High tech is skin-deep in India
NY Times, May 15, 2004 What India's Upset Vote Reveals: The High Tech Is Skin Deep by AMY WALDMAN NEW DELHI, May 14 - As India prepared to vote this spring, strategists from its ruling party mapped the country's first modern electoral campaign. They boasted of sending four million e-mail messages to voters and transmitting an automated voice greeting from the popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to 10 million land and mobile phones But the hype over the high-tech campaign obscured these statistics: In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India's 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 a day, only an estimated 659,000 households have computers. The message that the Hindu-nationalist-led government had delivered the country to a new era of prosperity was belied by the limited reach of the media to deliver it. That gap - the coexistence of a growing middle class with the growing frustration of those excluded from it - helps explain why Mr. Vajpayee's government has been turned out of office in the biggest upset since 1977, when Indira Gandhi lost after imposing a state of emergency. "It was a huge popular rebellion," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. In election results announced Thursday, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's coalition failed to win anywhere near enough seats to form a government. The B.J.P. itself, which a short while ago had been expected to coast to victory partly on the strength of an economic boom, emerged as only the second largest party. The Indian National Congress will form the government with smaller parties, including Communist ones. The Congress leader, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, now appears likely to become prime minister herself. To attribute the election results only to economic factors would be an oversimplification. Caste, communalism, alliances with smaller parties, anti-incumbency, and local issues and personalities all played a role. But it also would be a mistake, analysts said Friday, to underestimate the role of economic discontent. "It is a big warning for everybody," said Sudheendra Kulkarni, a senior aide to Mr. Vajpayee. Mr. Rangarajan called it a "victory of the common man and woman." The notion of a class-based backlash may surprise Americans lately inundated with news of jobs migrating to India and a growth rate expected to reach 8 percent this year. This still developing nation is indeed being transformed in many ways, but the transformation has yet to reach most of the population. The entire information technology industry here still employs fewer than one million people, compared with 40 million registered unemployed. Growth in the preceding five years has averaged only about 5 percent, nowhere near enough to lift hundreds of millions from poverty. And the policy reforms, like privatizing state-owned industries or allowing more foreign investment, that have helped unleash the economy have yet to help an increasingly struggling agricultural sector, which supports some two-thirds of the population. The B.J.P. and its allies fared poorly in all of the major metropolises, winning a total of only three seats in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta. But heavily rural states were their undoing, particularly in the south, which has decided the national government for the past 14 years. N. Ram, editor in chief of The Hindu newspaper, said voters "turned on those who were callous to it or perceived to be pro-rich or didn't do enough in a drought." Not only the B.J.P. suffered for this: in Karnataka, home to Bangalore, the center of India's tech industry, voters turned out the Congress-run state government. They did the same in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, a B.J.P. ally, had turned Hyderabad, the state capital, into "Cyderabad" by luring Bill Gates and others and trumpeting the ability of reforms and technology to transform the state. But because of drought and his own failure to invest more in irrigation or other infrastructure that could have eased it, Mr. Naidu's government lost this week as farmers turned on him en masse. That defeat was not hard to predict on a recent trip to the state, and in particular the rural district of Warangal, about two and a half hours from Hyderabad. Close to 300 indebted farmers have committed suicide since 1997, according to government officials. Statewide, nearly 3,000 farmers have killed themselves. Hundreds more have taken their lives in other drought-afflicted southern states like Karnataka and Kerala. The suicides have become a potent national symbol of economic angst, and in some states, including Andhra Pradesh, they became an election issue as well. With less than 40 percent of the state irrigated, and with an erratic power supply only 10 hours a day, farmers had no bulwark aga
Re: High tech is skin-deep in India
Sometime ago, I believe on pen-l, I questioned Brad DeLong's insistence that increasing aggregate income meant that "the people" were doing better, whether in India or China. I had not seen an indication that the BJP was in trouble before the election. India was, by all media accounts, an economic miracle -- even more so than China, but then the United States has always presented India as the anti-China. Trickle-down may work. The Industrial Revolution eventually, with the aid of massive Imperial victories, led to a rising standard of living for British workers, but as of many, many decades to happen. For perhaps a half-century, living standards may have decreased. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: High tech is skin-deep in India
Michael Perelman wrote: Sometime ago, I believe on pen-l, I questioned Brad DeLong's insistence that increasing aggregate income meant that "the people" were doing better, whether in India or China. I had not seen an indication that the BJP was in trouble before the election. India was, by all media accounts, an economic miracle -- even more so than China, but then the United States has always presented India as the anti-China. I don't see a necessary contradiction between a rapidly growing average income and a political backlash. First, we know that average income is not the best conceivable measure of average well-being (although there's some correlation). Second, distribution matters a lot, in part because of what Sen calls "positional goods" -- namely that people's individual sense of well-being depends not only on the average but also on where they are in the distributions -- plural because they take into account not only how wealth or income is distributed vis-a-vis their relatives, friends, or immediate neighborhood, but also in the larger community. Third, the change in these variables matters a lot -- and so does the speed of change. Fourth, the political cycle matters because people may time their actions to enhance impact. (Note that I'm not saying that we can find a nice function relating political backlash to all of these variables. Obviously, political dynamics is complex.) Rapid growth under capitalism shakes off all of these variables in complicated ways and leads to surprising dynamics. In Mexico, for instance, the Zapatista rebellion took place in early 1994, not in 1986 or 1987, when the country was at the bottom of its long debt crisis. In 1994, the economy was growing at a brisky pace. Of course, the military readiness of the EZLN was crucial in the decision, but -- that aside -- the Zapatistas timed the uprising to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA because of its symbolism. Marcos has made remarks where he frames the Zapatista rebellion as a reaction against richer areas of the country trying to pull way ahead of the poorest areas. In an interview given to Cristián Calónico (a UNAM sociologist) in 2001, drawing an analogy between nation and guerrilla, Marcos quotes Ernesto Che Guevara's famous phrase that the guerrilla moves at the pace of its slowest member. This is very telling. IMO, this operates not only for those on the boats that sink, but also for those on the boats the tide rises. It gives a good hint about the way the poorest and the not-so-poor in a community (and a nation is supposed to be a community) feel when some pull ahead without concern for the rest. I can think of many other examples. For example, the 1968 student movement in Mexico happened after Mexico's per-capita GNP had grown rapidly and with little interruption for 35 years. Consciously or unconsciously, the movement was timed to coincide with the preparations for the Olympic Games in Mexico City, which were meant to showcase Mexico's "economic miracle." The students protested against practices of police arbitrariness and government unaccountability that had been in place for decades -- and people had more or less accepted them as a matter of fact in previous decades because those generations had witnessed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1918). The huge demonstrations led to mass repression. Those who protested, high-school and college students from public high schools, colleges, and universities were being groomed at public expense to thicken Mexico's middle class. This was possible because, at the time, government finances were in good shape thanks to the "economic miracle." Charles Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that we get easily used to a better life but, by some ratchet effect, the alternative we don't take nicely. Long periods of stagnation make people more accepting of misery, but when the economy grows -- even if only on average -- then suddenly more people are in a position to expand their needs further and demand more. In a completely different context, I think that the speed with which the anti-war movement grew in the U.S., even prior to the invasion of Iraq, was related, not only to the shock of 9/11 (when people face death, they question themselves more deeply), but also -- to a very significant extent -- to the 1990s boom. The poor in the U.S. benefited from the 1990s boom, particularly in the 1998-2001 period. Higher employment among African-Americans led to a thickening of the so-called "black middle class," etc. IMO, the boom had the unintended effect of making people more demanding about the kind of foreign policy they can or cannot accept. The boom made people more assertive politically. That's one of the reasons why the worse-is-better school has it all wrong. Julio _ MSN Latino: el sitio MSN para los hispanos en EE.UU. http://latino.msn.com/
