Not measure for measure

With a plethora of government departments and international organisations putting out so much statistical data in the public space, often contradicting one another, it is the government’s duty to clear the air with up-to-date and coherent statistical data linking social and economic indicators

Purchasing Power Parity or PPP has validated a long held surmise that the poorer countries are not as badly off as they are made out to be nor the richer ones as well off as they seem. A nominal GDP ranking puts India at tenth place while a PPP one pushes it up to third, behind the United States and China. The Big Mac Index of The Economist loosely corroborates. Travelling to expensive parts of the world from our country brings this home to us tellingly.

A 2011 issue of The Economist published a controversial piece — “Comparing Indian states and territories with countries: An Indian Summary” — which purported to show that for all its size and population, the economy of Uttar Pradesh was roughly just that of Qatar, and Maharashtra’s no bigger than Singapore’s, while that of Tamil Nadu was no larger than Angola’s — all very confusing and probably wrong when in PPP terms, India as a whole is placed third in the world. So, where do we stand and what standard should one pitch for to measure ourselves against the rest of the world?

A land of opportunities

We would be wise to guardedly settle for PPP. The world too has done likewise. India, like those of several other similarly placed countries, does have an economy worth several times larger than its nominal GDP indicates. This fact has not gone unnoticed where it matters, especially in the boardrooms of multinationals or corporate India which indefatigably seek to “add an inch to every Indiaman’s shirt tail”. Some strong endorsement for this comes from the management guru, the late C.K. Prahalad. Unsurprisingly, for companies like Suzuki and Honda, India has emerged as their largest market for cars and two-wheelers and Vodafone, despite an unresolved retrospective tax issue, is very much here to stay. India of course enjoys the sheer strength of numbers. Everything that happens here, as in China, has to necessarily be on a gargantuan scale — invariably in several millions. It takes an outsider to marvel at our scale and make us conscious of it. But the scale exists!

“The game changer will be when India configures the internal rankings of its States for global consumption.”

After China, India has more mobile owners than any other country. The smartphone revolution has just hit us big and India is more likely than not to emerge as the second largest market for that too. India is also one of two largest motorcycle manufacturers. The country continues its run as one of two largest producers of rice and a third of wheat as well as fruits and milk. Of course we know that in per capita in agro and dairy products, we are still way behind much smaller producers but are likely to get “there” thanks to developments in science technology. In all these segments India is sitting on the cusp of an opportunity. If the green revolution surprised us, managed right, the future growth in agriculture will astound the world.

E-commerce is another area we mistakenly thought we had lost out on. Just as we were despairing at the success of Alibaba in China, we now see serious investment coming into e-retailing. It is not for nothing that Japan’s SoftBank is investing heavily in Snapdeal; Ratan Tata, ever ready to spot an emerging opportunity, had bet on it much earlier. The best known of India’s e-retailers, Flipkart, has attracted significant investors too. Meanwhile, Amazon, even as it threatens to leave, is expanding its footprint here. India, it turns out, is a glass half full and filling rather than half-empty and emptying.

Social indicators and evidence

But before we start rejoicing we need to reconcile flattering national economic indicators with some very odious social ones. India’s ranking in the UNDP’s Human Development Report (2011) is 134. In gender inequality, it comes out marginally better but still a rotten 129th out of 187 countries. Then on the ease of doing business, India is a miserable 134th, pretty much at the bottom of the heap. So things are that horrible. Or are they only being made out to be terrible?

Given the scale of poverty in India, it is very difficult not to make these rankings stick and lot of visual evidence exists. Mukesh Ambani’s massive residence in Mumbai coexists with a sea of slums nearby. Get out of many of India’s airports, and most especially Mumbai, and one is confronted with every kind of misery one can think of. Stop at the traffic lights and the poor of India come knocking on your car window. The better off in our country live in sanitised islands of relative calm defended by the very kind drawn from the ranks of those it seeks to keep out. But as we all know, visuals, even powerful ones, do not so much reflect reality as point out the shocking that we tend to ignore or deliberately disregard.

Statewide indices for the world

The country as a whole is nowhere as bad as these indices show but together they do bring out that India is a poor bet only because we have been inept at better stating our strengths while unfailingly adept at inviting attention to our weaknesses. The question to ask is “should India be taken as a country at all for such indicators to stick”? India is more populous than the whole of Africa and roughly equal to Europe and the Americas combined on that count. We need a better way of being compared — clearly, it is absurd to rank the country alongside say Lesotho or Guinea Bissau — the first has a population of less than three million and the other two. Singapore, for all its achievements, is about the size of Bengaluru and its suburbs.

Apart from the absurdity of comparing apples with ladoos, such indices, as The Economist notes, “blacken a country’s name”. It can, as it states, also “spread like wildfire on the web”. India needs to proof itself against this by coming up with some convincing measures of its own that attract rather than turn away potential investors using available data without tweaking. A start can be made by leaving the country’s PPP ranking alone while more effectively highlighting and deploying region-wise as well as State-wise indices for everything, from gender inequality to ease of doing business as well as infrastructure and migration.

Internal rankings of States, as what a leading Indian magazine brings out annually, is so much like water off a duck’s back, that the game changer will be when the country configures the rankings for global consumption. This will become particularly important now when States are competing with each other for investments. This should also make State governments sit up and take note that governance matters. Chhattisgarh is an early mover here. It is carpet bombing the print and television media with advertisements that project it as an investment destination of choice, with a visionary Chief Minister as its efficient CEO. States with poor social indices will strive to match and possibly overtake the better off ones, creating a virtuous circle. Then, there is something called shaming that every State would like to avoid.

Migrant labour

The debt the richer parts of the country owe to its poorer places is one of the dirty secrets we hardly talk about, but look at the vacant eyes of an emaciated young security guard in Kochi or the young woman at a construction site carrying material up precarious ladders in Bengaluru, and you immediately connect to their homes far away.

Millions are spilling out of India’s poorer States to run services in the better off ones. Mumbai would not run for a day without migrant workers and Kerala — the entire State — would come to a grinding halt if the near three million from Assam and Bengal as well as U.P., Odisha and Bihar were to en-masse go elsewhere. The Government of India would therefore do well to bring out an annual State-wise status report on migrant labour detailing where they come from and the jobs they do and how much they contribute to State economies rather than ungratefully treat them as parasites. This should cool rampant xenophobia of the kind the Shiva Sena promotes and make us grateful for a borderless India.

We now learn that the government is about to release the religious mix of the country as brought out by the 2011 census. Leaks indicate that the number of Muslims has gone up marginally, but where? In its most miserable parts, where along with a majority of Hindus, most lead ultra squalid lives and are crying to get better. The most important message, that the Muslims even in very backward parts constitute the underclass, cannot be overemphasised though of course some migration from Bangladesh into Assam and West Bengal cannot be discounted.

We need statistics we can trust and be informed. Unfortunately, with a plethora of agencies, government departments and international organisations putting out so much statistical data in the public space, often contradicting each another, we have very little chance of being properly informed. It is the government’s duty to clear the air with up-to-date and coherent statistical data linking social and economic indicators. Only this can lead to more mature public understanding and reaction than one which suggests that Hinduism is in danger or Muslims are consciously having more children. In the noise, one can ignore that fertility rates have fallen among the Muslims too and if they too could derive the benefits of economic development through education, their numbers will fall just as fast. The last especially deserves to be widely known. In context, statistics can lead to better understandings; deployed out of context, they can kill.