Today’s Editorial
More localization will make the world better
Source: By Arun Maira: Mint
India is facing many challenges, as are countries all around the world. Three of India’s most prominent challenges are: a crisis in the agricultural/rural economy, a need for much faster and more widespread generation of jobs and livelihoods, and rapid degradation of the environment. Cries for attention to the rural/agricultural crisis are becoming louder, with suicides of farmers in many parts of the country. It was thought that this was largely a monsoon problem—too little rain or too much—which interfered with the production of crops. However, farmers’ demands for relief have become louder this year, despite good rains last year and, consequently, higher production. This makes it clear that the problem is in the pattern of the rural economy, not in nature.
The problem of “jobless growth” has begun to receive the attention of policymakers who seemed to be fixated, so far, on higher gross domestic product (GDP) as a panacea for all problems. India’s GDP growth has been quite good for some years, but not enough good jobs and sustainable livelihoods have been generated. Indeed, the agriculture/rural crisis are a consequence. India is staring at an enormous environmental crisis. Cities are getting choked with solid waste. Air pollution in Indian cities is the highest in the world. Groundwater levels are reducing very fast in urban and rural areas. The health of the soil has been degrading for decades.
These problems are created by the pattern of growth. More growth will not reduce them. In fact, if the pattern of growth is not changed, the environmental crisis will become worse with more growth. Therefore, one must consider fundamental changes in the prevalent approach to economic growth. Begin with the obvious. That is, the economy, society and ecology are integrated in a system. Changes in any one of these components will affect the others. Components of systems must coordinate with each other for the system to remain healthy. Moreover, there must be harmony amongst the components wherever they come together for the whole system to remain healthy. The blood, the flesh and the bones must be adjusted with each other in all parts of the body. If there is disharmony amongst them in any part, the body becomes ill. Similarly, if society, economy and ecology fall into disharmony in any part of the world, trouble will grow and spread. Disharmony in the Middle East is affecting the whole world. Urban India cannot be well if rural India is not.
The problem is, we mentally break a complex system into parts and then try to improve them separately. Thus, economists worry about the economy, and sociologists about society, and ecologists about ecology. And they quarrel with each other. Economists think ecologists are coming in the way of growth. Sociologists think economists do not understand that human beings are, well, human beings and not factors of production. Each part of the complex system is managed by specialists reporting up to the top of organizations and governments. There, they try to coordinate the whole system. All have their programmes and their budgets and each passes down instructions to its subordinates in the localities that are responsible for only a part of the system. Not surprisingly, the system is not integrated on the ground where it should be.
The obvious solution to this systemic problem is to devolve responsibility for the governance of the system to the localities. However, the experts at the top are reluctant to let go of their power. They claim that the locals will not have the capability to manage, and so the centre must take on the burden of managing the locals. M.K Gandhi advocated the devolution of power to the villages. However, Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of centralized planning and large-scale projects prevailed.
The 20th century witnessed a great war of ideologies: of communism versus capitalism. Communism failed to deliver a better solution than capitalism. However, capitalism has failed too, to resolve issues of inequity and ecological degradation. Both these politically different ideologies subscribe to the same gods of “centralization” and “scale” in methods of production. Communist factories and capitalist factories are organized in the same way. The only difference in the two systems is in the ownership of the assets. In communism, the assets are owned by the state. In capitalism, the assets are accumulated and owned by capitalists. In both systems, local producers become parts of large supply chains, sending their produce upwards, and receiving value-added products for consumption downwards.
Gandhi’s charkha (spinning wheel) is known as a quaint symbol of local industries. But it is greatly misunderstood because the depth of his knowledge of systems management is not so well known. These ideas are cogently presented in an excellent book, The Web Of Freedom: J.C. Kumarappa And Gandhi’s Struggle For Economic Justice, V.M. Govindu and Deepak Malghan. Kumarappa and Gandhi understood from extensive experience, on the ground, that local management, at the village level, was the only way that an integrated system, of the economy, society and ecology, would be improved. Their ideas were flying in the face of the drive for large scale, centrally managed enterprises—in both the Soviet Union and the US.
Small industries could not compete with the efficiencies of large ones, with mass production technologies dominant in the 20th century. Now, with the internet, Industry 4.0 and smartphones, technologies to make small enterprises competitive are widely available. Small enterprises, connected into large networks, can have a great reach to markets. They can obtain resources of finance and information more easily. Village enterprises, and village-level governance, are feasible ideas now. They will help address the multifaceted economic and ecological challenges India is facing. What is required is a change in mindsets to empower local governance and networks of small enterprises.
Today’s Editorial
Improving policymaking with Big Data
Tucked away in the statement, put out by NITI Aayog after the third meeting of its governing council was an innocuous phrase. The Aayog, the statement said, has partnered with top-ranking institutions “to nurture evidence-based policymaking”. That seems like it should be a given. Surely, all policy is or should be based on solid data. But it became a guiding philosophy of policymaking globally only in the 1990s. It has evolved since then as technological advances have allowed more data to be captured and analysed. To say evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) today is to say policymaking guided by Big Data.
Governance in India, starting with the United Progressive Alliance and continuing into the Narendra Modi administration, has been trending in this direction. The Aadhaar programme, with its hundreds of millions of data points that can be mined for policy formulation and implementation, is a prime example. So is the Centre’s push, kick-started by the currency-swap initiative, to reduce the size of the shadow economy and widen the tax base. The actual amount of black money netted by the initiative might still be a matter of conjecture and debate, but the entire exercise has generated data that can make it tougher for individuals to evade taxes in the future. Geo-tagging of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme assets is another case in point.
This is a natural evolution of EBPM. The spread of the Internet and the rise of social media and the Internet of Things mean that the volume of data we generate is growing exponentially—currently about 2.5 quintillion bytes daily. This is a goldmine for the private sector and governments alike. Online searches can be trawled for data that helps predict disease outbreaks. Cellphone data can help direct relief efforts in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Power-usage data can be analysed to optimize energy grids and plant power generation; discoms in India are already using data from last-mile sensors to implement measures for cutting down aggregated technical and commercial losses.
The uses can range from the national—using healthcare data to revamp the public health system—to the local, where the massive amounts of data generated by cities, from traffic signals to public transport usage, can be used to improve infrastructure and transport systems as Singapore has done. But utilizing Big Data effectively in this fashion will mean keeping a few factors in mind.
First, two of the defining characteristics of Big Data analytics are the volume and veracity of data. The computing concept of garbage in, garbage out holds true here. Infrastructure in India for efficient data collection and management is lacking; this must be strengthened. The comptroller and auditor general’s Big Data management policy and its establishment of the Centre for Data Management and Analytics is positive signs in this context; they show that such issues are on the radar.
Volume and veracity also necessitate sharing of data across ministries and departments—indeed, with the public at large—to allow private-sector solutions that can in turn be utilized in government policymaking. India has done well to join the Open Government Data movement and formulated a national data sharing and accessibility policy in 2012. The government’s Open Government Data portal is a significant step, with thousands of data sets available regarding everything from health to agriculture. However, the reliability of the data, the tendency to work in silos, the reluctance to share data and lack of standard formats are all concerns.
Second, another marker of Big Data analytics is data velocity. Large amounts of data are collected swiftly today; this also means that much of it loses relevance after some time. Using Big Data effectively for policy formulation will thus mean changing policymaking structures and processes—continuously re-evaluating and rejigging policies based on the feedback generated by new data, from on the ground results to public opinion scraped from social media. Incorporating this flexibility in hierarchical bureaucratic structures will not be easy.
Third, the ethics of Big Data analytics is an area of major debate. The issues range from anonymization of data to what data should be collected and what use it should be put to. These issues will loom larger as new fields like psychometrics—the combination of Big Data with behavioural science to determine various aspects of people’s lives—evolves. The Indian state must engage robustly with these issues. This is currently lacking given the failure to enact even basic laws about data privacy and the right to privacy.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the right dynamic between political imperatives and EBPM will have to be struck. When the latter gained currency in the UK in the 1990s the government of the day touted it as a “post-ideological” approach to policymaking. This is a chimera. All the data in the world will not replace the political process; the farm-loan waiver mess is a case in point. While Big Data can and should be used to inform policymaking, the biases and motives of the political process that guide its usage should not be forgotten.
When the Planning Commission was created in 1950, early planners such as P.C. Mahalanobis realized the importance of good data. Consequently, India had one of the most effective data systems going at the time. The quality of data collection and usage has declined since. NITI Aayog’s push to EBPM is thus timely. But it is only the beginning of a long process.
Source: By Jayachandran: Mint
