Even Narendra Modi’s most strident critics in the media would have to concede that the country has seen myriad changes in his tenure, with widespread infrastructure development being the most visible of these. The government also set out early on to widen the reach of basic conveniences ranging from toilets to banking, making them available to the masses. The prime minister completing 12 years of leading the country this month merited a burst of credit-taking. Given the government’s propensity for publicity, schemes have a way of becoming claimed achievements. Mr Modi’s own tweet sported the hashtag #12YearsOfGaribKalyan.
He said India has witnessed many transformations and cited schemes for financial inclusion, and other benefits such as medical insurance, the building of houses, provision of water connections, and toilets reaching people at the bottom of the pyramid. Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, chief ministers and television anchors echoed him. NDTV devoted an entire news programme to the tweet. These initiatives were cited without mentioning the outcomes of the audits which have subsequently followed. But why should a grateful nation nitpick? Panel discussions on sundry television channels seized the term, ‘data points’, to quantify facilities that were transforming rural India as well as the lives of the urban poor. They would, if they were working.A tweet from the department of telecom told us that from digital identity and real-time payments to affordable internet and expanded public services, the last 12 years have laid the foundation for one of the world’s largest digital public infrastructure ecosystems.
The UPI payments interface enabled wide ranging small commerce. Memorably, The New York Times featured photographs of QR codes sitting atop vegetable mounds to show how ubiquitously it was being used by street vendors. E-Shram, a platform on which workers across the country can register to avail benefits, was founded in 2021. The digital divide became a significant barrier but crores of registrations have happened nonetheless. Many workers, particularly women, still lack access to smartphones and affordable internet, relying on external support to navigate the registration process. They struggle with Aadhaar, biometric authentication, and e-KYC to use the platform. How successfully the working class is accessing government benefits in different parts of the country is something only widespread ground reporting could tell us. Economists have also documented the exclusions that have resulted despite digitisation.
A skipped census has huge implications for beneficiary coverage. The demographic baseline remains fixed: the approximately 81.35 crore people on beneficiary rolls today represented India’s 2011 population structure, according to one analysis. How does the government plan to update these beneficiary rolls?The image-building blitzkrieg from the party, the State, and the media tells one story, the governance record of the government tells another. The most recent example being the problems in the way in which exams such as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and the Common University Entrance Test were conducted and the trauma that students experienced in recent weeks.How well then is the country being run under Mr Modi and his party?
When reporters set out to do what they are supposed to, they shed light on the quality of governance. To cite random examples from The Hindu this month — a paper that takes its governance reporting seriously — India’s pension scheme lags in terms of coverage and contribution. The Centre’s contribution to India’s flagship pension scheme has remained the same, the paper says, while add-on contributions by state governments have increased. Neither the number of beneficiaries nor the sum of Rs 200 a month has risen since 2007. Yet another data story describes how one in every three faculty posts are vacant in top technical institutes. Vacancies all across the government is a story which the media should dwell regularly on but does not.
Reporting from the ground has suffered in recent years, particularly after Covid-19 when newspapers across the country shut editions and sacked reporters. Well before that, the mainstream media’s viability issues had led it to shrink reporting bureaus in the states. But data journalism has risen to compensate, with the frequency of government surveys having increased for employment and various economic indicators. Other data comes from the answers provided to Parliament questions. And how does the working class fare in one of the world’s fastest growing economies? Data show that this is a country with abysmal wages, though the focus of news reporting is far more on employment than on wages.
One consequence is malnutrition as an analysis published last week shows. The high unemployment rate and low food consumption level show that the relatively high growth of the past three years is not trickling down to a large section of the population. Accidents at worksites and assembly lines have become as endemic as low wages in a country that is professing labour reform.
But whereas the worker unrest in Haryana and Noida, which began earlier this year, have highlighted stagnant wages as an issue that can no longer be ignored, the time has come for sustained outrage on India’s record in enforcing safety oversight at places of work. Molten iron spilling on workers at the Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited’s Visakhapatnam steel plant at the beginning of this month, after an explosion, has to epitomise the worst that can happen to labourers in a country where horrific violations of worker safety have become common.
The governance issue here is that industrial safety cannot improve without an overhaul of the factory and worksite inspection regime that the Centre and state governments operate. Inspectors are highly inadequate in number and widely assumed to be bribeable. The data collected separately from the chief inspectors of factories and the directors of industrial safety and health, and the data compiled by the Labour Bureau never match. India’s factory injuries are undercounted. Around 98% injuries are in factories supplying to six major auto brands. The prime minister highlighted India’s rise as a global supply chain and manufacturing hub this month. But this is coming at a heavy human cost.
Finally, there is the role political management plays in managing voter discontent and keeping the party and the prime minister in control despite widespread under-performance in many areas. As the French political scientist, Christophe Jaffrelot, points out in a discussion on TheFederal.com, elections are now less of an even playing field than before. Once the 2024 Lok Sabha elections showed that the BJP could lose even with Mr Modi at the helm, the country entered a new era in which elections are no longer fair. The risk of losing is such that you have to change the rules of the game. And because men matter, those who occupy key positions of election control have to be neutralised in the way appointments are made. Management of the electorate, presumably of the kind we saw in West Bengal, will also flow from that. But will that save a government which talks more than it delivers?
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the WhatsApp channel on labour news,