Political India: Engaging America

The Southern Frontier

After more than 125 years of towering like a colossus above the media world in south India, The Hindu is at a crossroads. For the first time in its history it is facing the prospect of serious competition, entering the arena as not one but two serious challengers. The Deccan Chronicle (DC) launched its Chennai edition on 28th March 2005, and the old lady of Boribunder, the Times of India (TOI), is hitching up her skirts and heading south later this year.

Although both papers are financially in strong positions to take on the Mount Road Mahavishnu in its home turf, it is the TOI’s brand value that is likely to cause the people at The Hindu some concern. However the limits to this concern ought not to be exaggerated. For starters, the TOI’s target audience is a younger cohort than The Hindu’s- approximately 18-40 year-olds. The Hindu has aimed, for the last several decades, to be relevant to the interests of those in the 30-50+ age cohort. While the groups certainly intersect, the fact that they diverge at all implies that the outcomes of this battle for media supremacy in TN could be different from that observed in Delhi over the last decade (where the TOI and Hindustan Times targeted more or less the same groups).

Second, even within the groups that will be the common targets of both papers (and indeed of the DC) the battle is by no means decided since all three contenders have a shot at expanding readership and circulation through more sophisticated marketing and advertising strategies. As mentioned before, all three papers can afford to finance such strategies, respectively because:

1. The Hindu: Has been the market leader for over 125 years in south India
   
2. TOI: Held a dominant position in a number of north Indian states
3. DC: Recently had an IPO raising a little more than 100% of its annual turnover

The dynamics of this factor, however, favour The Hindu. Even the TOI’s powerful ‘page-3-policy’ may not suffice to break the vice-like grip that The Hindu has on readers in Tamil Nadu. As suggested in an earlier post, the latter is widely regarded as a way of life and a lasting institution in these parts. What’s more, The Hindu also has a USP- a content-heavy, serious attitude towards journalism that sets it apart from virtually every other English daily in the country. No university department in India, nay the world, would ever ask its graduate students to study the TOI as part of their master’s degree in political science, economics, communication or journalism. The same cannot be said of The Hindu.

In fact this USP points the way forward for The Hindu itself, if it wishes to emerge from the upcoming media wars unscathed. Like The Guardian has stood the test of (The) Time(s) and resolutely held fast to its principled journalism in England through the onslaught of Murdochian marketing, so too can The Hindu in India. There is, of course, nothing preventing it from being ‘contemporary, yet classic’ (as its recent makeover surgeon Mario Garcia has tagged its cosmetic surgery), and indeed making new inroads into serious journalistic accomplishment as it has always done in the past. And lest we forget, there’s always potential for this south Indian goliath to turn towards the old lady of Boribunder and start determinedly walking in her direction!

Battles Begin

As the Times of India (TOI) plans its foray into Tamil Nadu later in 2005, the Deccan Chronicle launched its edition in the state on March 28th this year. Its start has received a mixed response, and the public awaits the next salvo to be fired- will it be from their powerful rivals in the state- The Hindu? Or will the TOI cast the next stone? We watch as the war unfolds...

Comments:

The terrain of the print media landscape is gradually changing with more incursions across long-respected territorial frontiers. So far as the Deccan Chronicle's (DC) Chennai edition is concerned, it is too early to tell whether they will:

1. Slip comfortably into second place, displacing Manoj Sonthalia's New Indian Express
   
2. Actually threaten the readership base and advertising revenue collections of The Hindu
   
3. Do one of the (a) or (b) and still be in a position to enter a bloody war between the two giants who may begin their conflict by the end of 2005- The Hindu and The TOI
   

The reason that it is hard to make any predictions about the DC are two-fold. First, its IPO war chest may well help tide over medium term losses, even severe ones, since it managed to raise a good 130-155 rore rupees (106-126% of its total turnover in March 2004). The second reason is that the DC is new to the market-entry game on such a large scale, and this game is unpredictable even for relatively seasoned players like the TOI.

The battle between the TOI and The Hindu is likely to be a more dramatic affair. The Hindu has come out with its new look, and this would appear to have gone down well in public opinion. However the extent to which a cosmetic makeover can alter a major newspaper's fate is debatable. Having said that, the real challenge for the TOI will be to wean away readers for whom The Hindu is more than a newspaper- it is a way of life and a lasting institution. And that, logically, would imply that the newspaper has fairly deep pockets as well.

The one factor that might set this battle apart from earlier ones that the TOI has engaged in is that The Hindu may not follow the HT's example and embark on an internecine price war. This is bearing in mind that the readership segment of The Hindu does not massively overlap that of the TOI, unlike the HT.

As both the TOI and The Hindu are not publicly owned, their marketing strategies are also more closely guarded. Only time will tell us which carcasses shall litter the battlefield.

Grapevine:

MJ Akbar is pleased with the way the DC's launch has panned out.

Background Stories:

Business Standard: Battleground Tamil Nadu: The coming newspaper wars

Dancewithshadows.com: Times are a-changing!

Detailed Stories:

The Economic Times on The Deccan Chronicle IPO and prospects in Chennai

Dancewithshadows.com: The Deccan Chronicle in Chennai

Businessline (The Hindu Group) on The Deccan Chronicle IPO and prospects in Chennai

Reachouthyderabad: TOI enters H'bad

Dancewithshadows.com: TOI to start new 'serious' edition in Mumbai

Exchange4Media: A Mixed Bag for TOI

Agencyfaqs: TOI's upcoming Chennai launch

Agencyfaqs: Hindustan Times (HT) revamps, prepares to enter Mumbai

Dancewithshadows.com: HT is going to Mumbai

‘Targeting’ the Poor?

At a recent workshop on population, health and gender issues organised by the Press Institute of India with the Population Council, the Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary, Mr PK Hota, proclaimed that the biggest challenge to the success of population and health issues is the implementation by States, health being a State subject (see “Population control: implementation is the challenge” in The Hindu, 7th April 2005). His words have been proved true in a deeply ironic sense, by a recent policy initiative in Maharashtra seeking to coerce banana and sugar farmers in the state into having no more than two children by denying them access to water for irrigation if they do.

Mr Ajit Pawar, the Maharashtra’s Water Minister and nephew of Union Agriculture Minister Mr Sharad Pawar, is the chief architect of this controversial policy that has led to protests from both the ruling NCP as well as the opposition Shiv Sena. The bill has been passed in the upper house of the State Assembly, but dissent across the political spectrum is gathering steam as the lower house prepares to consider it. It comes with the harsh addendum that all banana and sugar cane farmers, regardless of child numbers, are required use drip or sprinkling systems of irrigation within five year or lose their supply.

Apart from having a direct adverse impact on the welfare of the poorest farmers in the state, who are statistically most likely to have larger families, this policy initiative resurrects the spectre of coercive disincentives for population control that haunted Indian politics during the times of Sanjay Gandhi. The implementation of this anti-poor policy will push Maharashtra into the company of Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan- all States that are following the two-child norm with disastrous consequences, according to the recent population workshop. The two-child norm itself has been derived from the one-child norm of China. However the extent to which the slowing of population growth in China is solely the result of the success of this policy is unclear. For example, a number of experts have posited that the decline in the population growth rate took place before the one-child norm was introduced.

While Maharashtra is agriculturally one of India’s most advanced States, it has been suffering from a series of droughts in recent years, as indeed have other parts of the country. Water shortages for irrigation and consequent crop failure at least partially explain the spate of farmer suicides that have been observed in this region. In such water-insecure context, what are the economic and ethical grounds for forcible intervention by the government in the rate of population growth?

The philosophical roots of coercive population control measures stretch back in time to arguments by Malthus, who propounded in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principles of Population’ that the excess of the rate of growth of population over the rate of growth of food production would inevitably lead to compounded economic misery unless some proactive steps were taken to avert this looming disaster. Malthus’s seminal work indirectly attempted to explain the nature and origins of poverty in a way that would suggest that there was no viable alternative to capitalism, and more insidiously, “sought to defend the interests of capital in the face of the enormous human misery which capitalism causes”, according to Eric Ross, population expert at the ISS, The Hague. Interestingly, Malthus himself retracted his earlier views on the need for coercive control in a revised version of his paper published in 1803, wherein he proposed that ‘positive controls’ were more likely to succeed.

Today, the burgeoning evidence from population studies suggests that family planning and positive incentives are among the only policy tools that are consistent with the widely accepted conceptualisation of development in terms of capabilities and freedom, a la Amartya Sen and the Human Development Index. Coercive measures have no place in such an analytical and policy framework. This is as true of the Indian context as anywhere else, and as Mr Abhijit Das of Sahayog argued, a two-child norm has the potential to cause immense harm to women's health in the existing social situation where preference for male children is high and women's status is low.

The economic rationale underlying the irrigation-linked population control measure is also dubious. A number of experts have posited that the poor are more likely to have larger families because they lack adequate access to labour markets and their children are also a source of income and security in old age. In this context economist Nancy Birdsall, for example argues that the poor value these instrumental attributes of their children much more than the rich, and hence, “it is easy to imagine a tax forcing a peasant to forgo the birth of a child whose financial security value alone is much greater than the tax”- the ‘tax’ in this case being the restrictions on water use.

More generally, such attempts to penalise the poor for their second-best strategies to overcome labour market failures do not only perpetuate the unequal income distribution structure that is commonly observed in rural India (and indeed between urban and rural India), but a number of implementation hurdles are likely to lead to poor results in terms of efficiency goals too. One seriously problematic example of this is the lack of state capacity to ensure effective targeting. Additionally, there has been no discussion of the possibility that lower fertility rates resulting from this doctrinaire initiative could lead to instability in agricultural yields in the long term or stronger impulses to rural-urban migration of farm labour (with accompanying deleterious effects on urban unemployment and poverty).

In the light of all the evidence at hand, it can be safely claimed that Mr Pawar’s population control policy reflects a backward step in a State that has otherwise made remarkable strides in poverty alleviation and rural development- a case in point being the Employment Guarantee Scheme, where Maharashtra has been no less than a trailblazer. Ironically, given that both the Congress and NCP have their stronghold in rural Maharashtra and their MLAs know that it may be political suicide to back the bill in its current form, it is possible that the bill may not be passed or even if passed may not survive long.

Unfortunately the lesson that policymakers such as Mr Pawar will perhaps fail to take away from this experience is that it is not high fertility rates, per se, that are responsible for a host of barriers faced by the poor in India today. Rather, as population expert Robert Cassen argues, the economy has failed to deliver the correlates of declining fertility, which include better health, education and employment prospects for the marginalised classes in rural India. The Malthusian argument that the government can constrain, at will, the rights of the rural poor in order to maintain balance in a system characterised by absurd income inequalities is untenable in a political democracy such as India.

Issues in Democracy and Development in India

While the veracity of Professor Bhaduri’s comments on the need to improve the quality of democracy in India (‘On improving the quality of democracy’, The Hindu 22nd March 2005) is beyond doubt, the implication in his article that the most effective solution to this problem is to strengthen the Right to Information (RTI) is less tenable. The RTI is certainly a powerful tool of reform that is potentially capable of altering institutional performance at all levels of government. However so long as the Indian state does not make bold advances in terms of improving human capabilities among marginalised groups such legislation will achieve less than it ideally could, in terms of mitigating the “unforgivable failure [that] is the persistence of acute poverty and destitution”.

The genesis of Professor Bhaduri’s somewhat oblique emphasis on the RTI is his discounting of the role of the state in fostering economic development in India. The dismissal of the Leviathan as a “Simple-minded old answer… [that] results in wasteful and mindless bureaucracy” is ahistorical and will not stand up to analytical scrutiny based on the available empirical evidence. This is not to undermine, in any way, the role of the RTI in deepening democratic practices in India- globally celebrated though India’s basic achievements are in this regard. The deeper assumption that Professor Bhaduri’s article makes is that democracy as system of governance is desirable mainly for its own sake and less in any instrumental sense, for example as a political system that is apropos to the poor to using their ‘voice’ (a la Hirschman) and thus receiving a greater share of the benefits of rapid economic growth. To posit that democracy is preferable to dictatorships and ‘soft’ authoritarian states (e.g. in East Asia) because it is the system that most represents the average citizen’s preferences is not the same as saying that it is also the best political system to bring about economic uplift of massive numbers of poor citizenry. Professor Bhaduri’s comments would support the former view of the merit of a democratic polity, but not the latter.

This is because, while the RTI is a vital tool of reform that could actually alter the balance of political power in some village of rural Bihar in favour of a farmer victimized by a local bureaucrat, there is a less direct but also less conditional approach to shifting this balance of power. This entails the redistribution of resources by the state towards the poor, in terms of improving their capabilities by investing in their basic education, healthcare and economic opportunities. Every one of these heads of social sector investment requires an agency that is capable not only of mobilising and then redistributing many thousands of crores of rupees, but also of coordinating investments of a strong ‘public goods’ nature; i.e. with powerful externality effects. Given that economics overwhelmingly argues that externalities of this kind can lead to market failure, the odds are that few private or multilateral agencies are capable of venturing into this profit-threatening arena. Of course, this conclusion is only strengthened in a developing economy like India, which carries with it the heavy burden of over 26 million people below the poverty line and many more above it but having less-than-secure livelihood options.

But even such arguments leave unanswered the most significant aspect of development that Professor Bhaduri’s article easily sidesteps- the historical-political role of the state as the ‘engine of growth’. Nowhere in the history of the nation-state, ever since the retreat of colonialism, has any country the size of India or even Uttar Pradesh developed without the state playing a dominant role in economic transformation and resource mobilization. As Barrington Moore points out in his classic exposition of the social origins of democracies and dictatorships, under Marxian conditions of ‘primitive accumulation’, even today’s advanced economies such as the United Kingdom and the United States experienced the ascendancy of brutally repressive regimes that set the stage for economic growth through the (forced) mobilization of investable resource. This includes the enclosure movement in England, spearheaded by a Parliament dominated by powerful landlords, and of course slavery and the plantation mode of production in the US, along with levels of protection to large agricultural producers that would seem ridiculously high in the context of the WTO tariff arrangements today.

While there is no place for repressive regimes in the context of India’s laudable political achievements as a human-rights-respecting nation with deep democratic roots, it is dangerous to consign the state itself to the backwaters of developmental politics. This is precisely what Professor Bhaduri’s arguments imply, when he posits that the most serious hurdle India faces is mass poverty, but that the solution to this problem lies in the realm of reforming public institutions through measures such as the RTI. As mentioned earlier, assuming that the enforcement of the RTI is enabled by the presence of prior conditions (such as a free press and other watchdog organizations), it is a piece of legislation that could potentially have far reaching consequences for the practice of democracy in the country. However, given the plurality of power structures in India, conditioned as they often are by traditional social relationships of caste and community, the probability that the RTI can uniformly transform the lives of the poor at a national level is relatively low, except in the long-run (when development itself improves the ability of such legislation to make a difference to the poor). For every farmer in Kerala who is able to obtain her rightful access to land records from the district bureaucracy, there could well be ten people in a Bihar village who cannot obtain information on a police investigation into the violence inflicted upon their families by upper-caste landlords. Improving the capabilities of the marginalised groups through pro-poor redistributive policies, however, will eliminate this regional and temporal variability in voiceless-ness of the poor and permanently alter the balance of power in the heterogeneous society that is India. Microeconomic theory and the history of comparative development politics only corroborate the view that the state, therefore, must take the lead in this process.

Promise and Challenges

(This article is available at The Hindu)

The launch of the National Food-for-Work Programme (NFFWP) this week in Andhra Pradesh is a bold symbol of the pro-poor policy orientation of the United Progressive Alliance Government. The initiative marks a clear divergence from the `India Shining' sloganeering of the former National Democratic Alliance Government, and there is much promise in this orientation of governance for marginalised classes, predominantly in rural areas. However, the potentially serious pitfalls of elite capture of the administering institutions implies the need for frequent monitoring and review of performance, as well as a nuanced understanding of local political conditions in the 150 districts where the implementation of the scheme has been planned.

The NFFWP is premised on a Keynesian understanding of employment that emphasises the role of the state in proactively generating employment opportunities. The policy design is simple yet remarkably efficient in adopting a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the essentially multi-dimensional problem of poverty. On the one hand, it provides employment to otherwise seasonally unemployed wage labourers who often migrate from district to district, and sometimes across state borders, to obtain a subsistence wage. On the other, the policy facilitates rural infrastructural development in the form of repair and construction of village-level irrigation works, road connectivity and basic socio-economic infrastructure. Essentially the hope is that income levels in the rural economy will gradually rise, both as a consequence of the wage goods provided as `payment' for work undertaken, as well as through externalities derived from boosting the quality and quantity of rural infrastructure. Broader developmental goals, including food security and employment guarantee are also likely to receive a shot in the arm from this programme.

This partly brings to fruition the efforts of the Right to Food Campaign spearheaded by Jean Dreze and others, and a number of other organisations that have actively campaigned to get the Employment Guarantee Act tabled in and passed by Parliament in December this year, pressing towards establishing the constitutional right to work. These organisations include the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education, All India Agricultural Workers Alliance, All India Agricultural Workers Union, All India Democratic Women's Association, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, National Alliance of People's Movements, National Federation of Indian Women, New Trade Union Initiative, among others. There is little doubt that the adoption and passing of this pro-poor, redistributive scheme is a notable achievement in itself and clearly marks a divergence from the principal dependence on `trickle-down' growth manifested in the NDA regime's governance.

However, the empirical record of redistribution failures in India occurring in the second, implementation phase should serve as a note of caution to those who are inclined to believe that agenda setting is the main stumbling block for policymakers. The dismal implementation record of land redistribution, rural credit policies such as the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), and a host of other foundering initiatives, points to the need for frequent monitoring and review of the performance of the administering institutions. This includes the bureaucracy, as well as partner institutions such as non-governmental organisations.

The fact that the NFFWP is funded primarily by the Central Government itself implies that the resources coming from New Delhi will encounter State-level patronage networks that may seek to alter resource allocation, in this case food distribution patterns, in favour of dominant elites at the sub-district levels. Targeting issues are also potentially under threat from this sort of political capture, as many critics have pointed out about the IRDP that ultimately pandered to the not-so-poor in credit terms.

It might be argued that in a country with such a decentralised political structure as India, this sort of elite capture is inevitable to some extent, but it can certainly be minimised through the creation of multi-institutional monitoring bodies, comprising, for example, independent watchdogs, political leaders of the ruling and opposition parties, civil servants and NGO members.

However, above and beyond this basic issue is the need for policymakers in New Delhi and in the respective States to incorporate an understanding of local political conditions into their plans for policy implementation. Caste discrimination, neo-feudal interdependencies between poorer tenants and their rich landlords, and even criminal elements that dominate specific parts of the rural economy are factors that need to be carefully examined before committing resources to any district, even the poorest ones. Otherwise, there is a looming threat of misappropriation and wastage of scarce food resources in an already predominantly food-insecure context.

Welcome to Political India!

This is my personal guide to what's hot (and what's not) in Indian politics. Discussing politics is not the prerogative of elite ivory-tower academicians only, and so this blog is as much for me to speak out on (what I consider) some of the burning debates in Indian politics as it is to keep my finger on the pulse of public (internet) opinion. So of course, I welcome your views. If they're pertinent and coherently written, I'd be happy to keep your comments on the site.

As I'm principally a student of development studies, many of the political issues I write on will be directly or indirectly related to the political economy of development in India (favorite topic #1) and the role of the media in sustaining and strengthening secular democracy, with a focus on the print media in south India (favorite topic #2). However, I do feel strongly about (and have been consistently following) a number of other political processes in the country, including (but not limited to):

1. Religious conflict and resurgent Hindu nationalism
2. State-level politics and centre-state relations

If any of these issues interest you, read on and feel free to write to me about your opinions.

Happy surfing!