The October figures for the index for industrial production are very heartening, particularly since it comes on the back of a blip. The IIP stands at 11.8%, which is higher than the corresponding period last year. Now this proves that the India growth story is continuing. There are other strong economic indicators as well. Take a look at the rising foreign exchange reserves currently over USD 273 billion.
The booming stock market, the changing life style of the people that we see around us - all of this clearly suggests that India is on the move. Who in fact could have imagined that India would have over 200 million plus mobile phones? There seems to be no stopping India now. India at 60 is indeed raring to go, but the question is should we be content with this growth and what could spoil the India party? That is the theme for this event - will the next decade belong to India?
I am reminded of what Gandhi said - "India lives in its villages". So for the growth story to be sustained and accelerated, the time has come to look at the growth outside of our metros. The focus is on inclusive growth; so we ask how can the Indian banking industry play a major role in transforming rural India.
Subir Gokarn, Chief Economist-Asia-Pacific, Standard & Poor’s and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission debate on the theme of inclusive growth.
Q: Will the next decade belong to inclusive growth?
Gokarn: I think inclusiveness as a concept, as a goal, has four dimensions. The first is opportunity i.e. the system is the economy creating opportunities for people to earn more money in more stable fashion with opportunities for productivity growth, which allows them to move up the income ladder. The second dimension is capability, which relates to the opportunities being created and we when we look around us see signs that there is mismatch between the two.
Are enough people being equipped with the capability to take advantage of those opportunities? And that brings me very squarely to the issue of education, in which the system works.
The third dimension I would describe as an access, which is the mechanism that brings opportunities and capabilities together and there the issue is one of how labour markets or other mechanisms that bring opportunities and capabilities together?
The market is only an example of this mechanism.
What will be very important as we go along, particularly as our currently bulging young population starts to grow older, is security. Is the system capable of providing both short-term and long-term security in the sense of allowing people to tide over temporary gaps in employment, temporary disruptions in employment or other shocks to their income and is it capable of providing older people with a more permanent long-term security. So we look at inclusiveness from this broad perspective.
Q: You were talking about four dimensions, but if you were to tell the government something today, what are the immediate things they needed to do, focus on to make this inclusive growth happen?
Gokarn: Facilitating jobs are absolutely the priority. As I said social security is important, but if you had to prioritize, I wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort on the system. It needs to be designed and rolled out, but 60% of the workforce in agriculture, 16-17% of GDP in agriculture - this is an untenable equation and we have to be moving people out of agriculture faster, which means creating the kinds of jobs that people who are now in the agriculture sector can transit to, relatively easily and that means very short-term, very skill oriented educational processes, which allow them to move and the ability of market regulation. So that’s really the priority.
Q: Inclusive growth only a part of government job or even the private sector should be involved here? You talked about a PPA model. Is it workable yet?
Gokarn: The lesson we learnt from recent experiences with private investment education is that if the environment is there, if you have some facilitation, people are willing to invest, that can be supported because it is costly. If a private provider of education will charge a significant fee, that can be supported by the development of financial mechanism that allow students to borrow against their future earnings, which is happening to a limited extent now, but not yet widespread enough to make a significant impact.
It all started in 1951 by the resolution of the Indian government to bring about a steady and shift rise in India’s living standards. Today it has set the stage for India’s 9% economic growth by clearing the draft of the 11th five-year plan amidst the Prime Minister’s concerns over the burgeoning oil and food subsidies, which is expected to touch the Rs 10,000 crore mark this year, that is indeed a frightening figure.
Will the next decade belong to India?
Ahluwalia: The issue is not whether the next decade belongs to India, I am sure there are a lot of claimants in the world for the next decade, but whether the next decade will be very significantly different from what we have seen so far, which sees the emergence of an India that is viewed quite differently.
I say that because if you look at the last decade, probably the growth of the economy has only averaged about 6% or so. It is only in the last four-years that it is gone up to 8.5%. We are now talking about averaging 9% ending at 10% in a five-year period. So the next decade hopefully will involve a growth rate above 9% and closer to 10% and would be a order of magnitude different from what has happened in the previous 10-years.
The simple point is that if you grow at 6% and your population in the last 10-years has grown at about maybe 1.7% or so, your per capita income is growing at about 4.2% or 4.3%. If in the next decade, we grow at 9.5% with the population growing at less than 1.5%, then you are talking about a per capita growth of 8%, which is double the per capita growth of previous decade.
That’s a huge change and if that were to happen the way we want it to happen, which is in a manner much more inclusive than the growth that we have seen in the past. The reason is that the government has recognised that the private sector will do most of what is needed for the growth to take place, but the government has to take care of the inclusion and further more the inclusion is not being viewed now as simply handing out subsidiaries.
Inclusion is being viewed in terms of putting in infrastructure that will energize the more remote parts of the country. Putting in a new set of policies and rural infrastructure that will create a new dynamism in agriculture. Bring in more and more investment and better structure of public services that would improve education and health. Now this is not a strategy that has been so clearly followed in the last 10-years. We have talked about it, but the reorientation of government money and putting the money behind these things is something we have started in the last couple of years in the middle of the 10th plan.
We brought it to a much higher level in the 11th plan, which has just been approved by the NDC and frankly if the economy grows, the resources that it would generate will enable us to put even more money behind this strategy.
Therefore if you can see a 10-year period with per capita income growing at something like 8% per year, poverty as we know it now will definitely be a thing of the past and what is more - you will see for the first time the kind of growth of high quality employment, which is central to making the growth process more inclusive. Too much discussion takes place on the growth of employment. Actually employment has grown quite a bit in the last several years, more than what was originally expected. The real concern is, much of this employment is in the unorganized informal sector.
What we need is a qualitative change. Rapid growth in an environment in which modern small and medium industries can actually take off thus generating much higher quality employment all of which, will lead to an essential change in income structure. The impact of which, over 10-years could be very powerful. Now I don’t know whether that gives the decade to us, but it certainly produces a much attractive India at the end of that decade.
Q: Let me step back in time. It is about 18 years since you joined the government as Commerce Secretary. 17 years since you, Dr Acharya, P Chidambaram, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unleashed India into the world. Did you think then that we would reached 9% so quickly by 2007 and did you think we would reach it just doing the “no brainier” reforms, as you have called it, without getting hard reforms?
Ahluwalia: Our reforms have been slower than what I would have liked. By the way, I never thought that they would be very rapid. I didn’t think that in our kind of social and political environment, one could have this sort of ‘big bang’ quick type of reforms. I did think the reforms would be slow but I would have liked them to be faster. There is no question about that. What are the results being like? If one dates it from 1991, in the initial stages the economy responded very well. Then, there was a bit of a turnaround in the second half of the ‘90s and that turnaround is partly because the global situation deteriorated, East Asian crisis, and so on. It is also that the reforms proved to be slower than what we would have hoped for, because when the reforms slowdown, then the signal, which is given to industry to better start changing rapidly, is weakened.
It has been very encouraging after about 2002 as there has been a big upsurge in growth. To some extent, that is also linked to the change in the global economy, because there has been an upturn in the global economy too. What we are now seeing is not a growth, which is other than, what was envisioned. After all, even in the 9th plan, we had set a target of 8%. We didn’t achieve it. In the 10th plan, the target that was set by the previous government was 8%. It wasn’t achieved in the first couple of years but in the last three years or so, we have been achieved more than 8%. But still the average for the 10th plan is only 7.6%.
Q: Yet we achieved 9.4% last year. It looks like we will achieve 9% this year. But for the 11th plan, you have set yourself just a 9% growth target. Is that a tad under ambitious?
Ahluwalia: Many of my friends say that we are being under ambitious. Let’s get the record on this clear, when we projected the 9% average, it was projected on a base of 8.5% for the current year accelerating to 10%. One would say that we are getting 9% this year. It is true that the average for the first six months is 9%. There seems to be some likelihood that the economy will grow somewhere between 8.5-9%. I think that it would probably do better than what we had envisaged for the current year because we had thought of 8.5%. While the economy has done very well, even the present growth rate of 8.5% is not sustainable on its own unless we make a lot of policy changes and invest in infrastructure. The system is now straining at the seems and therefore we need to do a lot just to sustain 8-8.5%, to reach 9% is therefore going to be a significant effort.
Q: The government has not encouraged investments in rural areas or small towns where the growth is not taking place and growth will come only from that place?
A: First, I agree that in the past there has not been much investment in the productive rural infrastructure as they should have been. That is why one of the fundamental policy decision of this government was that we should do more of that. Hence, we have the whole Bharat Nirman programme, Rural Roads Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana, and investments in irrigation. All of this has been done. Now, the facts are that in the last 2 -3 years, there is a turnaround in public investment in agriculture. The graph shows an improvement.
Second, in three years including the current year, average agricultural growth is 4%, which is double of what was happening in the previous seven years. Any sensible strategy for any inclusive growth must focus on ensuring productive investments and growth of productivity in agriculture. We are trying to correct several years of neglect.
For three years, we have been at it. The early results at least are good. I completely agree that it would be foolish to be complacent because of three years, but I think it is worth noting that at least in these three years the trend is different. I think the 11th plan, if one reads it carefully, spends lot of energy on how to bring in a policy environment that will shift resources into agriculture. The government will do the infrastructure portion.
The market will do a lot of the rest. Credit needs to be brought to agriculture, so that productive farmers have access to credit. There are a whole lot of other things which will relate to improvement in cultivation practices. Our information, research etc shows that with existing technology, it is possible to increase the land productivity in most parts of the country between 80% and 100%.
But this is only going to be possible if the right cultivation practices are brought to the farmer. If the farmer has access to credit, he can finance farm investments. If the government builds infrastructure ‑ rural roads, irrigation and this kind of stuff ‑ that is exactly what the 11th plan says.
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