The Indian Economy I knew – Or so I thought

This article was published in The Hindu: The View From Sitapur

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was a usual question I was asked as a child by several adults, to which my standard reply was, ‘A doctor.’ Now it was my turn to shoot this question at a young one and to have some fun. About 90 kilometers from the city of Lucknow, at the end of a smooth national highway covered by the bucolic country on its either side, is the district of Sitapur. Our frequent travels to this place entailed surveys as part of a research project in primary schools carried out by IIM Lucknow. Surveying students, teachers, and parents from 60 odd villages in this huge district was a behemoth task which our four-member team was able to perform in about 6 months. Almost every journey in the car was marked by either John Mayer or FKJ on Spotify, or by our intense discussions about economics and the Indian economy, wherein I would be the one to happily translate the jargon for the lone layman among us. I had thought I knew what the Indian economy looked and felt like until I reached Sitapur for the first time.

Coming from a metropolis like Delhi, the economy in my mind was represented by urban sprawl and ever changing infrastructure, shopping centres like Big Bazaar where one could procure monthly supplies from, smartphone apps like Uber and Ola which could miraculously transport me from one point in the city to another with a tap on the mobile screen, price wars between telecom giants like Reliance Jio and Airtel, Arun Jaitley’s vigorous attempts at making GST a success, Urjit Patel’s warnings regarding the hike in the MSP fueling inflation, and Prakash Javadekar’s revamping of higher education through the establishment of HEFA. But the moment we reached the first village of Sitapur in the Toyota Innova, I realized immediately that that was going to be an economy unlike any I had ever seen before, because the road simply refused to accept such broad cars as ours.

Driving through the curvy and narrow roads while carefully avoiding the Uber of the village, or the bullock cart, for about twenty minutes after leaving the highway, we reached the first government primary school. Having studied at Cambridge School throughout my childhood in Delhi, the memory of the school building with peach permanent exterior finish still gives me a lurch in the stomach. Though I had visited government schools before, I had to lower my expectations manifold for the other schools to come, for this one didn’t even have a finish on its exterior, let alone a permanent one. In fact, a part of the ceiling was hanging in mid-air and students were forbidden from entering that portion for fear of getting crushed by it. With nothing but disappointment for toilets in these schools, not connected to the sewers, where I had to fight cobwebs before attempting to discharge, most children (and unfortunately, even teachers) relieved themselves in the shrubs behind the so-called compound. ‘Do you prefer coming to school or staying back at home?’ was one of our survey questions for the 5-year old students. To my surprise, most of them preferred the former. Now the human development index of the economy can finally go up, I thought, for it could never have been good on a sample of people like myself who never liked going to school but preferred staying at home to watch Cartoon Network. Out of curiosity I finally asked one of them, ‘What exactly do you love about school?’ ‘The food,’ exclaimed the kid, ‘especially the tahadi (aloo ki tehri, as known in Sitapur).’ Well, health was still a dimension in the HDI, I consoled myself.

Right before our first household survey, I asked my counterpart at the client’s office to provide us with a detailed list of parents’ demographics along with their addresses for the sake of economizing on time. ‘Shiv, they don’t have addresses in villages’, she said. Cultural shock number one. Our car managed to make its way through the village which was filled with mud-houses. Have you ever watched the old television series Bharat: Ek Khoj? I was instantly reminded of the introductory episode that showed the houses built during the Indus Valley Civilization. Déjà vu. We were just strolling around the village to soak in its image when all the dwellers came out of their houses with suspicious looks yet silly smiles on their faces. They thought we were government officials. Cultural shock number two. We found one of the parents at the Big Bazaar of the village, namely the multi-purpose paan shop full of consumer goods brands I had never seen or heard of before, where he purchased a full-sized soap brick for Rs.5. I asked him if he was willing to be surveyed, but he didn’t seem to understand my Hindi ‘accent’. Cultural shock number three. About time I learned the Sitapur dialect. Once I felt I was good at it, I asked one of the students’ mother, ‘Tumhaar bacchan ke papa ka kaam karat rahi? (What work does your husband do for a living?)’, to which she replied, ‘Kachu kaam naahi. Bas khetan ma hal jotin (He doesn’t do any work. Only labours in the field)’. Cultural shock number four. Time to update my economics dictionary according to the Sitapur vernacular.

Throughout the 60 villages surveyed by us, I didn’t get to see a single bank or a health care center in their vicinity (except for the all-encompassing Anganwadi centers, where one could witness everything but pre-schooling). Upon inquiry with our local guides, I came to know that their establishment depended on the lobbying with the state government by a specific person. I had the (mis)fortune of meeting this very unique creature, called the pradhaan of the village. We met at the local wedding hall, namely, the government primary school. The mood, culture, values, and ethics of every village were set by the pradhaan alone. ‘The village has witnessed unprecedented development under my reign,’ he said, amidst the beautiful plastic cups and Styrofoam plates scattered on the floor from the previous night’s party. ‘Earlier, the children from our village had to walk miles to go to the school situated in the neighbouring village. Today, the situation is such that students from those villages come to our school,’ he said. True, the pradhaan can get work done if he wishes to for he is the village’s Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitley, Urjit Patel, and Prakash Javadekar, all-in-one. Even if it means partnering with MGNREGA contractors to withhold villagers’ payments by misinforming them that they weren’t disbursed by the government, purely for the sake of development. Whose development, remains the million dollar question.

Life in Sitapur is difficult, at least for people like us. If nothing else, it surely is distinct. It was customary for the helping staff at every government school to prepare tea for us. The problem was that everywhere it was prepared using a different kind of milk: sometimes buffalo’s, sometimes cow’s, while at times even sheep’s, depending upon the standard of living of the villagers. The latter two had a pungent taste because of which every time I had to cook up a story regarding me fasting for my imaginary wife’s good health in order to avoid going through the excruciating experience. One of those days happened to be karvachauth and I became the laughing stock of the school staff, but that was still preferable. A respite from all this came when the Project Associate at the client’s end informed us that we were to visit a private school. With the old image of Cambridge in mind, to my frustration we reached a half-constructed building for a private school. That was when I understood that the ones in urban areas are private unaided schools while those in rural areas are private aided ones that receive regular financial aid from the state government. Anyhow, students in either of those enjoyed life by either rolling cycle tyres with a stick or by sucking on a succulent shoot of sugarcane, unless shouted at by the teacher to come back to class. ‘Would the human capital model of economic growth be relevant in such a situation?’ I thought to myself. I wondered whether it would be worth the effort to uplift them from this low-level equilibrium only to bring to them the stress of modern life. On second thought, I wondered whether it was even a low-level equilibrium to begin with or just a matter of social relativity.

How any of this relates to economics or economy, you ask? Well, economics is the science of wealth: how entities in an economy earn a living, sustain themselves, and improve their living standards. While the Indian economist like me is worried about whether India would clock double-digit growth, whether inflation would be contained within the RBI’s target region of 2% to 6%, whether GST has led to formalization of jobs, whether foreign direct investment would get revived, and whether Trump would finally call off the global trade war, the average Sitapur man is busy dodging the puddles of rain water and heaps of cow dung on what could never be called a ‘road’, busy rebuilding the shack of a house that was ruined by the storm, busy double-timing his employers in both the field as well as the mill, and busy complaining to the paanwala about his children not helping him milk the cows because they ran off to school. And here I sit comfortably in my air-conditioned living room grumbling over the erratic Reliance Jio internet connection. There is an India we urban folk are used to living in and reading about in The Economic Times, a whole different one out there. It becomes all the more important when one realizes that such rural areas house around 70% of the nation’s population. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I asked a 5 year old school boy as part of our qualitative surveys, expecting the usual reply. ‘Sir, a driver!’ he said, ironically, with excitement.

Originally published on The Economic Pluralist.