What is the real India?

Pankaj Mishra reviews the latest writings of Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, two prominent Indian economists. Sen is a Nobel laureate. I had thought that India had made many advances in the 21st century. But, if Mishra is right - and I have no reason to doubt him - it is the upper classes that have moved forward; it is still a backward country. Here are some excerpts from the review:

The 2011 census revealed that half of all Indian households have to practice open defecation. Nearly half of all Indian children are underweight (compared to 25 percent in sub-Saharan Africa), and as Sen and Drèze point out, despite a rise in literacy rates, “a large proportion” of them “learn very little at school.” Almost all Indians buy health services from private providers, exposing themselves to crippling debt as well as quackery. Inequalities have widened between classes, regions, and rural and urban areas. More worryingly, they seem unbridgeable owing to the lack of adequate education and public health. Not surprisingly, poverty declines very slowly in India, slower than in Nepal and Bangladesh, and unevenly.20 Calorie and protein intake among the poor has actually dropped.

“India today,” the historian Ramachandra Guha writes, “is an environmental basket-case; marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests.”22 Meanwhile, as Sen and Drèze write, the largely corporate-owned media, deeply indifferent to poverty and inequality, and reflexively intolerant of any remedial action by the government, produce “an unreal picture of the lives of Indians in general” by celebrating the fame and wealth of billionaires and cricket and Bollywood stars.

That drama is one of an elite that expands and is entrenching itself. Increasingly impatient with the rules and ethics of democracy, India’s ruling class today consists, as C. Rammanohar Reddy, editor of The Economic and Political Weekly, defines it, “of large Indian businesses, the new entrepreneurs in real estate, finance, and IT, the upper segment of the urban middle classes, the upper echelons among the bureaucracy, and even large sections of the media.”