In several pre-budget interviews featured in the media, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has stated that the Union Budget 2016-17 scheduled to be presented to a fractious Parliament and the nation on February 28, will focus on ramping up investment in the agriculture and social sectors — education and health — of the economy. This realignment of national development priorities is overdue because decades of rural neglect under the Soviet-inspired centrally-planned economic development model has precipitated a full-blown crisis in Indian agriculture, which precariously sustains two-thirds of the country’s population, and is inexorably destabilising the Indian economy.
Unfortunately, there is insufficient awareness within the establishment — academia and the intelligentsia included — about the scale of distress in the rural hinterlands of the country. According to recently released official data of state governments, 3,228 and 1,002 farmers ended their lives by suicide in Maharashtra and Karnataka in the period April-December 2015, which translates into 16 suicides per day in these two states of the Indian Union of 29 states and seven Union territories. Although these two states are in the forefront of the grim harvest of farm suicides, evidence suggests that after three successive years of erratic rainfall during which the average annual agriculture growth has halved to 1.1 percent, other states of the Union are not far behind. It’s highly probable that over 100 impoverished farmers unable to bear the burden of indebtedness, are killing themselves everyday countrywide, leaving behind hapless widows and hundreds of orphaned children. Falling demand for manufactures and consumer goods in rural
India is a major factor behind crashing stock markets, creeping stagflation and rising unemployment.
Regrettably, the Central and state governments have only exacerbated the situation by raising the compensation paid out to families of farmers ending their lives from Rs.2 lakh to Rs.5 lakh. This ill-conceived solution has perhaps incentivised debt-related suicides and prompted prolonged enquiries into the cause of death, making a bad situation worse for dependents.
The deep-rooted causes of rural distress that need urgent attention of government policymakers and civil society organisations are poor schooling in rural government primaries; inadequate access to healthcare; almost total absence of law and justice machinery; unchecked official corruption, especially in irrigation projects; lack of insurance and bank credit and policy roadblocks preventing the establishment of a viable downstream food processing industry which has long depressed farm produce prices.
Boosting investment in social services and infrastructure — rather than sops, subsidies and loan waivers — is the prescript for transforming rural India and securing the future of the long suffering rural majority. Unless these issues are addressed and reforms in rural governance and development undertaken in right earnest, the Indian economy will never attain long-term growth and stability.
Preventing destruction of Indian science
The mixing of vedic mythology with science at the annual Indian Science Congress (ISC) held in Mysore from January 3-7 once again eclipsed debate and discussion about the pathetic condition of contemporary Indian science and technology. Presentations glorifying Lord Shiva as the “greatest environmentalist on earth” and advocating the physical and spiritual healing benefits of sounding the conch at ISC 2016, drew widespread derision from scientists and academics for damaging the already poor international reputation of Indian science and research.
Unfortunately, unproven and overblown claims about the prowess of Indian science in past millennia can’t paper over the slow momentum of contemporary Indian science. According to a Thomson Reuters Report (2012), India’s share of current global research output is a mere 3.5 percent (cf. USA’s 22 and UK’s 15 percent). In 2013, India filed a mere 17 patents per million population compared to 4,451 in South Korea, and its scientists and researchers published only 90,000 research papers (cf. 325,000 in China).
Ironically, a recent report of the US National Science Foundation reveals that India has contributed 807,500 scientists and engineers to American research during the past ten years, indicating that ground conditions in Indian academia and the 47 Soviet-style research academies established in post-independence India are not conducive for rational enquiry.
At the root of the dismal performance of Indian science is under-investment — India spends only 0.9 percent of its GDP (cf. 2.75 percent in the US and 1.9 percent in China) on science research — and continuous obsolescence of science education in schools and universities. An estimated 59 percent of secondary schools in the country make do without science laboratories while 68 percent of higher secondary schools (Plus Two) lack separate laboratory rooms. The condition of the country’s 35,000 colleges and 800 universities is no better with an estimated 30 percent of faculty positions vacant. Little wonder not a single Indian university is ranked in the Top 200 World University Rankings league tables published by THE and QS.
The BJP-led NDA government is tacitly promoting the cultural agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, by providing national forums to RSS ideologues to launch forth on the imaginary attainments of ‘Sanskrit science’. It needs to shift focus to real issues such as ramping up investment in science and tech research, building libraries, labs and lavatories in schools and colleges and abjuring government interference in academia to prevent the continuous flight of India’s best scientists and researchers to foreign shores. The prescription for realising prime minister Modi’s grandiose Make in India plans is not atavistic jingoist triumphalism, but sustained investment in science and research and reform of the education system.
