Form of words:
TeaThe findings of the fifth National Family Health Survey make it clear once again that there are indeed two Indias, as comedian Vir Das has put it in his own way. India represented by Tamil Nadu has less than a third of reported diarrhea cases from India represented by Bihar. It has only 40 percent of infant mortality rate and 60 percent of fertility rate. In contrast, Bihar has only two-thirds of Tamil Nadu’s proportion of literate women, or doctors per 1,000 population, but the proportion of stunted and vulnerable children is 50 percent higher.
Yet, remarkably, both belong to the same India when it comes to household electricity and drinking water (between 95 per cent and 100 per cent). And when it comes to women with bank accounts, the gap is smaller than in some other metrics (92 per cent in Tamil Nadu, 77 per cent in Bihar). One would expect that, progressively, we would see more of the India that Tamil Nadu represents. But given the varying fertility ratios, we will have many more Indians whose living reality is Bihar.
Tamil Nadu of India, which includes most of southern and western India and states such as Haryana, has an annual per capita net income of around $3,000. This is 75 percent more than the national average for net income. India’s per capita income is slightly lower than that of Nigeria. For Philippines, Tamil Nadu is close to it. Bihar, with barely a third of India’s per capita net income, could be along with Niger, ranked 204 out of 215 countries and territories on per capita income and with the world’s lowest human development index. UP can be combined with Niger’s neighbor in the Sahel, Mali.
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So we certainly have two Indias – the Sahel region of Africa and coexistence in separate worlds with the Philippines. There is no point in comparing economic growth rates as the claims of state growth rates are even more unreliable than the national numbers. But it is easy to see that India is headed for private investment that can catch up with the Philippines, not the India that compares with the Sahel. What is the scale of public investment? You might think so, given that there are some infrastructure projects under discussion in UP. But the per capita financial transfer from the Center is less for Bihar than for richer states. And poor states have their own tax resources only with better states.
These two Indias are not coming close to each other even though their worlds overlap. UP has built impressive expressways and claims it will have Asia’s largest airport at Jewar, but Delhi’s existing airport has already handled the planned Jewar’s Phase 4 passenger capacity for decades, and is one of the five largest airports in Asia. There are airports. However, the actual catchment area of Jewar is not as much as that of the western UP hinterland of the National Capital Region.
The way the playing field is leveled for those living in the dark lands is through migration to more affluent places. Much of the country woke up to the scale of this east-to-west migration only after those millions of people moved east, hundreds of kilometres, back during the 2020 COVID lockdown. But now we have states like Haryana, which are against recruitment. The “outsiders”, not realizing that the people of India of the Sahel are willing to work for low wages, often in Dickensian working conditions, which would be unacceptable to the sons of Haryana. These latter want to belong to the glass towers of Gurugram, but don’t have the education to go there – because there are two Haryanas too. When you put both India together, there is not enough economic growth to create enough jobs; And less healthy, less educated Indians in places like Bihar will suffer even more if there is little chance of escape from migration.
By special arrangement with Business Standard
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