The Chinese model and why it is bad

Mumbai can quite easily be transformed into Shanghai if that is really what we want, personally I would like it to remain Mumbai, but it’s not going to be quite so simple, dear Mr. Hu Jintao, for you to give your people the freedom and fundamental rights we in India have long been accustomed to.

It’s true that China is in many ways ahead of India. When I went there ten years ago, I was bedazzled by the speed at which Shanghai was being transformed into a modern city and blown away by the excellence of Chinese roads compared to our own bumpy tracts.

In Shanghai and Beijing I was impressed by the absence of signs of poverty (no street children, no beggars) but on the drive to the Great Wall what surprised me was that living standards in the villages we passed seemed not that different from that Indian villages.

It turns out that our own aam aadmi might be better off. As Saubhik Chakrabarti pointed out in this newspaper last week “the share of consumption in India’s GDP is a little over 60 percent, for China the figure is around 38 per cent.”

That is a staggering difference if you consider that India began its economic reforms nearly fifteen years after China and it is only now that we are beginning to see the benefits of restricting the state’s role in industry and commerce.

The Chinese economy has been showing double-digit growth rates for years while we have only just begun to escape the damage done by all those decades when the economy grew at 2 per cent, thanks to the “commanding heights” being in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians of socialist bent.

The result of those decades of socialism was that by the early nineties India was broke, mostly illiterate and desperately poor. Poverty remains our most shaming problem. If we are not yet winning this war it is because we refuse to accept the need for drastic administrative and social sector reforms. We will not be able to end rural poverty until we begin by accepting that the instruments that we are using to fight this war are outdated, unwieldy and leak like sieves.

The public distribution system, the child welfare programmes, the BPL (below poverty line) schemes have made so little difference that farmers are killing themselves at an alarming rate in rich states like Maharashtra and Punjab. In Vidarbha last week there were eight farmer suicides in a single day.

With the Indian economy growing at more than 8 per cent a year this state of affairs is unacceptable. But it cannot change unless we make drastic social sector changes. Instead of wasting our energies on reserving seats in elite institutions for OBC students we should be taking a close look at the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to correct its flaws. Instead of a public health policy that concentrates on reserving seats in medical colleges for the backward castes, we need a policy that acknowledges that more than 90 per cent of the country’s rural health facilities exist in name only.

I could go on and on and on but would like to end this piece on a happy note. With all our failures and with all China’s successes there is no doubt in my mind that it is the Indian way that will endure because we have something that the Chinese people will not have in the foreseeable future: democracy.

The Chinese may have better governance but in my Indian eyes the idea of a country ruled by despotic, omnipotent officials is too horrific for words.