Rani’s cell phone and inclusive growth

Our maid, Rani, too owns a cell phone. She is obsessed with it. Every morning when she comes to work, I can hear her chatting away on it. How does she manage the monthly bills is what mystifies and worries me, because a close look at her manner of existence would show how hopelessly inadequate her economic sense is. She is an indifferent worker with no dependable means of earning a livelihood. Result: she earns badly and spends badly and her meagre monthly income vanishes sooner than the melting of the ice on the holy Shiva lingam in Amarnath. Ever since her husband — an alcoholic and wife-beater — deserted her and their four-year-old daughter, Rani has been forced to work in three households to keep the stove-fires burning in the one-room rented accommodation she has in the local slum. Now there is the additional expense of the cell phone that she incurs.

Rani has no sense of planning for the long term, as for instance making provision for the future schooling of her daughter. Occasional bouts of illness mean asking for an advance from employers. In spite of having stayed in a metropolis like Delhi for a while now, she has no idea of the different occupational options open to her and how she could get trained for a job that offers better wages. I once even tried to float a home-based micro-financing scheme for her and some of her friends from the same slum but it never took off, because they failed to make the small monthly contribution required of them. Every day for Rani is one filled with anxieties and tensions. Sometimes, for months at a time, she would be extremely hard up, even in debt — she owes a sum of Rs 30,000 to a creditor — yet she never stops craving for a fancier cell phone or TV set.

Rani is not the only one of her kind in the country. There are countless day-dreaming millions who may have a cell phone or a TV set in their shacks, but look to the future with little hope. This is the new change, the experts remind us, that is visiting India. But what we tend to forget is that when the poor make their investments, they often betray their inability to systematically rank priorities for themselves and their children. Driven by the cult of unbridled consumerism, they often end up spreading far too thin even the modest savings they have made.

No data exists on the price the poor pay, in the form of changes in food habits and poor provisioning for the future, after splurging on acquisitions like TVs and cell phones. There is no information available on, say, what such families eat, how much they eat and how often. We don’t know the effect their extravagance has had on the provisioning of health care for themselves.

Rani’s endless financial distress and daily struggles and troubles in various aspects of life keep her at just one remove away from those considered below the poverty line. So are the conclusions drawn by many of our learned economists about inclusive growth not a bit premature? Can Rani’s ‘domestic economy’ be said to be really in sync with a rising ‘national economy’ that is believed to be robust? Isn’t even her cell phone only a superficial sign of her supposed prosperity? Does it reveal anything significant about her actual economic status?

Human beings have holistic requirements. Today, the dream of holistic development and inclusive growth is proving to be an elusive one for millions of Indians despite the ‘robust performance’ of the economy.

The writer is a management consultant and was on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi