The EconomistOctober 26th 2019 Special reportIndia 112 ments have preferred big, showy dams and
canals to investing in urban sewage net-
works or enforcing rules on effluents.
Many of the impressive 100m toilets built
in Mr Modi’s first term stand idle for lack of
water. His government now plans a nation-
wide programme to bring piped water to
every home—a transformational move if it
can pull it off. Yet, wary of rural voters, it
has shied away from fixing an appropriate
pricing structure to reflect the rising value
of water.
Only when it does is there likely to be
the sort of decisive shift towards cities that
China has recently undergone. Two-thirds
of Indians still live in rural areas, com-
pared with 41% of Chinese. One of the main
reasons for lower urbanisation is that sub-
sidies to farmers make small rural hold-
ings sustainable. More than drought or
flood or government neglect, the resulting
lack of profitability is the real root of In-
dia’s rural distress.
As more Indians become city-dwellers,
one thing they need is better education. Al-
though some states—Kerala being the champion—are approach-
ing universal literacy, others trail far behind. And though the offi-
cial claim of 75% literacy sounds respectable, more detailed
studies raise doubts. The most recent report by aser, an ngothat
has undertaken annual surveys of rural schools since 2005, reveals
rising attendance, an overall improvement in school facilities and
an encouraging, albeit small, recent rise in learning levels. Even
so, barely half of fifth-grade students nationwide had reached sec-
ond-grade reading level, and less than a third were able to do basic
maths. Among students completing eighth grade, some 27% could
still not read at second-grade level, up from 15% ten years ago.
Such results suggest not just that India’s 1.5m schools are gener-
ally bad, but that many children fail to develop important skills
and yet still move up to the next level. The trouble is not limited to
rural elementary schools. Aspiring Minds, a recruitment firm that
tests millions of tech-industry applicants every year, reckons in its
latest report that only 1.5% of India’s engineering graduates pos-
sess adequate skills to work in data-driven fields. More disturbing,
this “employability ratio” has not improved since the company’s
first survey in 2010.
It is easy to ascribe such poor outcomes to low government
spending on education. For decades, this has lingered below 4% of
India’s gdp, far below the world average. A disproportionate share
of that, too, has gone to higher education, to ensure that India has a
trained elite to run the country. As a result, many of India’s top
state universities are indeed globally competitive. The downside
is that its ordinary state schools are not.
Karthik Muralidharan and Abhijeet Singh, two economists, say
the solution is not just to spend more money, but to change the
culture and structure of Indian education. Schools are so geared to
passing exams that they fail to impart skills or values. Teachers
have limited time or motivation to teach slower students.
Yamini Aiyar of the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi think-
tank, suggests the trouble starts higher up, in the educational es-
tablishment. The whole system, she argues, is designed and incen-
tivised around enrolment and infrastructure rather than learning.
The focus on measurement may reflect the scale of the challenge
of managing so many schools in such diverse conditions. But add
to this an 18% rate of absenteeism among teachers and it is not sur-
prising the system is struggling.
To the relief of education experts who
have long pleaded for reform, Mr Modi’s
government is considering a draft national
educational policy that admits to a crisis.
Its chief recommendation is for a massive
focus on literacy and numeracy at the foun-
dation stage, so that children stop falling
behind. That would be a good start.
A third challenge facing Mr Modi is one
that plagues every Indian government: its
tools are not up to the task. Almost unique-
ly among large developing countries, India
does not have a bloated administration. Its
bureaucracy is underweight and over-
stretched. In the words of Milan Vaishnav
of Carnegie, a think-tank, “India is a 21st-
century economic and diplomatic entity
powered by a 19th-century state.”
The vaunted “steel core” of government,
the elite Indian Administrative Service, is
made up of just 5,000 active officers, the
same number, in proportion to the popula-
tion, as when this correspondent’s great-
grandfather joined it in 1889. That is some
1,500 officers short of the services’s full
strength, made worse by politicians’ habit of shunting them from
post to post. Similar levels of understaffing, as well as the “transfer
Raj” of frequent repostings, and mismatches between skills and
duties, plague every other Indian service, from the courts to
schools to the police.
The result is not just poor service. As many as 37% of high-court
and 25% of district-court positions remain unfilled, which helps
explain why Indian justice carries a backlog of more than 30m
cases. If the most congested courts worked as efficiently as the
least congested, one study found, India’s overall productivity
would rise by 5%, an annual gain to gdpof some $150bn. Consid-
ering that India spends a miserly 0.12% of gdpon justice, hiring
enough judges to sit in courts would seem a useful investment.Free the cities
If government is too flimsy, it is also the wrong shape, thin at the
central and local levels but fat at the state level. Big cities, in partic-
ular, have neither the independence nor the political clout to cope
with rapid urbanisation, let alone to plan for the future. “It is ironic
that India, which is constitutionally federal, is less devolved than
China,” says an urban-studies researcher.
Mumbai, the richest and most populous city, is run by the same
unelected bureaucrats who manage the surrounding state of Ma-
harashtra, similar in size and population to Vietnam or Germany.
The 22m Mumbaikars are at last getting a metro system. Until now,
public transport consisted of a rumbling state-run bus service and
a Raj-era suburban railway, managed from distant Delhi, that is so
crowded and precarious it kills some 3,000 commuters a year.
Freeing Indian cities to run their own
affairs would cost very little but substan-
tially boost the quality of life for millions of
people. The reason it does not happen is
political. In states like Maharashtra, party
bosses like to milk urban areas to pay for
vote-buying rural schemes. They also
prefer big infrastructure to more mundane
measures like making streets tidier or saf-
er. If India is to thrive, the cities where the
majority of Indians will soon be living need
to be much better run. 7GaspSource: AirVisual World Air Quality Report 2018 *PM2.5World’s most polluted cities, 2018
Micrograms per cubic metre*
Average
Rank City Pollution
136
135
130
129
125
124
120
116
116
115
114
113
110
105
1051 Gurugram, India
2 Ghaziabad, India
3 Faisalabad, Pakistan
4 Faridabad, India
5 Bhiwadi, India
6 Noida, India
7 Patna, India
8 Hotan, China
9 Lucknow, India
10 Lahore, Pakistan
11 Delhi, India
12 Jodhpur, India
13 Muzaffarpur, India
14 Varanasi, India
15 Moradabad, IndiaTwo-thirds of
Indians still live
in rural areas,
compared with
41% of Chinese