If you want to assess a country's progress you should pick up the poorest from among the people and see how far he has gone up the ladder - so said Mahatma Gandhi.
The budget session of parliament, in progress, is a stock-taking exercise, not of economy alone but of other fields as well. With an array of liberal measures, India has more than doubled its growth rate which was once dubbed the Hindu growth rate of four per cent.
If Gandhi's criterion is applied, India is rich but unequal. Billionaires compete well with their counterparts in America. Millionaires in India are cheaper by the dozen. Yet the common man has made little progress.
Two reports emanating from official circles say that nearly 70 per cent of people live in dire, dismal conditions. The latest national Sample Survey says that the people in the countryside live on a daily earning of Rs8 to Rs12 (Dh0.73 to Dh1.10).
The amount has lessened by half from the time the report was published early last year. It is quite a steep fall in some 12 months.
This is apart from the suicide that farmers are committing all over India, including rich Maharashtra and Punjab. The figure is one every half hour. (In 2006, the number of suicides was 7,006).
The villagers cannot clear the compound-interest debt because they have got enmeshed in the cash crop economy that cannot take the market's vagaries. In comparison, even a middle class person spends more in one evening at a restaurant than what a villager's family affords in 365 days.
As for the government, it would prefer importing rotten foodgrain to buying from the Indian farmers the same wheat at a remunerative price which in any case is less than one fourth of the world price.
The Central Vigilance Commission is looking into the import of 2.3 million tonnes of wheat at a far higher cost than was warranted.
After testing the quality of the wheat, it was found to everybody's horror that the imported wheat failed all quality tests. Gandhi had promised that there would be no tear on anybody's cheek in independent India.
Sixty years later, tears of helplessness and hunger do not stop trickling from the eyes of a large majority of Indians. Jawaharlal Nehru's socialism and Gandhi's self-sufficiency policy have clashed to give India a hotchpotch of uneven urban progress and scotched rural betterment. These signs are not that of a soft state but of a confused state.
The neo-liberal economic policy of the Manmohan Singh government has pushed aside the common man, whether engaged in small industry or retail business.
Influenced by public opinion, the government has introduced the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to give work or dole to a villager a minimum of 100 days of work in a year. The scheme has already been perforated by corruption.
List of denials
Rajiv Gandhi, when he was prime minister, said that 85 per cent of the money did not reach its intended target. However, the rural employment scheme is said to have awakened people to their needs.
The government can, however, take credit for the Right to Information Act (RTI). This has opened many doors, although the government, particularly in the states, continues to stall the information sharing process.
But it is not only the dearth of money or employment that is tormenting the people in rural India. There is a long list of denials. The public health does not cover them.
Teachers do not attend schools. Roads are few and barely passable. Land records are in a mess. The politician-cum-police backed mafias have come to wield authority at several places, with the connivance of the bureaucrats.
Yet the fact remains that the middle class has expanded to some 250 million people, more than the total population of Europe. They have all the money to buy goodies. But this class of consumers is still crazy about foreign goods.
A sad development is that the Indians are becoming traders and increasingly quitting the field of manufacturing. Many among them are outsourcing their production to China.
The purpose of growth should have been to spread gains wide so that even the ordinary person could reap the benefit. Apparently, Manmohan Singh, once a left-of-centre economist, has decided to convert India into a capitalist society, not realising that capitalism, socialism or any ism is a means, not the end in itself.
Disparities weaken democracy and make people desperate. Frankly speaking, in a poorly developed country, the capitalist methods offer no chance. Another budget, another exercise in stock-taking has gone awry.
Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP.
