By Ashok Gulati
On the 77th Independence Day, from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort in Delhi, prime minister Narendra Modi said that, in the last five years (2015-16 to 2019-21), his government lifted 135 million people out of poverty. This is a commendable achievement based on the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MDPI) prepared by the NITI Aayog. The UNDP had earlier estimated that India lifted 415 million people out of poverty (MDPI) over the period 2005-06 to 2019-21. I think this has been the biggest alleviation of poverty so far in India’s history.
After political freedom, the first and foremost job of an elected government is to reduce poverty, hunger and malnutrition. When India got freedom, more than 80% of its people lived in extreme poverty; the figure today hovers around 15% as per MDPI and about 11% based on the income criterion ($2.15 PPP a day). This gives us self-confidence and almost all governments contributed to it in varying degrees. But the pace of reduction has been much faster since 2005-06 than any other time in the past. A lot depends on the policies adopted by the government of the day. The year 1991 was a watershed moment in India’s economic history, when the country started shifting from a state-controlled economy to a market one. It started paying rich dividends after a few years of transitional adjustments. The biggest achievements that I see today is in foreign exchange reserves that hover around $600 billion, up from a meagre $1.4 billion in July 1991. This did not figure in the PM’s Independence Day speech, but it is this that has made Indian economy much more resilient to any external shocks than perhaps any other achievement. In the absence of this, India could have been in a crisis similar to what our neighbours, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, are facing.
But let me get back to poverty, hunger and malnutrition. On poverty reduction, India seems to be on track to almost abolish this in the next 5-10 years. On hunger, at least in terms of food availability, India has done pretty well. Green Revolution turned India from a ‘ship to mouth’ economy to the largest exporter of rice. It has also enabled India to give free rice or wheat (5 kg/month/person) to more than 800 million people, under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana, thus improving their economic access to basic staples. India also experienced a White Revolution (milk) and emerged as the largest producer of milk (222 million tonnes), with the US coming in second with just 102 mt of milk production. The Gene Revolution in cotton that was triggered by PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s decision in 2002 to introduce Bt cotton, made India the largest producer of cotton (39 million bales in 2013-14, up from just 13 million bales in 2002-03). Remember what Vajpayee often said, “What IT is for India, BT is for Bharat”, where IT referred to information technology and BT referred to biotechnology.
But what is still on the table, very stubbornly, is the issue of malnutrition, especially amongst children below the age of 5. As per NFHS-5 (2019-21), 32% of children were underweight, 35% stunted, and 19% wasted. Although India made reasonably good progress in reducing infant mortality from 57% in 2005-06 to 35% in 2019-21, the progress on other indicators of malnutrition is not very satisfactory. This is a real challenge facing the Modi government.
On top of this, climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events—from heat waves to flash floods—pose a big challenge not only to India’s food system but also to poverty alleviation that can reverse with such shocks.
How can one deal with all these challenges that relate to a large segment of population at the bottom of economic pyramid? One simple answer would be to keep focus on accelerating economic growth and making it more inclusive. PM Modi talked about gender-led development in India, citing the case of India having the largest number of women pilots in the world. He also talked of giving training to women in 15,000 SHGs, to fly drones for agriculture use. That’s a unique idea, and if implemented, India could be top ranked in women-driven drones!
But then if we look at the female participation rate in our labour force (age group 15-59 years), it is pitiably low at about 30% (2021-22) against the male participation rate of almost 81%. If we can focus on improving the literacy rate and quality education of young women, along with their skill formation, several of India’s problems, especially poverty, hunger and malnutrition, can be solved. In our earlier research at ICRIER with Shyma Jose on the unit level data of NFHS-3 and NFHS-4, we found that women education beyond 12th grade is a key determinant of nutrition amongst children, as is access to better sanitation and more nutritious food.
The upshot of all this for policy makers is the following: incentivise and improve the access and quality of education for women through liberal scholarships, especially after 10th grade to Master’s level. This can give high returns, more like a brahamastra, limiting family size and contributing significantly to nation’s growth story. Next, focus on improving productivity in agriculture while making food more nutritious and food system more climate-resilient. This will require doubling or even tripling R&D expenditures in agriculture to make abundant food available at reasonably competitive prices.
Export controls and stocking limits to push prices down are no solution. These are defunct policies of socialist raj of 1960s when India did not have the foreign exchange to buy food. The famed Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) that played a yeoman’s role in spreading the Green Revolution, and still ranks at the top, can be roped in to usher in a new revolution of sustainable growth and more nutritious food in agriculture.
The author is a distinguished professor at ICRIER.
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