An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions

An Uncertain Glory is an analysis of India's stage of development. GDP is often the gauge we use for output growth but the authors take the view that what matters is the development of the lives of the citizens in a much more broad sense. They consider issues like health, education, opportunity, inequality and corruption and probe into how well India is doing in its provisioning for its citizens at large. The book discusses policy needs and what they see are myths and injustices about the economy. The authors are clear to argue that despite India's productivity boom, the boom has not been inclusive and despite the leaps and bounds the economy has made the basic services the country provide are severely lacking and have not kept pace.An Uncertain Glory is a look at India from the bottom up and from the lens of development economics. The authors use a large data set to show that despite its strong GDP growth India is a country that has many population segments which suffer poverty on par with that of sub-sahara africa. India is not a uniformly developed country, states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu having far superior literacy and developmental states versus states like Bihar. The authors do comparative studies on where India stacks up globally on things like child immunization, literacy, life expectancy etc and show the results show huge disparity within the country. They look at corruption and accountability and find them to be rampant and absent respectively. They look at education and discuss how absenteeism of teachers is at record levels and the solution is not based off higher salaries but a much needed revamped organization. They discuss the total failure of the health system and the state spending at levels that are unforgivably low. They look at poverty and social support mechanisms and discuss how they are largely absent though they make a point to advocate the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. They discuss the intrinsic class structure as a function of the caste system as well as inequality of the sexes and these have created a background of terrible inequality in India. The authors also argue throughout the book about the benefits of democracy and how development and democracy are not at crossroads but that democracy facilitates more consensual growth strategies. They do however feel that India's democracy and the media that pushes where agendas are focused is in the grips of the minority and the debate is held hostage to the issues that are more important to specific minorities.The authors believe India has made some achievements but that despite its economic growth its growth in the median lags the growth of the mean. India needs to focus on the basic provisions it provides so that the biggest asset India has, its human capital, will be included as well as drive India's development. This book is helpful in looking at India from the bottom up. The authors are careful to show how far India is lacking other countries in the provision of basic services. How to fix it is ambiguous but the authors give several directions and articulate the biggest headwinds which remain institutional. Having an accountable government is at the source of being able to reform and the authors feel India's government is lacking in accountability. The authors make a strong case for the need of a more inclusive growth strategy and the current policy faikures that India faces are shown extensively in this work. At the same time creating an institutional arrangement that allows for more inclusive growth is not sufficient as a goal right now. India also needs a hospitable business environment- as India needs foreign capital to fund parts of this stage of its development. Policy makers need to focus on improving the lives of its citizens but simultaneously realize that an improving investment climate and improving taxable income sources allows for budgetary adjustments to be made with much greater ease.

Sen and Dreze's "An Uncertain Glory" is a salutary and timely corrective to the "India Shining" meme propagated by the business press and other interested (and powerful) parties. An absolute treasure trove of real information on nutrition, education, health, gender equality and other indices of human development, this book is not "just another" analysis of the Indian polity and the existential difficulties of the majority of Indians. The detailed analyses, replete with easy-to-follow statistics make for a grim story of India's lag in taking care of its own citizens. Written with a clear sense of moral urgency, An Uncertain Glory asks us very provocative questions and relegates any hubris to the dustbin. Why is it that India's human development indicators rank below those of even far poorer countries like Bangladesh and on many indices, Nepal and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Further, do these facts conform to the typical middle-class Indian's assessment of his/her own country?You can't read this book and not change. You can't read this book and not work towards remedying the pitiful situation in which our fellow human beings live and toil.

Mildly repetitive and inevitably somewhat dry, nevertheless well worth the read if you want to understand why India is not the juggernaut that many, especially in the right wing press, have been warning us about. Oddly enough, this book is rather informative about our own country in the sense that we get so see what the US would look like if the Republican/Tea Party was able to fulfill its plan of unfettered industrial growth, education for the working people neglected and complete privatization of medical care. The US is not in any real danger of falling into deep, mass poverty but the description of policy decisions and their consequences by the authors cannot but remind readers of the politics of deeply red states like Alabama and Mississippi.

This is a deep, mature and thoughtful account of the little that is working in India, and the lots that have by and large remain ignored. Sen and Dreze in great detail construct a very humane study of all that India has missed out on building in its pursuit for economic growth. As a citizens of the country, one needs to pause, reflect and act in addressing the concerns raised in this book. Our drive towards the markets and slaving after it has clearly raised our profile in the international community, but like the book very aptly describes, our glory is lost to most of its citizens given the extent of disparity....layer this with the rising indifference of the well to do, and we are putting ourselves in a very precarious position as a country. Addressing health, education, the public sector and critical social indicators can do us a world of good, even if it comes at the expense of booming economic growth. I cringed many times as I looked at some of the data and commentary on how poorly we are doing on some of our social indicators. I am still left wondering though on how and when these issues will be a part of our mainstream narrative. This book should be a must read for those that are involved with building our public policy

Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen celebrate India's many democratic and economic achievements but also make clear its shortcomings in inequality and sexism.

Quite a meticulous analysis of the prevailing situations in this country of more than billion people with a third of them living without electricity and almost three fourth spending less than thirty rupees for meeting their daily expenses for living. This book can be harbinger to whole new idea of providing "intellectual eye opener works" to government of India through its shrewd, pioneering analysis of public policies and their implication on lives and well being of the population. A must read for true Indian who have empathy for his/her countrymen.

Half the book, roughly, is data. Cold data, that paint an unmistakable picture: India might be enjoying the second highest GDP growth of any country on the planet, but across a vast number of measures it is scoring no better than sub-Saharan Africa.Social indicators not only lag countries of India's GDP per capita level, but are simply abysmal. Here's an example: outside of sub-Saharan Africa, India is the sixteenth poorest country per capita. The authors turn the stats on their head by defining those sixteen countries as India's peer group. Among them, to be clear, India is the richest. Regardless, there are barely any measures, from life expectancy at birth, to child immunization, to access to a toilet (55% of Indians have to defecate outdoors, if you must ask) where India can hold its head up high compared with earthly paradises such as Vietnam, Moldova, Uzbekistan and Laos, not to mention how backward it's made to look by much poorer Bangladesh and three times poorer Nepal.Moreover, India seems to be rapidly falling behind. The authors rank India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka on 12 measures, including per capita GDP, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate, etc. and compare 1990 figures with 2011. India's average rank has only improved on a single measure (it has gone from fourth to third in GDP per capita) and has regressed or stagnated across the 11 remaining measures.The numbers themselves make you cry:43% of children are underweight26% are never immunized for measles26% of young women (15-24) can't readIt gets worse than that. India is far from uniform. There are states that look almost like the rest of the world, such as Kerala (human development index 0.97) and states that don't bear looking at. In Bihar, female literacy is 37%, a mere 44% of children can pass a simple reading test, 84.8 out of 1,000 children under 5 will die before they reach that age, in part because only 32.8% are fully immunized, and more than half the population is below India's unfathomably low poverty line.What's to be done?Education is a good starting place. At the time of India's liberation from the British, very few could read. The literacy rate was 18%, quite unbelievably. So the task was momentous, but India did not prove up to it. Much poorer Nepal (adult literacy rate 9% in 1960, versus 28% in India) has caught up, for example, with a 60% adult literacy score in 2011 versus 63% for India. Even today, some 20% of kids in India never attend school and in many of the schools (12% to be precise) there's only one teacher. He is a state employee and earns on average three times more than their parents, but often as much as six times. Half the teaching hours go wasted on average due to 20% teacher absenteeism and 33% student absenteeism. And in a study quoted by the authors, half the schools visited by an inspector did not have a head teacher at the time of the visit.The authors blame Gandhi and Nehru, who allegedly believed it was more important for the youth to learn a craft than to acquire an official education. Whatever the case might be, those leaders have not been in power for decades and there's something that needs to be done. The authors note that there is enormous divergence between states. Therefore, studying what the states have done that have the good results ought to be an excellent starting point. No surprises, then, those are the states where the government has taken seriously the task of educating the young. Places like Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh. The authors have nothing against private education, but follow basic economic theory, which states that for goods with high positive externalities and high incidence of market failure, there is a strong case to be made for government intervention. Other important contributions come from the hot meal that both nudges pupils to attend and helps them concentrate, on top of forcing pupils of all backgrounds to mix and offering work to the women who prepare it. Standardized evaluation, famous for all its sundry drawbacks, is in the authors' opinion entirely appropriate for the current state of Indian education.Healthcare is another important issue that needs to be addressed. The current healthcare situation is a crisis. The authors don't mince words here. They lay the blame squarely on the American-style private healthcare system. India only spends 1.2% of GDP on healthcare, less than half the percentage China spends, for example. In numbers, 39 dollars per citizen per annum. This evidently does not go a long way. 74% of preschool kids in India suffer from anaemia, 61% from Vitamin A deficiency. 46% are more than 2 standard deviations lighter in weight than they ought to be. The list goes on. When it comes to healthcare, the authors are downright categorical as to where the answer lies: with the much-maligned Integrated Child Development Services and equally maligned Primary Health Centres. Yes, they often deserve all the criticism they get, and more. However, the statistics could not be more clear: where these services are taken seriously by the state, the standards of healthcare are head and shoulders above the rest of the land. Getting these two already existing programs to work should take first precedence. However, this will entail a fight against the business interests of private medicine. Should these interests prevail, the authors believe that it will be a one-way street to an American style health system which (uniquely for this book, which is jam-packed with data) they reject pretty much in principle as inappropriate for this stage in India's development.Poverty, Inequality (across class, caste and gender) and corruption are the three other big problems the authors identify. Again, they mostly see the state as the first line of attack on all these fronts (for example through the monthly distribution of the 35kg of rice to poor families), but their arguments are more nuanced and subtle here than for healthcare and education. They don't see how things can change overnight, but they observe very happily that attitudes are changing. Practices that used to be normal are now frowned up.The book sometimes drifts into philosophy, which I found fascinating. Consider, for example, how democracy served India better than dictatorship served China in the fifties and sixties. Mao let millions starve during the Great Leap Forward. This was impossible to do in democratic India. These days, on the other hand, China's more efficient dictatorship can be credited with delivering its subjects from poverty, bringing them education and assuring them healthcare, while India's democracy has spawned corruption and to a great extent failed its citizens.The authors choose to emphasize two further issues above all.First, progress relative to the survival of girls versus boys is being reversed. Depending on how hot it is in a country, babies conceived are anywhere between 900 girls for 1000 boys and 960 girls for 1000 boys. Girls are better survivors, so at birth they're typically doing better. Call it 940 girls per 1000 boys on average. By age 6 in older days when medicine was not advanced, the numbers would totally even out. Not in India. Girls suffer at every step of the way. More so in the upper classes, too. And more so today than ten years ago. In 2011 there's 914 girls age 6 for every 1000 boys in India, down from 927 in 2001. While the poor states are improving (so Punjab has improved from 798 to 846, which represents great improvement) in West Bengal (where you'll find Kolkata) the presumed use of selective abortion among the rich has brought the number down from 960 to 950. The authors struggle to propose a solution to this awful problem.Second, and equally disturbing, none of the topics discussed above seem to be part of the public discourse. While India enjoys a genuinely free press, which the authors are proud of and, indeed, celebrate, it is very uncomfortable discussing the problems that afflict the vast majority of Indian citizens. The authors believe that the top echelons of society live in a parallel world where the plight of the poor majority is a taboo that never gets discussed. As with every argument they make in the book, they provide the full set of statisticsThe result is that the wherewithal of the state is wasted on subsidies to the lower strata among the affluent. Subsidized fuel for their automobiles, subsidized fertilizer etc.So the book has three purposes:1. To air in public all the issues that never get discussed2. To suggest that the newly found GDP growth is an opportunity that needs to be harnessed3. To expose that the tax take from this newly created GDP needs to be funnelled from the state to those who really need it.Contrary to what other reviews here seem to suggest, I believe it succeeds at all three levels.

I lived in India for 6 years in the 1970s and 1980s and returned again recently. While there is now much conspicuous wealth the lives of very poor people remain just as terrible and tragic as before. Economic growth may even have highlighted their dire situation. Dreze and Sen bring together a huge amount of evidence to show that the situation for poor people, especially in terms of malnutrition, is worse than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although Africa is often the focus of attention, India is the real nub of global poverty.India could easily afford to remove this shameful blight but elite groups have put their own interests above everything else and politicians have colluded.This is a brilliant book by brilliant authors. It leaves an uneasy sense that the situation could easily persist and there is nothing anyone outside India can do about it. Dreze and Sen call for intense public debate and much more willingness to challenge vested interests. But where is this new dynamism to come from? Why should the situation change simply because it is morally repugnant?Although this is a weighty academic work it has a message for anyone connected with India, although most of all for Indian people because they alone can bring about a solution. It is an issue of priorities within a democracy.

The authors, both highly distinguished economists, talk long and hard about what is wrong with today's India.They discuss at great length, and with copious charts and tables, exactly why India's economic revolution seems to be stalling.In the end, they say, it's down to not spending the money on education and medical support on the 80% of the population who are rural and poor but using the taxes to prop up the middle class and a corrupt political system.It's an interesting way of saying, in a very long winded way, what Gandhi said 70 years ago: "The future of India lies in the villages".

A fine tribute to the Indian intelligentsia by Dr. Sen and Dr. Dreze. Harsh realities of India supported by research, facts and data show that the country has a long way to go! The disconnect between the masses and the so called 'middle' and 'high' classes is revealing. The authors have often used the word 'dismal' in this book and it is a very apt word for describing the dire situation which calls for urgent action and remedy. a wake up call for all those living in their 'iron gated' communities to look beyond and they will not have go much far to discover what lies beneath the dazzling malls, cinemas and high rises of Indian metropolis.

This book gives you the latest figures about what's happening in India - it's not all shopping malls and affluent middle classes. It doesn't pull punches, either. It's not the easiest of reads, being rather full of statistics, but it's reliable and very well informed. It would do nicely as an answer to those who say we don't need to help countries like India because they have good GDP growth figures.