Quality of Life: India vs. China

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality-life-india-vs-china/?pagination=false

By Amartya Sen

1.

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value.

Dinodia/Stock Connection/Aurora Photos

Girls in a classroom in the Indian model village of Ralegan Siddhi, northeast of Pune, Maharashtra, 2006

It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth.

Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China.

Comparing India with China according to such standards can be more useful for policy discussions in India than confining the comparison to GNP growth rates only. Those who are fearful that India’s growth performance would suffer if it paid more attention to “social objectives” such as education and health care should seriously consider that notwithstanding these “social” activities and achievements, China’s rate of GNP growth is still clearly higher than India’s.

2.

Higher GNP has certainly helped China to reduce various indicators of poverty and deprivation, and to expand different features of the quality of life. There is every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic growth in India in order to improve living standards today and in the future (including taking care of the environment in which we live). Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way that “growth mania” is not.

GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country.

What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPTvaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income.

Of course, Bangladesh’s living conditions will benefit greatly from higher economic growth, particularly if the country uses it as a means of doing good things, rather than treating economic growth and high per capita income as ends in themselves. It is to the huge credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been able to do so much so quickly; the imaginative activism of Bangladeshi NGOs (such as the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution, and BRAC, a large-scale initiative aimed at removing poverty) as well as the committed public policies of the government have both contributed to the results. But higher income, including larger public resources, will obviously enhance Bangladesh’s ability to achieve better lives for its people.

3.

One of the positive things about economic growth is that it generates public resources that the government can devote to its priorities. In fact, public resources very often grow faster than the GNP. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the government of India (corrected for price rise) is now more than four times what it was just twenty years ago, in 1990–1991. This is a substantially bigger jump than the price-corrected GNP.

Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector”—health, education, nutrition, etc.—has certainly gone up in India. And yet India is still well behind China in many of these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even in relative terms, while the Chinese government spends nearly 2 percent of GDP (1.9 percent) on health care, the proportion is only a little above one percent (1.1 percent) in India.

One result of the relatively low allocation of funds to public health care in India is that large numbers of poor people across the country rely on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training. Since health is also a typical example of “asymmetric information,” in which the patients may know very little about what the doctors (or “supposed doctors”) are giving them, even the possibility of fraud and deceit is very large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust—a public interest trust I set up in 1999—we found cases in which the ignorance of poor patients about their condition was exploited so as to make them pay for treatment they didn’t get. This is the result not only of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of public health care in many parts of India. The benefit that we can expect to get from economic growth depends very much on how the public revenue generated by economic growth is expended.

4.

When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favor China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China.

Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped—and this has certainly been a substantial gain—to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licenses already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels.

Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage.

Could it be that India’s democratic system is somehow a barrier to using the benefits of economic growth in order to enhance health, education, and other social conditions? Clearly not, as I shall presently discuss. It is worth recalling that when India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard to convince those opposed to democracy that fast economic growth depends on an economic climate congenial to development rather than on fierce political control, and that a political system that protects democratic rights need not impede economic growth. That debate has now ended, not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India. We can now ask: How should we assess the alleged conflict between democracy and the use of the fruits of economic growth for social advancement?

5.

What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on which social conditions become political issues. Some conditions become politically important issues quickly, such as the calamity of a famine (thus famines tend not to occur at all when there is a functioning democracy), while other problems—less spectacular and less immediate—provide a much harder challenge. It is much more difficult to use democratic politics to remedy undernourishment that is not extreme, or persistent gender inequality, or the absence of regular medical care for all. Success or failure here depends on the range and vigor of democratic practice.¹ In recent years Indian democracy has made considerable progress in dealing with some of these conditions, such as gender inequality, lack of schools, and widespread undernourishment. Public protests, court decisions, and the use of the recently passed “Right to Information” Act have had telling effects. But India still has a long way to go in remedying these conditions.

In China, by contrast, the process of decision-making depends largely on decisions made by the top Party leaders, with relatively little democratic pressure from below. The Chinese leaders, despite their skepticism about the values of multiparty democracy and personal and political liberty, are strongly committed to eliminating poverty, undernourishment, illiteracy, and lack of health care; and this has greatly helped in China’s advancement. There is, however, a serious fragility in any authoritarian system of governance, since there is little recourse or remedy when the government leaders alter their goals or suppress their failures.

The reality of that danger revealed itself in a catastrophic form in the Chinese famine of 1959–1962, which killed more than 30 million people, when there was no public pressure against the regime’s policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy. Mistakes in policy continued for three years while tens of millions died. To take another example, the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care.

In a functioning democracy an established right to social assistance could not have been so easily—and so swiftly—dropped. The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years.

The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.² Whether India’s democratic political system can effectively remedy neglected public services such as health care is one of the most urgent questions facing the country.³

6.

For a minority of the Indian population—but still very large in actual numbers—economic growth alone has been very advantageous, since they are already comparatively privileged and need no social assistance to benefit from economic growth. The limited prosperity of recent years has helped to support a remarkable variety of lifestyles as well as globally acclaimed developments of Indian literature, music, cinema, theater, painting, and the culinary arts, among other cultural activities.

Yet an exaggerated concentration on the lives of the relatively prosperous, exacerbated by the Indian media, gives an unrealistically rosy picture of the lives of Indians in general. Since the fortunate group includes not only business leaders and the professional classes but also many of the country’s intellectuals, the story of unusual national advancement is widely and persistently heard. More worryingly, relatively privileged Indians can easily fall for the temptation to focus just on economic growth as a grand social benefactor for all.

Some critics of the huge social inequalities in India find something callous and uncouth in the self-centered lives and inward-looking preoccupations of a relatively prosperous minority. My primary concern, however, is that the illusions generated by those distorted perceptions of prosperity may prevent India from bringing social deprivations into political focus, which is essential for achieving what needs to be done for Indians at large through its democratic system. A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India.

This is exactly where the exclusive concentration on the rate of GNP growth has the most damaging effect. Economic growth can make a very large contribution to improving people’s lives; but single-minded emphasis on growth has limitations that need to be clearly understood.

1. 1

   I have discussed this issue more fully in " How Is India Doing? ," The New York Review , December 16, 1982; in (jointly with Jean Drèze) Hunger and Public Action(Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1989); and in Development as Freedom(Knopf, 1999). ↩

2. 2

   I discuss this in "The Art of Medicine: Learning from Others," The Lancet , January 15, 2011. ↩

3. 3

   I am grateful to Lincoln Chen, Jean Drèze, and A.K. Shiva Kumar for helpful discussion of this and related issues. ↩

Contradictions of ‘development’ in contemporary India

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/swapna-banerjee-guha/contradictions-of-%E2%80%98development%E2%80%99-in-contemporary-india?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_'2011-02-11+05:30:00'

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit?

About the author

Swapna Banerjee-Guha is Professor of Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,Mumbai. Most recently she publishedAccumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order(Sage Publications, 2010).

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit? A large number of Indians from various cross-sections are currently enraged about this crucial question. While official outlets make frantic efforts to project this tendency as a contradiction between modernity and backwardness and label anyone questioning the validity of the above development model as ‘anti-development’ or ‘unlawful’, innumerable lived experiences go on reflecting heightening inequalities and the increasing expendability of the poor.

Take the case of the resource-rich tribal heartland of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh located in central and eastern India. Mining areas in these states are enthusiastically being leased out to global corporations leaving the poor tribal community homeless; common lands and waste lands in several states that have been traditionally providing livelihood and survival means to the poor are being taken over to make Special Economic Zones; rich coastal areas with enormous bio-diversity are being handed over to corporations like Dow Chemicals for making chemical hubs; natural resources like rivers are being privatised for industrial and commercial purposes, like the Sheonath river in Chattisgarh. Examples abound. This ‘development’ process that rests heavily on displacement, dispossession and destruction of the environment is creating an irreversible production structure in favour of the rich that is actively supported by all major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and the like and facilitated by the neoliberal Indian state.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Specific areas in India – large and small, rural and urban - are being identified as global economic regions to carry out modern hi-tech corporatised activities. Essentially global, these new economic spaces (location choices are made by investing corporations) are carved out from existing agricultural areas, forest lands, mining areas, fishing zones, peripheries of metropolitan regions, villages, even slums and dilapidated areas inside cities. In the process of converting these spaces into newer ones, large numbers of farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen, in short a huge section of economically active but poor people are being displaced and dispossessed leading to fierce resistance struggles, inviting in response, state atrocities and violence.

The phenomenon has become pan-Indian: whether in Raigad in Maharashtra, Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, in Jagatsinghapur-Kalinganagar in Orissa or Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, the patterns are comparable. The official argument says that as the State is not financially capable of providing ‘world class infrastructure’ in a short time, it is necessary to invite private capital to provide it initially in chosen pockets that will boost economic growth in the surrounding regions. While private capital undertakes this task, it becomes obligatory on the part of the State to offer them concessions and subsidies, in exchange. Land acquisition for such global spaces is undertaken by invoking a Colonial Act of 1894 that says that the State is the ultimate owner of land and can take over any tract for ‘public purposes’ by paying reasonable (sic) compensation. Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy.

The vociferous state

This newer form of capitalist development depends on global finance and technology and a supportive neoliberal hegemonic discourse. It goes beyond the previous practice of disaggregation and production relocation in areas with lower social reproduction costs to an altogether newer design of total appropriation of space for a novel exploitation process. Set to mutate all existing social relations, it further modifies the non-Fordist labour process, transforms relations between the dominant and the dominated and alienates space-economies from their respective social realities to construct an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory. The common collective interest and the public good start getting negotiated away by ideological, political and economic power-plays that privilege individual accumulation, subordinating the common people and their rights in a way that is even used to underpin justifications for state violence.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Resting on a contradictory framework of inclusion (of the few) and exclusion (of the many) it materialises a multiscalar, uneven development involving integration of selective regions and sections of societies in a globalised market framework. A destructive ensemble of obsoletism and reconstruction diffuses across the old spaces, displacing the existing use values and altering the discursive as well as the material geography of such spaces, creating a solid, material background for intense conflicts. A typical neoliberal construction of space, place and scale is taking place in India that is reconstructing a new geography of centrality and marginality, making the issues of production and capitalisation of space extremely crucial. The resultant landscapes of conflict invite resistance and contestation from below by those whose livelihoods get jeopardised and who are systematically marginalised by the state apparatus in diverse ways that expose their vulnerability in the current order.

To identify the causal factors, one needs to look at the direction of India’s current economic momentum. There has been a far-reaching shift in her economic policy, facilitating ingress of global capital in all economic sectors, downsizing labour, outsourcing economic activities, and promoting an aggressive urbanism based on gentrification and privatisation. Based on exploitation of the product of labour, pillage of nature and expropriation of social property, such policies have a close connection with international financial institutions, the global corporate sector, and quite significantly, the major capitalist countries. The State, backtracking from its previous role of a provider takes a neoliberal stance, becoming a vociferous facilitator of private capital pitching heavily on a ‘politically neutral’ practice of developmental governmentality. While the country’s growth roars ahead at an annual 8 per cent, growth in regular employment in recent years is found to have exceeded not even 1 per cent. Quite logically India accounts for the largest number of homeless, illiterate and ill-fed people in the world.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Amidst the euphoria of creating a free market, in practice the contemporary policies are resulting in a dramatic intensification of a coercive disciplinary form of state intervention to impose a market rule that subjugates the majority and protects the ‘strong’. This is taking place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape in which newly emerging ‘economic spaces’ stand in conflict with inherited regulatory arrangements, providing a political arena through which subsequent struggles over accumulation by dispossession and its associated contradictions are getting articulated and fought out at various scales questioning the prevailing development path of the country, assuming a national character, often supported by pan-Indian coalitions of regional resistance groups, broadly/basically left oriented but not belonging to mainstream left parties. The resultant negotiating strategy of the neoliberal state creating multi-level contradictory spaces of conciliation, coercion and atrocity is significant in exposing the porosity of the state apparatus.

One needs to emphasise that the contextual embeddedness of the current exclusionist economic policy in India, produced at national, regional and local scales, are not only getting defined by the nexus of policy regimes, disciplinary political authorities and their regulatory practices, but also by resistance struggles, consolidated grassroots movements and mobilisation of progressive forces that are challenging the state sponsored corporatised development paradigm. Peripatetic global capital in collision with state power may exhibit its authority in controlling spaces and territories for some time, but the ongoing struggles clearly point at an emerging discourse in search of an alternate paradigm, based on a democratically oriented sustainable development practice.

For references and full development of issues see:

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (1997). Spatial Dynamics of International Capital, Orient Longman, Hyderabad.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2002). 'Critical Geographical Praxis: Globalisation and Socio-Spatial Disorder', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.37 (44 & 45), pp. 4503-09, Mumbai.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2008): ‘Space Relations of Capital and Significance of New Economic Enclaves: SEZs in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43(47), pp. 51-60, Mumbai

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2009): ‘Contradictions of Enclave Development in Contemporary Times: Special Economic Zones in India’ Human Geography, Vol. 2(1), pp 1-12, Massachusetts

Bhaduri, A (2008): 'Predatory Growth', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43(16), pp.10-13, Mumbai.

Bourdieu, P (1998): 'The Essence of Neoliberalism', Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998.

Brenner, N and N. Theodore (2002): ’Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 34, pp 349-379

Conway, D and N Heynen (2006): 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalisation' in Denis Conway and Nik Heynen, (eds.)., Globalisation's Contradictions, Routledge, U.K.

Cox, H (1999): 'The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation',Atlantic Monthly, March, pp.18-23.

Gill, S (1995): ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, Vol. 24, pp 399-423.

Harvey, D (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.

The monumental myth of vibrant gujarat

Deepal Trivedi (published in The Asian Age)

Nothing is black and white ever but Gujarat’s grey spots are getting frighteningly glaring. Last fortnight validated this again.

Narendra Modi’s beefy rhetoric stressed Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) had put Gujarat as top investment destination of 2008-2009 with 19.91 per cent of the country’s total investment coming to Gujarat in mid-June report.

Chief minister Mr Modi tomtommed on Twitter about being number one in providing vocational training and employment. A state official explained how Gujarat led the nation in providing jobs through employment exchanges. Out of the total jobs provided in India through employment exchanges, he said the highest, 72.77 per cent were provided by Gujarat, he contended. Soon, Gujarat will become the first state to have a Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) with bus stands competing in style and functionality with Curitiba, Brazil, which is home to the first and one of the most successful BRT systems in the world.

Did you know that the Gujarat government has promised that all 1,8,000 villages in the state will have all the facilities present in the chief minister’s chamber, that Gujarat will become the first place in Asia where villages will have IT connectivity," the official informed.

Gujarat is the No. 1 state in India when it comes to economic freedom index also. Economic freedom index means absence of government coercion or constraint in the production, distribution or consumption of goods and services beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty by itself, he explained adding he was indeed sorry for all those "pseudos" who fail to see Modi beyond 2002 riots. Modi’s vision is more important than his role, if so any in Gujarat riots, he earnestly explained.

Past is past and 2002 is history. Gujarat has moved on, he reasoned.

Admitted it’s a good to have great roads, uninterrupted power supply and world-class mall-multiplex culture besides Golfing societies and plentiful profit churning businesses. It’s a pleasant feeling to be in a state which is number one in so many sectors besides investment, infrastructure and industry. But the bad news refuse to fade in the background.

In fact, several of them. Here are a few samples which are dubbed as stray cases in an otherwise vibrant Gujarat. A 40-year-old pregnant woman went for her check-up to the G.G. hospital in Jamnagar. Two qualified gynaecologists along with the staff pasted a tape on her forehead that screamed her HIV positive status. She was then paraded in different wards of the hospital. Shockingly, none of the medical, paramedical staff who were aware that HIV status cannot be declared this way, objected to the woman’s public parade. The woman got her two-month-old foetus aborted because of her health condition, but the humiliation of public parade with a tape screaming HIV-seropositive will hang forever.

Little before that, a 12th grader, a brilliant science student with great career goals, left her home for tuitions when she was intercepted by three men posing as cops a little away from her home early morning. She and a male co-student were forced in the car and the girl was gang raped for 90 minutes before being dumped at the same spot.

This happened in Surat, Gujarat’s fastest growing economic paradise. The rapists filmed the gang rape on their mobiles. After the arrest, the police recovered about half a dozen "live" gang rape videos from them.

Because Mr Modi scores high on the luck quotient in developed but divisive Gujarat, some local media pithily put it that the rapists were Muslims feebly attempting to spare the state government of any blame about the law and order situation. What followed was worse. In the HIV positive case, the only positive action the state government initiated was to ask the doctors and nurses involved to go on indefinite leave. Sadly, in the last three months, 10 HIV positive persons have committed suicide in Gujarat after they were socially and economically ostracised. The No. 1 state did not offer them enough motivation to continue with their lives.

In Surat, the first response of the police commissioner was that the girl was a soft target for rape because she was with a male co-student. Indirectly hinting at the teenager’s character, the police commissioner craftily justified the gang rape. When Surat literally took him to task, the state government, just to avoid confrontation, transferred the police commissioner, Deepak Swarup.

Here is more to Vibrant Gujarat. The Annual Status of Education Report by Pratham, a non-governmental organisation, points out that Gujarat is worse than Bihar when it comes to education standards. The report, sponsored by Google, Oxfam and Unicef, categorically says that Gujarat students are behind their Bihar counterparts. The percentage of students who can read their textbooks, do basic subtraction, tell time or do basic currency tasks is much lower in Gujarat than in Bihar.

Several other reports also authenticate that Gujarat has been doing miserably in almost every index of human development. Gujarat’s developmental model and module has been questioned and dubbed flawed by several social commentators and researcher who have been casually dismissed as "anti Gujarat" or "pseudo secular". Infant Mortality Rate(IMR) in Gujarat was 69 per 1,000 in 1991 compared to 80 of India. While the national IMR became 58 per 1,000 in 2005, that of Gujarat became 54. So, while India on the whole really did much better to cut down its IMR, Gujarat’s performance was not actually impressive. The gap between Gujarat and India reduced because states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand fared much better than Gujarat. Experts stress IMR is a sensitive indicator of women’s status in general besides being a mirror of healthcare facilities for pregnant women.

A February 2007 Reserve Bank of India report put Gujarat as 17th among 18 large states when it came to social sector budget allocation. With 31.6 per cent budgetary expenditure on social sector, Gujarat dipped from 12th spot in 1991(then there were 15 large states category) to 17th of the 18 large states proving expenditure on social sector had considerably declined in Mr Modi’s regime. In the past, former President Abdul Kalam has also commented on the need for Gujarat to focus more on its social development index.

Mr Modi is described as an iconic leader with innovative thoughts. A leader for whom progress matters more than propaganda. Mr Modi’s resolve is to put Gujarat on top of human development index.

Resolution and reality, however, seems to have a huge gap which is steadily widening.