Nothingness as policy in a hungry nation

(One of my favourite things in the internship at Tehelka was being asked to review books on a regular basis. Thanks to the quality of books published in the summer of 2011, this allowed me, a lowly college student, to rip into famous authors and their latest offerings. One book that escaped my wrath was Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a remarkable book on poverty that promises to change the way we look at development. On the penultimate day of my internship, I attended a session with the two authors and two of my personal favourite articulators of public policy: Nandan Nilekani and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. The following is a piece I wrote in the aftermath of such awesomeness.)

On being asked for three policies that could help India tackle poverty, MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, co-author with Esther Duflo of the seminal book on development Poor Economics, had a perplexing answer. “I have only one suggestion: don’t do anything,” he said. We do not know enough about the methods, he said, adding that they could do more harm than good. “We have a moral responsibility to deliver, but not to deliver a lie.”

Banerjee and Duflo have long advocated the use of empirical evidence before adopting anti-poverty measures, most of which are prescribed by the West for the entire developing world and might not be applicable in India. These ‘silver bullets’, as Nandan Nilekani calls them, are often gross simplifications of complex economic theory, distilled to fit a 22-minute news programme. As Duflo puts it, it is important to find shoes that fit the poor, and not the poor that fit the shoes.

But for a development economist like Banerjee to ask a nation that is talking about ending hunger, corruption and illiteracy to do nothing is a bit jarring. Largely due to the efforts of a proactive National Advisory Council (NAC), we are talking about expanding entitlement programmes to cover a number of aspects of development. Bills on these, however, receive nowhere close to the public scrutiny they should. Ask a random sample of Indian citizens how many of them support the Right to Education Act, and you are likely to get a large majority in favour of the legislation. Ask the same sample what the law contains, and barring a few stock answers, very few know, or care.

The National Food Security Bill, touted to be the biggest legislation in the UPA2 government’s tenure, has recently had many of its substantive clauses removed by the agriculture ministry, without much hue and cry. The constitutional guarantee to food, child nutrition, maternity benefits and emergency food relief have all been removed from the NAC draft, which now resembles a standard food subsidy.

All over the world, the public holds its government accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

Government is accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

In his landmark study of electoral strategy, Clientelism and voting behaviour, Leonard Wantchekon performed a unique field experiment to quantify the impact of campaigning on a platform of national policy on election results. He got four parties in the first round of the 2001 presidential election in Benin to canvass on the strength of their policies in one village, and on strictly localised propaganda in another village where their initial support is roughly the same. A team of one party worker and a research assistant would go to the first village and talk about ending corruption and how it would eradicate poverty, and rant to the second village how their region had fallen behind and promise to provide pork barrel spending and hiring sons of the soil. The results confirmed what political parties in India have long known: parochial positions improved the party’s performance, while policy positions actually hurt it.

We have a polity which does not extend beyond our caste, class and region. Politicians have exploited that for decades. The conversation for poverty alleviation is restricted to a general sense of affirmation at the need to do so, but with few original ideas beyond throwing money at the problem. Thankfully, there are fora, such as the NAC, where these ideas are discussed in depth, but like the hatchet job on the food security act shows us, its suggestions can easily be ignored without fear of backlash.

In a country where 42 per cent of the population falls behind the international poverty line, we cannot afford for our government to fall prey to the temptation of symbolic legislation that has not been subjected to field tests first. In the meantime, it would make more sense, as Banerjee says, to fix our development mechanism.