I happen to see a debate in CNN-IBN on which people from different sectors of the society were debating regarding the problems that hinder our growth to a super power status. One strange pattern I noticed was the degree of rationality that was used in the debate. What do you understand by being a super power? Why too much rationality is used across all sectors when the layman associates his life in a completely irrational manner? How people gain so much energy taking about the numbers when more than half of our children are malnutrition-ed, more than half of our population lives in acute poverty and when our social infrastructure development is crawling at snail’s pace. Then why is this government concentrating more on numbers?
Recently I happen to speak to my uncle who retired as a deputy general manger from Nabard. We had a discussion for more than one hour regarding the social infrastructure available across our country. The debate started with my complaint of lack of world class roads in my state. More over I was overwhelmed by the great social development in my state and the failure of the government to use it for the next economic revolution. But he steered my attention to the increased income and standard of living of the people in my state. As he mentioned, there are no world class MNCs or corporate giants in my state, but we are the state with the highest per capita income in India, with the highest literacy rate, with highest road density, with highest telephone density and with high quality social life. Here a daily worker earns 400rs per day, which is way higher than the national standards. People here enjoy a wonderful life compared to all other states. Two of our big cities are turning into the most livable cities in India with wide roads, less pollution, and with smiling auto drivers at your service. Our social life is comparable to the Japanese and our vehicle penetration is comparable to the Americans. If state wise growth is counted, we would be first among the states which could be declared as developed in the next couple of decade.
What were the contributing factors for this? First I would like to ask each and every one of you, what do you understand by development? Is it the presence of multinationals, those multiplexes, and shopping malls in your state capital or improving your people’s living standard? This matters to a minority like you and me. Yes the answer lies in the irrational approach of development, to invest in social development including schools, hospitals, rural banks, proper distribution system, farmer education etc. And it’s nothing but the stress on above mentioned approach made my state economically forward. This could form the basement for accelerating our economic development. Being little more rational, our current policies are benefitting only 6% of the total population i.e. 94% of the population are growing at below 1% when Indian GDP grows at 9%. This statistics could reveal the scary situation of income disparity in our country.
But what led to this? Yes it’s nothing but the power of rationalist approach to mesmerize our mind. Or moreover it’s the success of the government to make people think in such a manner. What a 12 billion dollar steel factory can do in Orissa where the people can associate the presence of Indian government with only one rail line that goes to an iron ore mine and that is nothing but a private rail line of a big MNC. Can you blame them for not giving up their land for the multibillion dollar mega industry? Can it change their life? Of course not!! What they need is nothing but good food, medical facility, schools, and banks to make them feel connected to the external world. And we blame them for blocking our race to that double digit growth.
Further strengthening the statement, success of non rationalist approach can be found in many successful corporate worldwide. This includes IBM, P&G, J&J, HP, DuPont, Intel and many more. Can the strategy of ‘share holder first’ make any sense to the employees? How can he associate his life with the daily fluctuation of his company shares? And if you are one of those who believe in this, it well buttresses that you belong to that upper segment of social life. If you drill down the strategies in these companies, you would find that the companies with the best social environment inside were able to tide over all the market bounce backs, recessions and those lobbies that work against them in long run. They concentrate more on the small things rather than mesmerizing the employees with corporate numbers. But at the same time it cannot be ruled out that there are hundreds out there for whom the numbers can be stress busters.
