Time to stop inequalities from growing too big

The signs are so clearly visible. There is a great deal of good news, and there is a lot of bad news too. India is on the verge of becoming a world power, with GDP growth of around 10% providing a massive cushion for a growing middle class that is now assertive than ever before, and is now spending on more than mere essentials on a huge variety of goods and services, that has in turn, given rise to excellent growth rates across a variety of sectors and industries.

And the scope of employment in the ever-growing IT and IT-enabled sectors has meant that there is a huge demand for technically qualified and experienced manpower in the manufacturing sector, and hence just about every engieering graduate and hundreds of thousands of diploma holders in every branch of engineering are employed in jobs, that are now very well paid. This trend is now visible as the manufacturing sector has to pay at least 75% of the IT sector to retain talent.

That is where the good news ends. Agriculture is now neglected than ever before. A bit of statistics will prove the point. The sector has grown by just 2% between 1977 and 2005. Foodgrain production has stagnated between 180 tonnes and 212 tonnes in the five years between 2002 and 2007.

About 75% of the healthcare infrastructure, according to
Dr. P.C. Reddy, the Chief of the Apollo Hospitals Group, is concetrated in the urban areas. This includes medical manpower and other healthcare resources. And urban India is home to only 27& of the population.

We have had massive growth rates in the organized Corporate sector, and any of these success stories has always revolved around what the middle classes have consumed in the past ten years. Little of this has penetrated the rural areas, and hundreds of thousands of poor landless labourers have migrated to work in the construction sector and the small scale industries where there is no need for advanced technical training and where even an eighth standard passed man or women can be trained to do unskilled jobs or jobs that require any special skill.

There is a dangerous tendency to take away fertile lands from farmers in the name of special economic zones. This has lead to violence in West Bengal, in Karnataka, in Orissa and Tamil Nadu, apart from several other States. The entire policy of the Special Economic Zone is wrong, for it simply takes away the lands of farmers who have been cultivating lands for several years. They are now forced to part with lands that are very fertile.

The Special Economic Zones policy will have some meaning only if it is based in acres of uncultivate land that is anyway lying waste in rural areas.

The rural masses who do not have access to English-medium schools face a huge problem of speaking and writing good English, which places them at a big disadvantage when compared to the city-bred youth who have access to such education. In fact, this is the problem facing the IT sector, since a vast majority of graduates from rural areas lack exposure to what are now called "soft skills" -- the communication and presentation skills. Computer literacy is another problem, since the revolution has still not reached the doors of hundreds of children in rural schools.

Hence, education, training and lack of opportunities, apart from declining rural incomes -- thanks to the declining agricultural sector -- have all made all the inequalities so glaring. We have a great challenge ahead of us -- how does one reduce the gross inequalities?

There is so talk of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and a few organizations like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have done some good work in this regard. However, there is a big gap still and very little work has been done by several hundreds of corporates who think that their responsibility starts and ends with providing employment to a few hundreds or thousands of employees in their factories.

A good deal of work is done by the NGOs, but there should be better co-ordination and co-operation between them for benefits to flow from all directions. Increasing rural incomes will be the best answer, apart from simultaneously reducing prices of essential food items, through government intervention, if necessary.

The time to act is now. Otherwise, our happiness with recent innovations like the Tata's Re.1 lakh car will be short-lived. There are already signs of a greater awareness among the deprived lot of rural India. Greater mobilization of such masses, if and when it happens will become a social problem of unimaginable proportions.

The time to act is now. For, tomorrow will be too late.

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