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ARTICLE |
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Growing economic inequality
Need for corrective policies
by Jayshree Sengupta
There
is a lot of disturbing news regarding the Indian economy today which is likely to spoil the outlook for 2012. One of them is regarding the rise in inequality. A recent report from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the think tank of a Paris-based forum of developed countries, shows that there has been a doubling of inequality of incomes in India during the last 20 years. According to the report, the top 10 per cent of wage earners got 12 times more than the bottom 10 per cent in 2010 as compared to the early 1990s when they were earning only six times more. It also says that India has the highest number of poor in the world and that 42 per cent of the Indians live below the poverty line, on less than Rs 65 (less than $2) a day. Reducing inequality has to be a national priority because it is mainly the failure of redistributive tax policies that have been responsible for the rise in inequality as well as inadequate investment in human capital. Countries with low inequality have strong tax collection systems (high tax/GDP ratio) and a social safety net which takes care of all individuals from “cradle to grave”. Rising inequality means that many people are missing the opportunity of raising their standard of living as the economy grows because they do not possess assets, marketable skills, proper education and proper healthcare. They have been left behind in the race for higher incomes, cars, mall shopping and international travel that many are now able to afford. Today, unfortunately India’s high GDP growth is also slowing down and the outlook for next year is for 6 to 7 per cent growth rather than 9 per cent. The poor will suffer more when economic growth slows down. Between July and September 2010, GDP growth slowed down to 6.9 per cent and this was due to several factors like agricultural growth slipping and industrial growth falling. But certain things have not been under the UPA government’s control like the European Union (EU) debt crisis, which has been escalating for a year now. It has taken a toll on people’s jobs and incomes not only in Europe but also in the EU’s trade partners. The forecast for the EU countries’ economic future, according to European Central Bank, is grim for 2012 as it will experience GDP growth of only 0.23 per cent, and inflation is likely to rise to 2 per cent. There is a marked rise in unemployment in some of the countries like Greece, Spain and Italy. With austerity measures taken by most governments, more jobs are going to be cut and the demand from EU countries will shrink further. The slowdown in the EU is affecting Indian exports which grew only by 4.2 per cent in November 2011. Since industrial growth also has shrunk by 5.1 per cent (in October) and the manufacturing sector by 6 per cent, jobs may be cut in the manufacturing sector. The lowest 10 per cent of wage earners have a greater chance of losing their jobs, accentuating inequality. Inflation, which is close to double digit again, will also accentuate inequality unless food prices are brought down drastically. The good news, however, is that food inflation has started to come down. But the government’s bid at opening up the FDI in the retail sector as a wayout from high food inflation did not work. People and politicians could not be convinced about the advantages of opening up foreign direct investment in retail, especially in the face of an approaching global recession. High food and general inflation has also not responded well to the RBI’s monetary policy of raising interest rates and tightening liquidity. With 13 attempts at raising the interest rate, only the consumer demand has been staved off and industrial investment has suffered in the past few months (growth of capital good industries plunged by 25.5 per cent recently). Many robust industries like automobiles are facing an stagnant demand. The RBI has tried to inject liquidity in the market by buying Rs 57.8 billion worth of bonds through open market operations because it wants to rev up demand and give a boost to industrial growth. The eurozone crisis has also made the Indian companies which borrowed from abroad (around $29 billion) panicky in the face of slower dollar inflows through financial institutional investment channels and falling exports. As a result, they increased their demand for dollars. FIIs sold Indian shares worth $251.67 million in 2011 up to November. Importers also raised their demand for dollars and all this led to the rupee sinking to a record low of Rs 52.37 to a dollar in November. The RBI had to intervene to support the falling rupee recently as it would raise the debt payment charges of companies as well as increase import costs. The withdrawal of money from the Indian stock markets by FIIs has been due to Indian stock markets’ poor performance in the past few months as compared to other emerging markets. With FIIs taking away the dollars, the current account deficit of $13.6 billion in November looks ominous. Problems in the global economy and the government’s inability to control corruption will affect the government’s revenue-raising capacity in 2012. In fact, the Central excise collection fell by 6.5 per cent in November. Austerity measures will have to be imposed in India also which will affect the government’s important infrastructure development programme of $1.3 trillion adversely. Proper roads, power supply and railways would give a better opportunity to the poor to earn more. Thousands of villages remain with little or no power supply. Significantly, core sector industries (power, steel, coal, petroleum refining, electricity , cement, natural gas and oil) grew extremely slowly at 0.1 per cent in October 2011. Thus, cash-strapped for funds and having spent a lot already, the government’s ability to meet the targeted fiscal deficit of 4.6 per cent is going to be watched by all credit-rating agencies because a wider deficit will mean further problems for sustaining India’s growth story. With problems in controlling expenditure, less money would be available for human development in areas like women’s and children’s health, education and skill development which will further widen the gap between the rich and the poor. In order to reduce inequality, there will have to be strong policies that empower individuals, especially women. There should be better tax collection, implementation of land rights and maintenance of law and order which will contribute to the emergence of a more equitable
society.
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MIDDLE |
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Work and play
by Raji P. Shrivastava
Malavika
and I parted as classmates in 1984. Our alumni network group-mail brought us back in touch with each other recently and we resolved to meet at the earliest opportunity. Twenty-seven years vanished in a second as we finally met last week. She looked chic in a paisley-print shirt and black trousers. We chatted excitedly as we conquered Bangalore’s legendary traffic jams and parked in the bowels of a brightly lit mall. We browsed and shopped for the next few hours. Later, over spicy corn and pepper soup and dim-sums at an elegant restaurant, she told me that she had worked in a bank for some years, quit her job to care for the baby and done occasional content-writing in her spare time. Now that her child was 15, she said she was taking up bigger assignments. “I do freelance work for this agency. They pay me to visit malls, restaurants and multiplexes, pose as a paying customer, discreetly inspect the facilities and get an overall impression of the place. I e-mail the agency a confidential report. They give me an inspection fee and an allowance to cover the goods or services I have bought in the process, like a meal, a movie or a garment.” I realised that the work suited her perfectly. Her knowledge of brands, trends and cuisines was phenomenal. What’s more, she was able to combine her personal chores with her assignments. I told her I was happy for her. She had the courage to quit a “regular” job to be a stay-at-home mum. But she had nurtured the enthusiasm and energy necessary for a very different kind of job, which she did on her own terms. “Yes, sometimes I turn down assignments. They wanted me to check out a salon and get a hair-cut there. But I had had one only the week before !” Often, the agency required photographs, like pictures of her plate at a popular thali restaurant. It struck me that she was giving the restaurant an assessing glance even as we talked. Suddenly, a whimsical part of me wondered if Malavika was on one of her assignments at that particular moment. I decided I wasn’t going to ask her. Why jeopardise a lovely old-and-new friendship by making her feel awkward ? I just wanted to let her know that I approved of her choice of career. I pulled out my camera and requested a server to take pictures of us, telling him that my friend and I were meeting after nearly three decades. He happily obliged. I took good shots of the table setting. I praised the Cantonese pickled vegetables and the ginger-capsicum noodles and took close-ups of the colourful medley. Malavika paid the bill and we left the place. “I shall e-mail you those pictures tonight,” I told her. She said, “Are you planning to try out those dishes at home ? You took more pictures of the buffet than of ourselves!” I winked at her and responded, “The food was delicious. I am a disaster as a cook. But I had fun pretending that I was on an assignment !” We giggled conspiratorially like the 15-year-olds we had been, back then in
1984.
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OPED
WOMEN |
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The pill that failed
Nonica DuttaThe story of modern contraception has remained irrelevant for millions of women in India. In the absence of accompanying advances in education, health-care and incomes, their subordinate and submerged position has remained unaltered.
Stuck in a time warp- The narrative of sex and contraception —
Photo: Nitin Mittal
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Contraception
is the ‘in thing’ in today’s young India. Young women in small and big towns freely carry contraceptives in their kits, goes the prevailing modern perception. National surveys by leading magazines suggest an increasing use of contraceptives among the ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. With the globalisation of Indian economy, sex too is all easy to get, according to the modern media representation. A feel good factor, good coffee and good, safe sex. Hard-bitten brokers of power and money claim to think of a rich India monopolised by economic and social freedom. Their optimism uplifts the middle class sensibility. ‘We are modern gals’, spoke a group of middle class girls in unison in a prestigious woman’s college in Delhi University. ‘We enjoy sex, we party and we have fun’. Their hopes and dreams set me thinking. As I set out to probe the rhetoric of the so-called sexual freedom in the context of a snarling neo-nationalist and neo-liberal India that is emerging at such rapid speed, I decided to step back a little amid this chorus of jubilation and pipe dream of the urban young in the country. I tried to recall the history of contraception, and what it has come to mean in our country where sex was till late almost a taboo. It’s worthwhile to go back to the fragmentary narratives of sex and contraception and understand the different ways contraceptive practices have or have not affected women’s lives in India.
They did it in Rome
Well, they did it in Rome, too. In one of the seminal articles, the distinguished Oxford historian Keith Thomas revealed that upper class Romans in their desire for small families were concerned with contraception. Not only was contraception not a modern invention of the 19th century, Thomas demonstrated that contraception theory was part of a vibrant medical tradition which can be traced back to Aristotle and the Hippocratic Corpus. The ancient Egyptians too engaged with the practice of contraception. In the 9th century discussions were frequent in Arab literature on intra-vaginal female methods of contraception; these ideas travelled to the West. Thereafter, a complex history of contraception unfolds, as sexuality came to be policed from different quarters, including the church, religion, dominant institutions, and the guardians. The language of contraception transformed in the 19th century. It came to be ensconced in the ideas of freethinkers and political radicals in the West. They used the concept to ‘demystify nature and to promote social justice for the working classes’. In 1822, Francis Place, an English workingman, endorsed contraception, explaining to the working class population in industrial cities that sex should be separated from procreation. After much ado, a spring-loaded rubber vaginal diaphragm, thanks to the efforts of Wilhelm P.J. Mensinga, a German physician and professor of anatomy, became the symbol of modern contraception. Finally, came the marketing of the ‘antiovulant birth-control pill’ in 1960. A lively feminist discussion set the tone for ‘reproductive autonomy’ for women and made contraception synonymous with sexual freedom and choice. Annie Besant, the socialist-feminist and later an advocate of India’s independence, pioneered a campaign for contraception and women’s rights in the late 19th century England. The term ‘birth control’ was coined in a 1914 issue of The Woman Rebel, a military feminist journal published in New York by Margaret Sanger. Her campaign, like her British counterpart Mary Stopes, was for social justice, and made way for the opening of the birth-control clinic. Sanger’s ideas travelled to India when she met the Mahatma for a historic conversation. For Sanger, birth-control meant contraception, for Gandhi birth-control meant self-control. Emphasizing sexual abstinence, Gandhi regarded birth-control measures as dangerous. He abhorred the idea of sexual satisfaction on the part of women, and endeavoured to teach them to say ‘no’. An advocate of sexual joy via contraception, Mary Stopes considered Gandhi’s resistance to contraception as ‘ill-considered arrogance’. Gandhi’s ideas on sex have come a long way. Gandhian morality informs our middle class visceral reaction to contraception and sexual freedom. An orthodox narrative incorporated Brahminical and Victorian perceptions of women’s sexuality as dangerous. Gandhi’s view of contraception as ‘immoral’ further scooped pleasure out of sex and left women at the altar of self-sacrifice.
A messy story
In post-colonial India contraception has come to be entwined with family planning and the demographic imperative. It functions within marriage as a preventive measure to control fertility. The story is a messy one. The contraceptive has become a ruse to control female sexuality; it mainly lies entrenched in a reproductive and familial context. Crucially, contraception has been used as a statist technique of control and domination. Since the 1950s the Indian state promoted state propelled modern contraception, in the form of vasectomy through sterilization camps. During Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975-77), as a ‘national commitment’ to control population Sanjay Gandhi launched the nasbandi campaigns and established vasectomy camps throughout the country. What this meant for helpless people (men and women) subjected to coercion, abuse and sterilization sends shivers down the spine. In the last six months of 1976, 6.5 million people in India were sterilized. If the Nazi regime through its ‘racial hygiene’ program forbade ‘Aryan women’ to use contraception, our government forced contraception through bodily violence. Coercive governmental policies in India have continued to view contraception as an effective mechanism of population control. In a rapidly globalised India, hazardous ‘hormone’ and ‘emergency’ contraceptives, with fatal consequences for women’s health, have been increasingly used. Women’s bodies have become the testing ground for multinational companies who dump life threatening contraceptive pills developed by the rich nations, to be tested on the women of the third world countries like India. Medical science, like contraception, tends to work towards the stereotyping of vulnerable women.
Sex and Contraception
 According to the 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey, 49 per cent of Indian women use modern contraceptives, and of these, only 3 per cent are on the pill. According to a recent survey, 72 per cent people in India don’t use contraceptive with a new partner. This causes unplanned pregnancies and unsafe abortions.
Without accompanying advances in women’s education, health care, and incomes, will contraception work? In a deeply patriarchal context, what does it mean to be a woman with sexual rights? Is modern contraception irrelevant in the light of women’s subordinate status and submerged location? Can one think of contraception in a society riddled with poverty, structural inequalities and discrimination? When women don’t have legal rights, when they don’t have marriage rights, when they can’t choose their partners freely, when they can’t choose their residence and make everyday choices both as married or single, what will a pill or condom do? For some clarity, I listened to the stories of some of my colleagues and students at Delhi University. For many women of my generation, sexual freedom is a deeply complex issue on campus; married and single women discussed their uneasy relationship with sex and contraception. ‘Contraception’, quipped a highly articulate Associate Professor in her forties, ‘you must be joking. I’ve no sex life.’ ‘What stops you from having sex?’, I asked. She said, ‘Where can one find sex? I would be seen as asking for it.’ I was struck by her answer. It’s almost the inverse of saying ‘no’ that Gandhi advocated for women. As multitude of denials plague women in our university, the issue of contraception pales into insignificance. Another colleague said, ‘All we find is aggression, competition and violence in the university. Where is the inclination for romance and joy of sex? There’s no equality. Contraception may work in a marriage for birth control, but not among single women who are seen as ‘available’.’ She added, ‘Our labour power matters in the university at the expense of our sexual identities and preferences.’ And then one academic said unambiguously, ‘How can I have sex? I’m unmarried. Contraception is meant for married women.’ For a set of some young students contraception was the danger word. Though sex was at times easy, violence lurked in the background and abortion or the i-pill were the only answers. For a small minority of women, however, the contraceptive symbolised choice and right to their own bodies. While for the rest it was just an elitist idea. Contraception is not just a passport to women’s freedom. An empty rhetoric of female choices, the method and practice of contraception is surrounded by coercion and subjugation of women in a society embedded in patriarchal restrictions. I pondered: how do women, whose identities are fractured along class, caste, ethnic and religious lines in different locations - villages, small towns, and our provincial universities and colleges - relate to sex and contraception? Universal languages of rights and freedom - reproductive, sexual, personal -hardly touch their lives. Their expressions of their desire, agency, pleasure and romance in the everyday life are silenced by the very forces and institutions that are purporting to be, in the name of democracy and progress, the strongest advocates of contraception in our country. The writer teaches history at Miranda House, Delhi University
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Contraceptives could
not guarantee health
- Under the MTP( medical termination of pregnancy) Act, 1972, abortion till 20 weeks of pregnancy is legal, still an estimated 5 million illegal abortions take place in India, putting women’s health at risk. For every legally induced abortion, 10 or 11 are done in unlicensed clinics or by unqualified dais (midwives), killing approximately 20,000 women every year. India has the largest number of unsafe abortions - 5 million a year, or, a quarter of the global total.
- Despite huge amounts being spent on advertising different methods of contraception, only 56.3 per cent sexually active people use contraceptives in India, according to National Family Health Survey Data-3( 2006). The rest either go for unsafe abortions, or, if they can afford, use emergency pill.
- Though, the pharmaceutical companies would like the young women to believe, there are no side effects of the emergency pill, gynaecologists warn, frequent use - more than once or twice a year can cause fluctuations in hormonal levels and may cause infertility over a period.
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