Middle Class Issues while Looking West
Western science, social and economic thoughts have been dominant during the last few centuries. Its not that these have always been good or progressive as things like slavery, colonization etc. were also part of it. However, it evolved into something that is much better though its not perfect or even close to it. Many of the leaders who fought against colonial oppression were themselves educated in the same western countries that perpetrated it. Western R&D, Science and technology has revolutionized our daily lives and lifestyle. Our lives would not have been better without these inventions and technologies. Learning from and being open to assimilation of good aspects of other culture is not only necessary from the perspective of openness but it also contributes in real terms to the betterment of any culture. No culture can be closed; it can do so only at the cost of its own failure. As each region or culture has its own idiosyncrasies a direct transplantation of lot of things may not be appropriate, even some times straight forward wrong.
When we take inspiration from the West we should be learning how they structurally approach a problem and look for solutions. This way the methodologies that have been used there to understand issues at stake and critically look at the proposed alternative becomes more important than the actual issues and outcomes as these may have several idiosyncrasies of that region/culture. My observation has been that this important aspect has been bypassed and we have started taking on the issues/outcomes regardless of its relevance to India or even trying to instantiate to the Indian context. This may range from a bizarrely harmless misunderstanding in some cases to driving seriously wrong priorities in policies. In this article I discuss some of these issues observed amongst the people that I work or socialize with, which calls itself the middle-class of India.
During COVID there was a lot of discussion on the usual channels like whatsapp group, zoom calls etc on Govt. of India “declaring emergency”. This was to a great extent related to the US and other western countries declaring an emergency, with their own prefixes, due to COVID. India has its own constitution and laws, and its administered through it. So the basic check anyone should have done is to check on the provisions for declaration of emergency in the constitution. Indian constitution envisages declaring emergency only under extreme circumstances where the integrity of the country is under threat through war, rebellion etc. So the term has a completely different meaning in India. The US laws seems to be a much more relaxed in terms declaring the emergencies. This can be understood easily by a cursory search and does not need a deep understanding of constitutional principles. An astute constitutional expert can still justify the conversation by saying that COVID can lead to disturbances that can be a threat to the integrity of the country. Regardless, we all know the background in which such comments were passed, it’s not the result of a serious debate on the interpretation of the constitution of India for that specific situation but more as a cliché picked up from the discussions in the US.
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One of the latest topic of discussion on these lines is DOGE. The only reason I could see is that DOGE is a hot topic in US. No one seems to have looked into and compared the capacities of the governments in India. The capacities of core government functions like police, judiciary are a fraction of US. Most regulatory functions are grossly understaffed in India that effective implementation of regulations is not practically possible. We may not be able to achieve the same ratios of public sector employees in India due to the huge population and also our economic status. Digitization initiatives can also help us achieve similar outcomes that the west has achieved in govt. service delivery with lesser employees. But everyone would recognize the need to increase the ratio of public sector employees in core government activities is a dire necessity. Even this may seem a secondary issue when we consider the vacancies in sanctioned posts. While there would be some distortion in a few cases where some of the functions that are not considered to be of any use is well staffed, such idiosyncrasies cannot skew the overall direction in which the government staffing and capacities should move.
A buzzword that has permeated our economic jargons in recent time is gig economy. This, in spite of what is happening here in India has no structural resemblance to that of West, except for probably the use of a similar apps. What is termed as a gig in the West, is mostly being done through full time work in India but without any associated benefits. Social media posts by some business leaders saying they met a driver from a ride sharing app or spoke to a delivery boy from one of the online delivery apps and found them to be a student or an employee in the formal sector doing his/her gig in free time is at best an outlier and not the situation for a vast majority of such workers. It only reinforces the Western story of the gig economy without much Indian context to it. All we have done is to give a new fancy terms for the precarious employment situation. I am not accusing the new age digital companies for creating this or even exploiting the situation in India as this has been the case for decades much before these fancy apps and digital economy even existed. This would be clearly evident if we see the ratio of formal employees in the overall labour force in India for the past few decades. It’s not about singling out the highly visible digital companies and shaming them for these practices. My immediate grievance is more in terms of the lack of structural understanding of employment scenario. The west has achieved much higher rates of formal employment and social benefits associated with jobs. So the growth of gig economy may be seen as a threat to that structure in the West. However, the situation in India is completely different and importing those terms is not appropriate and leads to wasting of policy making bandwidth on superfluous issues.
Having complained on few issues, I would like to speculate on a few excuses that typically come up when this is pointed out. The most frequently used one would be the prevalence of corruption. In a scenario where the capacity to deliver within the expected time is low its rational for those with much higher marginal cost of time to bribe their way ahead of the queue. While there will be some level of corruption even if we achieve higher government capacities it would be much lesser than what we see today. Another excuse would be on the laziness of government employees leading to the view that increasing government employee count would only lead to more inefficient outcomes, akin to pouring gasoline over a fire. We are not unique in claiming this as this is the same complaint worldwide. There is a lot of research on motivation, incentive structures etc. that drive the performance and productivity of government employees. Regardless of these most developed countries have built higher capacities. Unless we feel that culturally Indians in government jobs are much lazier than those in developed countries this does not really impact the view on the government capacities. The most important one that is not much spoken about but lurking underneath is the apathy to the functioning of Indian government. People have lost hope in expecting something better from the government and this is a very dangerous one for the country. From this perspective its meaningless to waste time discussing these not only due to it being in vain and also in many cases it may lead to a divisive and adversarial political debate amongst friends, relatives and colleagues. This apprehension prevents a conversation on the ones that really matter to us and its would seem to be better to escape into a discussion on what’s happening some where else in the world.
Throughout this article I have consciously avoided throwing stats and metrics as these are easily available for anyone looking for it and the goal of this article was to induce that behavior. This is not a discussion on the right target metrics on the size and performance of the public sector but rather an indication of the direction that metric should be moving. If people start looking at the capacities built by government to deliver those services where they face issues and start debating on that, it would be a great start.
