. Three platoons of police arrived to disperse the protesters, but were held up by a group of women. When the police
lathi
-charged the women, the men arrived to help them. At some stage the police opened fire, killing three tribals.
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The firing in Kashipur did not deter the state government. Encouraged by the growing international demand, they signed a series of agreements with Indian and foreign companies aimed at mining 3,000 million tonnes of iron and 1,500 million tonnes of bauxite over the next twenty-five years. No thought was given to the likely environmental and social consequences.
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As these projects began to take shape they too encountered popular resistance. To allow Tata Steel to build a factory processing iron ore for the Chinese market, the government acquired land in Kalinganagar at much less than the market rate. The protests of the local villagers were overruled, the land handed over and construction work commenced. In the first week of 2006 a group of tribals demolished the boundary wall, provoking the police to open fire. Twelve people died in the incident. The tribals placed the bodies of these martyrs on the highway and held up traffic for a week. Among the first to express solidarity with them were Maoist revolutionaries.
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