Abstract
Development scholars are tracking a wide range of well-being indices across countries including life expectancy, school enrolment and a wide range of ‘freedoms’ now. Yet, a critical set of ‘privations’ or collective hardships, that undermine general well-being and call for concerted public response, still remain excluded from the mainstream development discourse.
This article highlights six sets of major ‘privations’ relevant to development studies based on an extended fieldwork in a village and a slum on Delhi’s periphery. It consists of four sections. The first section elucidates the conceptualisation of ‘privations’, its principal categories and their distinction from related terms such as deprivations, poverty and suffering. The next section explains the multi-method approach used in this study to track ‘privations’ in the studied communities (called Dhantala and Aradhaknagar) through surveys, interviews and group discussions conducted since 1988.
The third segment of the article focuses on two specific ‘privations’, namely safety and health risks experienced by studied subjects over the recent decades.
The article concludes with reflections on reasons for the neglect of the cited ‘privations’ in dominant development discourses. It offers suggestions for their better coverage in development indices and their mitigation by more concerted government response and civic action, in future.
Rethinking Development
The concerns and scope of development studies have broadened notably in recent decades. Health and education have not only emerged as major targets of development planning (along with economic growth and poverty eradication) but broader goals such as equity, ‘freedoms’ and climate safeguards have also been tracked across regions now. 1 The call given by Professor Amartya Sen to view development as ‘expansion of freedoms—instrumental and substantive’ is a reminder of this discursive shift (Sen, 2000).
Unfortunately, critical challenges such as rising crime, ethnic conflicts, state repression and dipping public morale that rank high in people’s concerns and are being tracked separately by some agencies, still remain marginal in the mainstream development discourse. Surprisingly, not only the primers on development studies but also the latest overviews of the discipline give negligible space to a systematic tracking of cited hardships across regions. 2 At a time when development discourse has broadened its horizons and does not remain limited to counts of GDP and poverty, such neglect of measurable collective sources of mass suffering that demand urgent collective response from the state and civil society appears intriguing.
Key Concepts
This article postulates collective hardships or ‘privations’ as a central concern of development planning and explores ways of tracking them comprehensively for spatial and temporal comparisons and policy responses in future. Six major categories of ‘privations’ that demand further attention include the three that pose major methodological difficulties for development analysis and the other three that need systematic correlation of existing data sets. The first category covers: (a) threats to public health (not only from limited spending and health infrastructure but also from fake doctors and medicines and pollutants in air, water and food chain, etc.), (b) atmosphere of fear and insecurity (including threats from rising crime and/or civil strife, brutalities inflicted by the state and ethnic violence and hostilities across regions and (c) low morale and interpersonal trust (which can be glimpsed from changing data on drug addiction, votes cast for hardened criminals and spurt in mob lynching, etc.). Besides above concerns that remain neglected in development charts until this day, there are others such as unemployment and hyper-inflation that are well tracked in existing literature but can still be clubbed with the study of ‘privations’ for a holistic understanding of collective hardships. Major categories in this set can be: (a) the state of physical infrastructure in any district or province, (b) quality of public service delivery and (c) sudden economic shocks brought by hyper-inflation, crop failures and spikes in unemployment, etc., especially in populations lacking adequate social security.
The present article maps ‘privations’ and their changing character in two marginalised communities within the National Capital Region. 3 The studied habitats include Aradhaknagar, a slum and Dhantala, a village. Their proximity to the country’s capital signifies the limits of development in this region, known for high per capita income otherwise (for details, see Financial Express, 2016). Both these communities have been visited and surveyed multiple times by the author since 1988. This accumulated evidence has been used, in the following pages, to present a comprehensive and data-based argument on ‘privations’ or collective hardships suffered by marginalised groups until today. However, in order to conform to the prescribed word count, this article focuses only on two ‘privations’, namely worsening health and safety environments in Dhantala and Aradhaknagar. 4
Before narrowing on the findings of the fieldwork, it would be helpful to first focus on the conceptualisation of ‘privations’, referred above, to underline the manner in which it differs from related notions such as poverty and ‘deprivations’ that have dominated the development discourse generally.
Finer divisions may be identified in each of these categories. Thus, the health environment may be tracked through changing mortality levels as also morbidity prevalent across social groups and the state of sanitation, medical facilities and food quality as also the impact of fake medicines, diagnostics and doctors in ill-governed regions. Similarly, the safety scenario may be tracked in any region by combining official surveys with local news and oral evidence on reported, unreported and unregistered heinous crimes and on repressive actions of the state besides communal and caste riots and trends in violence faced by women, children and the aged persons within family. The record of the physical infrastructure in a pocket may build on the condition of roads, power supply and sanitation, etc., while that of public services may be tracked in core institutions of the state such as police and the judiciary as also in the welfare apparatus, educational institutions and development projects (Dreze & Sen, 2013).
‘Privations’ Versus Poverty and Deprivations
As far as distinction between ‘privations’ and poverty is concerned, it may be noted that while the latter is measured through a monetary cut-off (below which individuals and families are deemed incapable of fulfilling basic needs in a territory), ‘privations’ refer to issues such as rising crime and contaminated food chain that have to be tracked across regions (rather than families) and are difficult to index on a single scale. Second, ‘privations’ can rarely be tackled at the level of households, unlike poverty. Also, the trajectories of poverty and ‘privations’ can be very different in communities. Thus, a fall in the former may actually be accompanied by a rise in the latter, as we shall see below.
At the same time, the notion of ‘privations’ needs to be distinguished from the more subjective terrain of ‘personal suffering’ also. While the latter include problems like clinical depression that may accrue from personal and extremely diverse sources, the former include collective hardships like the poor state of public services in a region that can be quantified and measured more easily. In addition, subjective personal sufferings are best tackled through family and local institutions while ‘privations’ impel systematic response mainly at the level of public policy and administration.
The notion of ‘deprivations’ (expounded by scholars like Amartya Sen) also needs to be distinguished from the concept of ‘privations’ presented here (Sen, 2000). While the former is focused mainly on long-term development goals such as expanding political participation, equity and social justice for maximising human potential and well-being across regions, ‘privations’ are centred more on pressing risks to people’s health and safety and the painful state of public services that call for urgent response from the state and civil society. It may be further noted that Sen’s concern with ‘deprivations’ and their resolution through universal entitlement to education and healthcare as well as ‘freedoms’ (rooted in comprehensive social security and large scale affirmative action) presuppose a functional democratic polity capable of delivering a vast spectrum of services for the masses.
Concerns like public health do entail an overlap between the proposed mapping of ‘privations’ and Sen’s focus on deprivations. But, here too, there are critical facets missing in the latter perspective. Thus, in a recent work, Dreze and Sen use life expectancy and public health infrastructure as the principal yardstick for ranking different states’ health record but neglect the growing threats to people’s health from fake medicines and doctors, etc. (Dreze & Sen, 2013). Similarly, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) compares health across nations through changes in life expectancy and not morbidity even though the latter is rising alarmingly even in nations witnessing continuous fall in death rate (UNDP, 2016). Another gap can be noticed in the global indices of educational progress that are largely based on rising school enrolment and pupils’ formal progression through classes without reference to their actual learning outcomes. This is unfortunate especially since learning indices have actually declined in several ill-governed states even as enrolment and pass percentage of pupils have risen in official files. 5 No doubt, many agencies are trying to measure pupils’ learning outcomes and adults’ morbidity levels across nations separately now (specially refer to ASER Centre, 2015). However, the global developmental ranking of nations has not been linked to these critical indices yet (UNDP, 2016).
Interestingly, UNDP and other bodies have tried to index an extremely subjective sentiment like ‘happiness’ across countries lately. 6 This metric is, however, even less quantifiable than ‘privations’ described above. While the latter have some basis in official and unofficial reports on crime and food adulteration, etc., ‘unhappiness’ is not only extremely subjective but also indexed by agencies from the respondents’ ‘reported feelings’ or perceptions of their mental state rather than a measurable, objective attribute (such as medical data on depression and drug dependence). Further, ‘happiness’ reported by selected samples across populations is inevitably rooted in extremely variable personal standards and difficult to compare across regions for this reason. The insignificance of happiness charts for development planning is also reflected in the fact that happiness and unhappiness among individuals rest much more on personal attitudes than objective conditions and are best tackled by civic and local community initiatives rather than the state’s development planning.
Within the ‘privations’ listed, there is at least one issue whose quantification and analysis poses a major challenge for comparative development studies, namely the problem of sliding morality and public morale across states. Although moral issues figure as a major concern among communities, the term itself is contentious and its measurement across regions is even more problematic. However, as a ‘privation’, morality refers to here only to the basic human sentiment of ‘care and sensitivity towards others’ suffering’ and not to contentious commandments of religions and philosophical viewpoints. The global appeal of an attribute such as human care and sensitivity and its centrality to the quality of life make it a relevant concern of development planning too. Fortunately, a range of policy measures can also be identified to promote an ethics of care and sensitivity including relevant reforms in education, law, media guidelines and distribution of public honours. The comparable indices of public morale (or adherence to basic human values of care and hard work, etc.) can also be identified in measurable trends such as pathological drunkenness and use of drugs and votes gathered by known criminals across regions. However, more research and reflection is needed for incorporating this critical social issue in development studies. 7
Methodology
In this light, the article confines to mapping only two challenging privations. These have also been tracked through a multi-pronged approach in a village and a slum visited since 1988, as stated above. While Dhantala is a community of about 2,600 persons, 90 km east of central Delhi (in Meerut district of western Uttar Pradesh), Aradhaknagar is an unauthorised colony of about 1,700 residents situated on the Delhi–Uttar Pradesh border along the Grand Trunk Road. These habitats were first surveyed by the author in 1988–1989 (for an MPhil dissertation) and visited again in 2005–2006 and 2017–2018 to track changing indices of daily life with special focus on ‘privations’. The communities were selected for this study as instances, if not samples, of urban and rural margins of the National Capital Region. Both the sites are multi-caste communities though Aradhaknagar has a preponderance of dalits while Dhantala is dominated by Jats and Gurjars.
Specific hardships analysed in this article are those of threats to safety and public health. They are challenging to assess but still open to assessment through a multi-pronged approach involving official records as well as oral evidence from the field. The latter was tapped by the author along with a research assistant making use of focus-group discussions, personal interviews and surveys. On the other hand, documentary evidence, in the field, was noted from available family records on court cases and letters, etc. Besides combining oral and documentary evidence and qualitative and quantitative data drawn from the field, an effort was also made to compare evidence from Dhantala and Aradhaknagar with that from other sites, in the region, studied by other scholars and also from macro data sets and news reports from the country as a whole.
Poverty and Suicides
As explained above, the problem of poverty that remains a major source of suffering for millions until today has not been included in the conception of ‘privations’ in the light of elaborate literature existing on the issue and its distinctive locus in families or headcounts rather than spatial characters associated with privations discussed above. We have also presented a detailed report on changing living standards in Dhantala and Aradhaknagar since 1988 in another article (Vijay, 2017a). The major finding of the said survey was that poverty declined in most households in both the sites after the economic reforms of the early 1990s in line with the liberal scholars’ claims regarding the impact of economic liberalisation. 8 This was evident from the long-term improvements in income, real wages, quality of housing, ownership of consumer durables and occupational patterns in the studied communities.
Several commentators have raised the issue of farmers’ suicides related to poverty and economic shocks in recent years. Our enquiry in Dhantala suggests that shaming and soured relations, etc., are bigger factors behind farmers’ suicides than poverty or starvation itself (refer to Table 1). It may be noted that, even as poverty declined in Aradhaknagar and Dhantala, from the 1990s, the rate of suicides (at 20, in a population of 2,500, over three decades) remained high and linked with humiliation and personal affairs much more than poverty itself (refer to Table 1).
Causes of Suicides in Dhantala: 1988–2018
Health and Security
In this section, the focus is on the two major causes of collective ‘privations’ noticed in the researched localities, namely threats to public health and to residents’ sense of security. While the former has been tracked through the indices of life expectancy and neglected factors behind rising morbidity such as contaminated food chain, fake medicines and fraudulent healthcare, the latter has been charted through trends in local crime and violence as well as the strained social fabric or resentments between castes and other ethnic identities in the region.
Public Health
It is arguable that next to hunger, the biggest source of misery among humans is poor health; the two together spell doom. In this light, the importance of reliable healthcare accessible to all cannot be overstated. Development theorists have thus paid attention to not only tracking health indices like life expectancy as much as the burden of major diseases across countries but also insisted on an enhanced public spending on comprehensive healthcare for all.
Unfortunately, a menace to public health (emanating from a highly contaminated food chain as also spurious medicines, hospital-imparted infections, excessive and fraudulent diagnostics, fake doctors and auctioned medical college seats) remains relatively uncharted in the official data sets as well as development texts. 9 Likewise, dangers to public health from the overuse of pesticides, antibiotics, colours and harmful chemicals in the food chain have still not been tracked systematically. 10
In this light, it is not surprising that the health scenario presents a paradox in India today—while life expectancy is rising across classes, morbidity is increasing simultaneously. Evidently, improvements in income and medical infrastructure have failed to check morbidity. Tellingly, reports from rural India indicate higher morbidity in the regions having more doctors and hospitals, and curiously better health indices in pockets still facing a deficit of (what is actually fraudulent) healthcare (Joe, Mishra, & Navaneetham, 2009). This signals an alarming apprehension that the expansion of poor quality healthcare facilities is a threat to public health bigger than the local quacks.
Another paradox worth noting in India’s health literature is the misattribution of widespread under-nutrition and stunting in the country to decline in calorie/grains intake when actually it is insanitary conditions and contaminated food and water that prevent the absorption of nutrients even when foodgrains are reaching about two-thirds of people at the subsidised price of ₹1–₹3 per kilogram (Patnaik, 2007). Stunting and anaemia, etc., are undoubtedly worse, in India, than much of Sub-Saharan Africa (Dreze & Sen, 2013). This signifies acute suffering especially among children and calls for a comprehensive public response immediately. Yet, maximum stress on ensuring cheap food to the poor without ensuring corresponding improvements in sanitation, clean air and water and a food chain free from toxins would not go far in addressing the challenge of malnourishment.
Health in Studied Communities
Our visits to Dhantala and Aradhaknagar confirmed general apprehensions regarding the sharp deterioration in the country’s health environment despite the increased life expectancy. Group discussions with community elders affirmed clear recognition of rising middle-age morbidity in the studied village as well as the slum. Thus, Devraj Singh (a 69-year-old postgraduate from Dhantala) stated in a recorded interview that the death rate had declined in the region mainly due to reduced infant and maternal mortality. Adults’ stamina and strength were, however, much worse than before independence. While respondents attributed this transition commonly to less hard work and more pollution now, dangers posed by the growing menace of fake medicines and fake doctors and negligible monitoring of medical facilities also found frequent mention in their reflections. 11 This concern indeed finds corroboration in the growing reports of frauds in health services, adulteration of food articles and overuse of pesticides, etc., in media channels which remain uncollated in official data still. The dangerous use of pesticides and colouring agents, etc., in food articles is indeed acknowledged by farmers in Dhantala too. 12
At this point, some contrasts and similarities in the health environment in Aradhaknagar and Dhantala are also worth noting. The village lacks even a functional dispensary until today. Although the number of practising quacks has increased to three, hospital facilities can only be accessed in the city like Meerut that is several kilometres away. Yet, Dhantala has a good number of nonagenarians and octogenarians (three and six, respectively) who are physically fit. On the other hand, there is only one octogenarian in Aradhaknagar, and he too has arrived from a village recently (to look after his orphaned grandchildren). Despite superior health facilities (including relatively well-functioning government hospitals and dispensaries of the capital city), morbidity in Aradhaknagar is higher than in Dhantala. In a survey of 100 families each in the said communities, in 2006, about half of the slum households had at least one chronically ill member (suffering from ailments such as asthma and diabetes). Whereas the chronologically ill constituted was only 20 per cent of the population of Dhantala. This is not surprising because Aradhaknagar suffers from not only congestion and lack of sunlight and ventilation but also highly insanitary conditions which have worsened as the population of the place had quadrupled between 1988 and 2017. By contrast, Dhantala’s population over this period had only doubled.
Insecurity and Crime
Along with food and health, personal safety and protection from violence are supreme concerns of people everywhere (Vijay, 2016, pp. 320–326, Tables 20–27). While the rich can shield themselves in gated communities to some extent, the poor are much more exposed to daily assaults and resultant trauma in ill-governed regions witnessing the spiralling crime, riots and terror attacks. Our research field lies on the margins of India’s capital city yet insecurities are palpable here on several fronts. Historically, Delhi witnessed considerable warfare right from ancient times. In this background, the consolidation of colonial administration in the 19th century and the stabilisation of democracy after 1947 were important turning points. In recent years, heinous crimes and caste and communal tensions have started threatening the region and the capital city itself figures high in crime rates even as official data does not fully reflect the extent of the menace. 13
In this light, it is imperative to track both the registered as well as unregistered heinous crimes in regions where corruption and excessive sway of ruling party cadres over local administration leads to biased registration of crimes. 14 Uttar Pradesh police were described as the biggest mafia by the Allahabad High Court in the 1970s. Delhi, on the other hand, has an extensive security apparatus but, here too, large-scale immigration and dense population have made it a hotspot of unrest and anomie. 15 As a result, the entire National Capital Region has been rocked by repeated news on gang rapes, murders and roadside snatchings (frequently involving repeat offenders and criminals out on bail or parole). 16 Worst of all, the law and order machinery, in the region, has also been found involved in the torture of culprits and innocent persons alike (besides being negligent and slow in responding to emergencies generally). News reports about custodial deaths, extortion rackets running from jails, gang rapes in police stations besides botched investigations, chargesheet against innocent persons by police (to claim successful investigation) and refusal to book well-connected persons or to file FIRs on complaints by commoners have added to this grim scenario (Vohra, 1995).
Throughout our fieldwork, issues such as rising crime and police excesses and miscarriage of justice in lower courts figured repeatedly in conversations. In Dhantala, for example, subjects from across castes claimed that murders, communal tensions, rapes and snatchings have grown with time (Vijay, 2017b). Several instances of heinous crimes as well as police excesses (including deaths in staged police encounters) were reported and some remained unregistered or even unreported, while some were hushed up by the community itself. Oral evidence from the field thus suggests that registered crimes may be only a fraction of total murders, rapes, etc., committed here. 17
Thus, ten murders (including those of two village pradhans) were reported during the past thirty years by residents of Dhantala. 18 Of these, one was not registered by police despite complaint, while three never got reported. Convictions materialised in only two cases, of which one was seen by most villagers as miscarriage of justice. Four cases are still in courts even after years of trial. Besides murders, three instances of gang rapes or heinous sexual assaults were reported by residents of Dhantala. Cases were registered in two instances only. Minor instances of molestation and ‘illicit’ sex within the village were settled through meetings between community leaders. Armed dacoities have come down in the region but highway robberies and snatchings have increased since our first survey in 1988. A telling sign of rising insecurity in the region was that families which had begun sending girls to adjoining cities for higher education began enrolling them in distance learning courses, if not withdrawing entirely. This is because of eve-teasing and harassment by organised goons on roads leading to city colleges against which complaints were made but police rarely took action specially under the Samajwadi Party’s rule. 19
Within Aradhaknagar, residents do not recall incidents of homicide though a number of stabbings were cited from the past three decades. On the other hand, reports of people from the slum having met a violent end outside the slum are no less. The author learnt about eight such incidents from local discussions (Thakur Jagjeet Singh [police officer], personal communication, 5 May 2011 [at Aradhaknagar]). Aradhaknagar thus appears safer than Dhantala as robust media presence in the capital seems to compel better policing and administrative response here than in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. Yet, petty crimes including snatchings and drug dealings are on the rise here too. 20
A peculiar paradox connected with violent crimes needs to be noted here. While media channels present an extremely grim scenario through more sensational reports picked from villages and cities, most individuals do not report personal experiences of violent crime generally. Hence, India’s crime rate seems to be actually lower than that of many countries. 21 But the worrying fact is that the registered crime, as shown, is just a fraction of actual crime occurring within communities. Second, as reported by residents of Dhantala and Aradhaknagar, the influence of even limited scale of heinous crime can have an extremely corrosive psychological impact on citizens, more so, when inundated by such news from multiple channels (Vijay, 2017b). Indeed, such pervasive insecurity can be extremely pernicious for the economic, social and political fabric as welfare delivery, basic services and elections are affected severely by fear and suspicion magnified on social media channels.
Strained Social Fabric
Besides crime, escalating inter-community tensions and violence is another major source of insecurity today. These strains have several loci including communal and caste prejudices and animosities and intra-family rifts. Among these, Hindu–Muslim violence over religious processions, inter-faith marriages and even over disputed cricket scores, loud music, mob lynching for alleged cow killings and witchcraft, etc., have been particularly damaging. 22
Within Dhantala, Muslims constitute only a tenth of the population but have never had to experience a collective assault from the majority community. Yet, members from both communities do express apprehensions about each other. While overt communal harmony has sustained within Dhantala, there have been horrendous reports of kidnapping and arson, etc., during communal clashes from surrounding villages such as Uldhan, Fafoonda, Tori and Sarava. This is also the case with neighbouring districts such as Muzaffarnagar and Kairana where both Hindu and Muslim ‘local minorities’ have even been forced to even desert ancestral homes out of fear of hostile majorities at times (Rai, 2016).
Similarly, caste tensions and violence had not been unknown in the studied region and dalits have faced humiliation as well as exploitation for centuries at the hands of upper as well as middle castes and even from Muslims where they are a local majority. 23 The problem was severe until the 1990s within Dhantala too and has been discussed at length in another work (refer to Vijay, 2016). In Aradhaknagar, interestingly, dalits are a numerical majority and inter-caste tensions are more frequent within Jatav and Valmiki sub-castes than between dalits and other communities in the slum. However, in the outer city, dalits face considerable discrimination from upper-caste masters and employers, etc., on a daily basis. However, such discrimination (specially in matters of employment and remuneration, etc.) is generally more covert than overt and involves traditional ‘untouchability’ or humiliation very rarely in city’s public spaces.
Besides tensions between castes and religious groups, sectarian acts of the local state also figure repeatedly in group discussions in the field. They also find frequent mention in scholarly writings showing dominant castes and caste-combines holding sway over the local administration and using this to favour own cadres even in criminal acts (Jeffrey, 2003; Pai & Kumar, 2018). On the other hand, electorally disadvantaged groups (with little clout over local administration) and the poor in general are treated callously by officials. 24 It was also reported that different party cadres have not only held sway over local administration from time to time but also manipulated appointments and transfers in police and other departments when in power (Times News Network, 2012). This has further deepened angst against ‘other’ parties and tensions between communal voting blocks also.
The joint family setup has been seen as a unique bright spot in India’s social tapestry (Mandelbaum, 1975). Indeed, amidst poor governance, rising insecurities and weakening community ties, it is bond with siblings, parents and other kin (with or without joint living) that seemed to be keeping individuals afloat in our society. But family and its idealised image have also been under strain lately. Our experience in Dhantala and Aradhaknagar brought to light the heart-warming as well as dark sides of the Indian family specially with respect to women. Thus, rural as well slum women not only remain extremely overburdened with work and child-rearing and other family chores (besides working in family farms and cattle sheds, etc.) but also suffer domestic violence and forced submission to decisions taken by others even in personal matters such as choice of friends, spouse, career and dress. In addition, new light has been shed lately on brutalities on elders and children inflicted behind closed doors through videos recorded on ubiquitous cell phones exposing hitherto underacknowledged violence and powerlessness faced by weaker family members. This is not to say that many Indian families suffer from such strains today. A large number of families indeed, maintain the glorious attributes of selfless motherhood, stable marriages, and joint living and care for elders, etc., for which our society has been praised globally (Erikson, 1995). Yet, mounting evidence on unfair treatment of women does signal challenges that call for major reforms.
In the studied region, a clear indicator of oppression faced by girls and women in families is the skewed sex ratio specially among middle castes where males outnumber females by a ratio of 10:8.5. This points to some concealed practices such as female foeticide, neglect of the girl child and occasional abandonment of little girls as well as old women in exploitative ‘ashrams’ by own relatives. On comparing gender indices between Dhantala and Aradhaknagar, important variations in rural and urban settings also come to light. As in other villages, a woman in Dhantala has very little say in her own marriage and can be disowned completely (though not killed) by her own kin for marrying against elders’ command. In contrast, women in Aradhaknagar have greater independence and command over their body and money. Yet, they also remain burdened with the double task of working in own and others’ houses to make a living and suffer from severe lack of privacy in the congested environment of a metropolitan slum. A critical tussle is also visible in some urban Muslim families where girls from slums are also graduating and looking forward to independent careers but also being forced to adopt the veil and early arranged marriage. 25
Conclusion
The survey of health and safety concerns in Dhantala and Aradhaknagar highlights the severity of ‘privations’ and impels a concerted response at multiple levels. Indeed, given their critical fallout on daily life and even on other developmental goals such as economic stability and growth, it is puzzling as to why development scholars have failed to cover these collective hardships holistically. This is particularly intriguing today when the development discourse counts a wide range of issues including ‘freedoms’, social justice and even happiness in its central concerns. 26
One answer to the riddle is that major privations highlighted by us can be categorised as governance issues rather than development targets. 27 Our field experience, however, pits safety, health and social harmony as not only relevant to conceptions of development for masses but also measurable and comparable for disciplinary analysis across regions. In any case, whether we track ‘privations’ as a development concern or as an administrative issue is less important than the fact that they deserve serious attention in policy debates in view of the damage they bring to individual lives as well as the social fabric. This is significant also because ‘privations’ emanating from poor infrastructure and safety environment, etc., are beyond individuals’ capacity to address and need planning at the collective level (even more than old development concerns such as poverty and illiteracy arguably).
Policy Derivatives
Having examined a range of ‘privations’ that call for urgent attention in development planning, it is pertinent to wonder what can be done to reduce sufferings emanating from these challenges at the national level. In order to save space, this article chose to focus on only two of the most challenging privations for tracking and comparisons. The study closes the discussion now by offering some policy pointers in these selected spheres while a more comprehensive account on ‘privations’ as a whole may be found in a separate volume (Vijay, 2019).
Regarding the worsening health environment today, our fieldwork impels far stricter and comprehensive monitoring of the food chain, water supplies and air pollution as well as marketed medicines, hospital services and doctors’ certification in the country. On safety concerns, we would stress that crime is spiked by large-scale unemployment but spreads particularly fast in ill-governed states where a corrupted law and order and the influence of mafia on unions, businesses and even entertainment industry, etc., breeds extreme insecurity among people at large. Besides tackling these evils through advised judicial and police reforms, every cultural resource of the country (including the education system, credible awards as well as support for sensitising literature, cinema and music, etc.) needs to be mobilised to strengthen communal harmony and mutual respect among social groups. The experience from Dhantala also shows that the adoption of a genuine secular agenda (that shuns any appeasement of majority or minority fundamentalism) would be vital for healing communal fissures.
Implications for Research
For further research, our study underlines the importance of tracking and comparing trends in listed ‘privations’ in the country as a whole. It is also suggested that local knowledge of villagers and slumdwellers be tapped for those concerns that are difficult to map from official data alone. For this, the establishment of monitoring cells in all district headquarters to collate accessible data (as on air pollution, falling water table, etc.) and to gather fresh evidence (as on fake medicines and unregistered crime) from local newspapers and village elders would be of help. In addition, evidence on ‘privations’ such as rising morbidity and quality of public services could also be gathered through new rounds conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation and other bodies or by adding fresh questions on said concerns in existing schedules used by surveyors.
Having generated serial data on privations from across states, development theorists could then analyse it to answer a range of questions including: Does the apparent rise in reported crimes and social strife in the media indicate better reporting or actual rise in such incidents too? What regions and social segments are reflecting this tendency more sharply and why? How can the menace be tackled in an environment in which new media channels are fuelling social tensions even while democratising information generation and sharing among people? The mapping of privations besides enriching development theory and planning is likely to alert the voter and civil society also on the record of different regimes in addressing these grave concerns. The role of such awareness in strengthening democratic pressures and realising better governance across states can hardly be overstated.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge here the arduous work put in by successive field assistants in this long journey, namely Mr Vikas Kumar and Ms Apeksha Sharma and by local surveyors Devraj Singh and Pawan Kumar for support in data collection. The guidance received from numerous scholars including Professor Jean Dreze, Professor Mahendra Prasad Singh and Professor Pulin Nayak was a vital prop of this multi-disciplinary work though responsibility for the final version is entirely mine.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by fellowship grants from University Grants Commission (Serial Number 1236/1986; F.5–344/2014/HRP) and Indian Council of Social Science Research (Fellowship Number 2–15/16–17/SF/GEN).