India unable to spread benefits, lags behind

India is behind sub-Saharan Africa in environmental sustainability and social spread of economic benefits even as it is among top six countries for amassing foreign exchange since 1995, a United Nations report said.

Updated on: Apr 12, 2013, 24:44:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India is behind sub-Saharan Africa in environmental sustainability and social spread of economic benefits even as it is among top six countries for amassing foreign exchange since 1995, a United Nations report said.

The report pointed out that in case of environmental disasters, around 1,200 million people in South Asia, including India, will get affected as compared to 1,000 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent reports have indicated that India’s economic growth model is not environmentally sustainable and the report says that the “business as usual” model would prove environmentally disastrous.

India had witnessed high economic growth but was not able to spread its benefits across the population as some other low growth countries including African nations have done. China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh have shown that despite low growth, income disparities in these countries were plugged.

Rajiv Chibber, who presented the report in presence of reform oriented economist and deputy chairperson planning commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, on the other hand, said inequality in south Asia (read India) has increased since economic reforms were initiated.

Rehman Soban, noted economist from Bangladesh, said China and Korea was ahead of addressing inequality and south Asia was way back. He observed that China has leveraged its economic growth for poverty alleviation whereas India has failed on account of its “partly structured and closed” system.

Soban, from Cambridge, took another dig at Oxford educated Ahluwalia saying land was being appropriated for the industry without creating permanent benefits for dislocated people. “Many of these (dislocated) guys from Singur or Orissa land up in Gurgoan or Kolkatta as rickshaw pullers,” he said.

Ahluwalia agreed that lowe growth can result in more social gains and that was the driving force behind the UPA’s 12th five year plan (2012-17). “We have 25 monitorable goals for 12th plan which include social sector,” he said.

India’s bid to earn demographic dividend because of its may boomerang if it failed to create sufficient jobs for its youth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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