An Oxfam study released on Thursday put India's growth story in perspective: the country trails Sri Lanka and even Bangladesh on the development front.
HT Image
The findings did not surprise Planning Commission members Professor Abhijit Sen and Sayeda Hameed, who faulted the government's delivery system for the lopsided growth in the country.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
Hameed admitted that she had seen “failure of our schemes in Barmer, Malegaon, and Uttar Pradesh. People are suffering despite so much money being pumped into development.”
Sen emphasised the need to strike a balance between fiscal prudence and social responsibility. The issue, he added, was also debated at length at Wednesday's meeting of the full Planning Commission.
Both agreed that the government machinery alone should not be blamed for the mess. They sought greater participation of the people in development. For example, "government schemes have brought improvement in states like Kerala and Himachal Pradesh where people participation is high," Hameed said.
Swati Narayan, author of the Oxfam report, said that in Bangladesh the infant mortality rate had fallen by two-thirds in the last few decades and enrolment in primary schools had risen from 73 per cent to almost 100 per cent. In India, 14 million children are still out of school.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
{{^usCountry}}
The report cites a comparative study between Bangladesh and Pakistan and Kerala and Bihar to emphasise the need for people's participation. Bangladesh and Pakistan have similar incomes, but the former has reduced infant mortality rate by two-thirds. In Pakistan, the infant mortality rate is as high as 60%. Kerala is doing much better than Bihar in basic human indicators, the report stated.
{{/usCountry}}
{{#usCountry}}
The report cites a comparative study between Bangladesh and Pakistan and Kerala and Bihar to emphasise the need for people's participation. Bangladesh and Pakistan have similar incomes, but the former has reduced infant mortality rate by two-thirds. In Pakistan, the infant mortality rate is as high as 60%. Kerala is doing much better than Bihar in basic human indicators, the report stated.
{{/usCountry}}
India fares better than Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal, which have a bad record of death of pregnant women and infants and poor school education system.
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.
