Saturday, April 09, 2005
The State vs Right to Information?
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.
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.
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 6:03 AM 
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