9-20-05, 9:10 am

  THE Human Development Report (HDR) 2005, released this week, has placed India on a Human Development Index (HDI) ranking at 127 out of total 177 countries.  This was the same position that India held last year.  During the BJP-led NDA’s rule, India had slipped from a ranking of 121 to 124 and then further to 127. Mercifully, this decline has been arrested.  India’s rank on the Human Poverty Index is 58 out of 103 developing countries. On Gender Development  Index, India’s rank is 98 out of 140 countries.   The general decline in the  levels of human livelihood in India, we have consistently maintained through  these columns,  was an important factor that shaped the result of the 2004 general elections. The urgent need to address the core issue of improving the living standards of the vast majority of the Indian people, therefore, constituted an important element of the Common Minimum Programme of the present UPA government. This content reflects the present political correlation in India whereby the UPA  government cannot  exist without the support of the Left. The CPI(M) has been consistently advocating that the pro-people commitments made in the Common Minimum Programme must be implemented in right earnest if  the Indian people’s decline into deeper poverty and insecurity has to be arrested and reversed.  This requires the reorientation of the focus of economic reforms in India – a shift from being solely preoccupied with the corporate profit towards improving people’s welfare.    The Human Development Reports prepared annually by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has, in a way, substantiated this understanding.  It has underlined a fact that we have often repeated  in these columns that  human development advances cannot come automatically with economic growth. The HDR 2005 notes: “Translating economic success into human development advances will require public policies aimed explicitly at broadening the distribution of benefits from growth and global integration, increased public investment in rural areas and services and above all – political leadership to end poor governance and address the underlying causes of gender inequality.”   Further, the CPI(M) has been underlining that a positive impact of economic growth can  come only with increased investment  in social infrastructure.  The HDR 2005 vindicates this understanding for India by stating: “Overcoming the legacy of decades of under-investment in human development and deep-rooted gender inequalities poses immense challenges. Political leadership of a high order will be needed to address these challenges. Failure to provide it and to extend health and education opportunities for all, regardless of wealth and gender, will ultimately act as a constraint on India’s future prospects in the global economy”.   Addressing a larger question, the HDR 2005 poses the following: “Why has accelerated income growth not moved India onto a faster poverty reduction path?”  It notes: “The incidence of income poverty has fallen from about 36 per cent in the early 1990s to somewhere between 25 per cent and 30 per cent today. Precise figures are widely disputed because of problems with survey data.  But overall the evidence suggests that the pick-up growth has not translated into a commensurate decline in poverty. More worrying, improvements in child and infant mortality are slowing - and India is now off track for these Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets”.    Further, the report notes: “At a national level, rural unemployment is rising, agricultural output is increasing at less than 2 per cent a year, agricultural wages are stagnating, and growth is virtually `jobless’.  Every one per cent of national income growth generated three times as many jobs in the 1980s as in the 1990s.   “The deeper problem facing India is its human development legacy. In particular, pervasive gender inequalities, interacting with rural poverty and inequalities between states, is undermining the potential for converting growth into human development.   “Perhaps the starkest gender inequality is revealed by this simple fact: girls ages 1-5 are 50 per cent more likely to die than boys.  This fact translates into 130,000 ‘missing’ girls. Female mortality rates remain higher than male mortality rates through age 30, reversing the typical demographic pattern.  These gender differences reflect a widespread preference for sons, particularly in northern states.  ….About one-third of India’s children are under weight at birth, reflecting poor maternal health.   “Inadequate public health provision exacerbates vulnerability. Fifteen years after universal childhood immunisation was introduced, national health surveys suggest that only 42 per cent of children are fully immunised.  Coverage is lowest in the states with the highest child death rates, and less than 20 per cent in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. India may be a world leader in computer software services, but when it comes to basic immunisation services for children in poor rural areas, the record is less impressive”.    To tackle problems of such a dimension, it is absolutely imperative that the UPA government must undertake to urgently translate the commitments made in the Common Minimum Programme with regards to massive increase in investments in agriculture, health, education etc. The Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the rural health mission alongwith the  cess on education for increasing in this area are beginnings that need to be consolidated and strengthened with urgency. The Indian people expect this UPA government to move in this direction. The CPI(M) and the Left shall, exercising its strength and influence, urge the government to proceed faster in this direction.   At the global level, the HDR 2005 has, in a sense, vindicated, many aspects that were analysed in the reports of the CPI(M)’s 18th congress. The current phase of imperialist globalisation, we have maintained is simply unsustainable because of growing levels of poverty and alarmingly rising levels of economic  inequalities.  These tend to shrink the global market due to the declining purchasing power in the hands of the vast majority of the people.  This, in itself, acts as a  powerful brake on capitalist development itself, making current imperialist globalisation unsustainable.  The HDR 2005 reveals that: Of the 73 countries for which data are available, 53 (with more than 80 per cent  of the world’s population) have seen inequality rise.  1 billion people lack  access to safe water. 1 billion people survive on less than $1 a day. 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million people registered lower scores on the HDI in 2003 than in 1990. Fifty countries with a combined population of almost 900 million people are going backwards on at least one MDG. The richest 20 per cent hold three-quarters of the world’s income and the poorest 20 per cent hold 1.5 per cent of the world’s income.  The world’s 500 richest people have more income than the poorest 416 million people.  Exposing myth that international  aid to overcome poverty is the benevolence of the advanced developed countries, the HDR 2005 shows that “Tied aid costs low income countries $ 2.6 billion a year – a tied-aid `tax’ of about 8 per cent.”.   It also shows that the demands for raising the level of international aid to 0.7 per cent of the GDPs of the developed  countries (which is the estimate to eradicate poverty in the world) is less than $118 billion increase in military spending between 2000 and 2003.    At another level, the HDR 2005 reinforces the understanding reflected in these columns in the past regarding the WTO negotiations being highly favourable to the advanced  countries at the expense of the world’s poorest countries.  The report decries what it calls ‘perverse taxation’, under which the world’s poorest countries face the highest tariffs in rich countries, and examines the impact on the poor of agricultural subsidies and protectionism in wealthy industrialised nations.  Donor countries, the Report shows, spend $1 billion a year aiding agriculture in developing countries and $1 billion a day on domestic subsidies that undermine the world’s poorest farmers.  At the same time, the report warns that the European Union and the US are restructuring their subsidy programmes to limit the effectiveness of WTO disciplines.   The overall effects of agricultural protectionist measures and subsidies in wealthy countries, the report estimates, cost developing countries close to $72 billion a year – an amount equivalent to all official aid flows in 2003.   In other words, the HDR 2005 sharply exposes the growing inequalities and the immiserization  of the vast majority of the world’s population in this phase of imperialist globalisation.  Though the HDR 2005 talks in terms of a political will and a deeper commitment to eradicate poverty and offer better living conditions for the majority of  world’s population, it is clear that such a political will is in direct conflict and contradiction with the very character of  capitalist development.  As the 18th congress of the CPI(M) declared, the only alternative to this exploitative world  capitalist order is socialism.  The wealth  of information contained in the HDR 2005 amounts to a virtual indictment  of the global capitalist order.

From People's Democracy