India's "Non-Reform" in Three Short Stories

The government, in its classic "Move Fast and Break Things" fashion, decided to jam three major Farm Bills through the Parliament last week. These bills affect the well-being and livelihood of more than half the country employed in the sector, but the government decided that it could not spare a few days' worth of debate and deliberation before enacting their "sweeping reforms". And for a change, I don't really mind it.

My lack of concern on the erosion of sacred principles of democracy has nothing to do with the contents of the bill. I have very little understanding of how these Bills might play out in real life. Reading op-eds and binging video explainers, I have realized that there are reasonable theoretical situations that can arise, and the entire exercise in reform might end up being another little more than a façade to enrich the wealthy. The counterfactual is equally feasible: opening the markets and de-monopolizing the mandis can liberate the farmers and generate substantial gains in earnings as well. But the fact remains that only time will tell.

So, what's my aim here? My purpose is broader. Instead of talking about a specific reform, I want to talk about reform in abstract - what it means, what it does, how it plays out, and what impacts does it generate. And to do so, I would narrate three stories. The first one is from a small village in UP, the second from Bihar, and the third is an excerpt from an interview. So here we go:

Open Defecation in an ODF Village

If you would visit the government's Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan website, you'd be greeted with a map of India - green from head to toe - declaring that all states, all cities and all villages in India have been declared Open-Defecation Free in 2019. This is indeed a great achievement - Open defecation is associated with the spread of germs, diseases, bad health and poor nutrition. But had it been this simple, it would not have made for a compelling story.

In a small village in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, a couple of government contractors and few MGNREGA laborers walk up to Ramila's house. She was in mourning, having lost her few-months old daughter to diarrhea a few days back. Her daughter was just one of the 350,000 children to die of this preventable disease in India in 2017, and her own story is no different from millions of families living in the lakhs of villages across the country.

So these contractors, she was told, had come to construct a toilet under the government's SBA mission. They would build it next to the house, and that she should not worry about anything. In the evening, the workers inform her that the toilet is ready, and head off.

She looks at the structure. It would be a stretch to call it a latrine by Delhi's standards. There are three walls, a cemented floor, and a granite slab that covered an underground pit in the center of the room. There is no sanitation facility or water connection. The money for all that has perhaps gone towards funding the foreign education of some bureaucrat's brat. But Ramila is not disappointed in the least. She uses a tarpaulin sheet to construct a roof and a door, and puts the room to use for storage. The pit serves as a fine place to clean clothes and utensils, and dung cakes are kept safe in the "latrine-to-be". she continues her defecation schedule in the open, even as her own daughter perhaps died of some of the germs emanating from this exact practice. One shudders to think how such sanitation (and such a deeply ingrained choice for open defecation) might be playing out in COVID times.

(This story has been adapted from Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Cost of Caste by Dianne Coffey and Dean Spears. Read the complete text for a compelling analysis of the problems of OD in India.)

How the Right to Electricity has Reduced the Brightness of Bihar's Cities

There is a certain oomph - an extraordinary aura - to the way PM Modi talks about his vision for India. A cornerstone of this vision is the project of electrifying every village in the country - a program that has apparently reached 100% success rate (just like the previous one) according to official statistics. With the most meagre increases in India's potential to generate electricity, we have apparently been able to supply the wonders of electricity to every single Indian village, and have fulfilled the principle of guaranteeing a "right to electricity" to all Indians.

While this story sounds amazing as well, it does not take a huge efforts to point obvious inconsistencies in the narrative. Let's start here: we still have power cuts in India. In fact, on an average, Indians receive just under 18 hours of electricity each day. Funnily, those who get electricity on subsidy receive more number of hours than those who pay full price. While these statistics might be biased because of a few states (like Punjab and Haryana's free electricity to farmers policy), the overall picture does not seem to reflect the attainment of electricity to the degree that a right would ensure.

The problem with this situation is not that the government is lying or the facts are fake. The problem is much deeper: Electricity just should not be a right. Unlike freedom and equality, Electricity is a market product that should be sold and brought at market prices. There is no good reason to conceptualize a rights-based approach to supply of electricity. In fact, there are several reasons to not do so. The first, and most pivotal reason is that when you call it a right to have access to electricity, you become more tolerant of theft, subsidies, fake connections, unpaid electricity bills, and runaway meters. When this happens, the marginal cost of supplying electricity shoots up, and the honest persons in the market end up paying exorbitant prices to accommodate the free-riders. Not only that, they are also faced with reduced number of supply-hours. The burden of such perils falls on small industries as well, who cannot run their businesses without running the meter lines. In order to operate without fear of power cuts, they are forced to spend on generators, raising working costs and making our industry les competitive.

And all this for a mere fancy slogan!

Reform by Shock, Stealth and Stupidity

A couple of months into the COVID-19 pandemic, as the country was opening back up up from the draconian lockdown, the states of UP and Madhya Pradesh announced sweeping "labor reforms". Yogi Adityanath, in a press conference, declared a no-holds-barred policy for the future, which scrapped away job security, removed rights to protest, increased workday to 12 hours without extra pay, did not raise the minimum wage, and pronounced a liberal hire-and-fire for the next three years. With the slight caveat that the declaration was unconstitutional and could not stand in court, the show was a clear invitation to industries t come and break ground in India's largest and most populous state.

I have often failed to understand what people mean when they talk about labor reforms in India. I find it tough to look around me and conclude that Indian labor is overpaid or over-secured in their job. If anything, I would imagine that labor reform would actually make labor more secure and guarantee insurance and paid leave. Alas, Yogiji differs!

When Raghuram Rajan was asked about this incident, his reply gave a sneak peek into how Indian reforms always work. First, as he points out, the UP government's decision reflected an utter lack of thought. Commissions upon commissions have given reasonable recommendations on how our Labor Code must be altered to make it more suitable and accommodating to the industry, but none of them advocate for the sweeping dystopia of slavery that was painted out by the state. However, in a bid to "shock" the country by the "suddenness of the move", the governments often look over the facts and advice in the favor of hastily enacting "reforms".

But, it is not as if the government does not have good reason to be hasty about these issues. It is tough to say that these reasons are political. Enacting such measures in a labor-abundant state would do little to help Yogiji's politics. The reason for haste are different. In particular, the purpose is to move stealthily.

For years, the prominent narrative about India has been that "we reform by stealth" - that any grand measure, by design, must involve little consultation and should be imposed overnight. This was true for demonetization, but it was also true for the reforms of 1991. In many ways, it is believed that discussion in a country as politically un-principled as India would devolve into a pig-fight - with mud flinging all over. No good reformer should, hence, consult - at least not if he wishes to actually bring in the reform.

And this statement is not without truth. For example, while the INC protests against the farm Bills, they had proposed the exact same measures in their manifesto for general elections in 2019. It is tough to digest that the protestation is not driven by politics.

In this article, I presented three stories that depicted how a reform translates into reality in India. Selfish actors, incompetent bureaucrats, crony capitalists, unprincipled oppositions, and poor awareness often make it tough to impose lasting change on the country. "Jugaads" often slip through the cracks of the system, and make it tougher for the country to get onto the right path. This is a uniquely Indian problem, and one that requires serious thought in policy circles. Education is our only hope to escape these traps of self-harm, maybe progress towards a future where we can reform with pride, and not with dissent.

- Vastav Ratra