NEW DELHI: Manmohan Singh should be happy that the country's economy has expanded more than nine percent in the past year. But the Oxford-educated economist has instead chosen to lament erratic electricity supply, the plight of debt-ridden farmers and the growing wealth of company executives. He says it is a toxic mix that the country's teeming millions who live on less than a dollar a day are not willing to accept indefinitely.
Analysts say the tenor of his comments, made at the end of May on his government's third anniversary, highlights disappointment in the struggle to bridge a yawning divide between affluent urban and impoverished rural India. "Singh is certainly concerned about the two faces of India that he sees. And this is manifested in statements about inclusive growth and new measures aimed at the poor," said political analyst Rasheed Kidwai.
Manmohan Singh, who launched India's economic reforms as finance minister in 1991, made an unexpectedly strong appeal to Indian industry, asking it to shoulder some social responsibility. "The time has come for the better-off sections of our society to understand the need to make our growth process more inclusive, to eschew conspicuous consumption, to save more and waste less, to care for those who are less privileged and less well off," Singh said. He followed that with a promise to spend nearly 11 billion dollars to improve rural roads and slammed corruption in the construction sector. "Corruption in road construction projects has spread like cancer to every corner of our vast country," Singh told a New Delhi conference. He issued a blistering warning of economic collapse unless the debt-ridden electricity generation and distribution system was fixed.
Singh also announced a six-billion-dollar package to help poor farmers who have been hit by high debt and low crop yields. In the metros, signs of affluence abound, from top-of-the-range imported limousines to swanky new restaurants where an average dish costs more than the monthly wages of hundreds of millions in the hinterlands. The gap has already sparked violence, with a Maoist rebellion infecting 15 of India's 29 states and frequent street clashes along caste lines over access to elite education, government jobs and services such as hospitals.
Kidwai said that Singh knows the social divide could spell disaster at the next federal elections within two years. The Congress party has suffered a drubbing in a series of provincial polls over the past year, including in the largest state of Uttar Pradesh last month, where a low-caste leader swept to the first majority government in 14 years. "Clearly, there is pressure on the government to attempt a mid-course correction," Kidwai said.
