Fixing the ladder of opportunity

Book review of The Broken Ladder: The paradox and the potential of India's one billion

The Broken Ladder

The Paradox and the Potential of India’s One Billion

Anirudh Krishna

Penguin

391 pages; Rs 499

Many books about chronic poverty in India, especially poverty in the rural hinterland, blame government apathy and the ways of the poor themselves. So we are told, ad infinitum, how the poor make bad choices such as little to no family planning, and how they push their children into labour at the cost of education.

Such books are generally penned by city-bred elites to whom such generalisations don’t just come easy but also provide the kind of simplistic faux-analysis that is of little real value. Anirudh Krishna, the writer of the book under review, arguably belongs to this cohort. A professor at Duke, he worked as an IAS officer for 15 years before giving it up for academia.

Mr Krishna’s elite credentials, however, do not cloud his responses. If anything, he plumbs the other, welcome extreme, spending time in a Maharashtra village a few months every year, soaking in the local economy and customs and basing this book and its findings on what he likes to call his “worm’s eye view”.

Most of what Mr Krishna observes is well-known: How globalisation has failed to reach the Indian village, even as consumption patterns have improved. Throughout the book, Krishna’s focus is on the lack of opportunity that continues to blight rural lives. The story is always one of mixed success. Government schools now dot the countryside but the quality of teaching remains abysmal.

Similarly for health and other public infrastructure. This results in a vicious spiral where the apple, in Mr Krishna’s evocative words, never falls far from the tree. Young men and women continue to work jobs their parents did, tilling increasingly smaller land holdings that yield little revenue. Those who do manage to migrate to cities often lack the skills to make it in the modern economy and end up finding work as a mazdoor (labourer).

Mr Krishna presents detailed case studies of people he lives around, and this closeness keeps him from making glib judgements. He speaks about a rural family where the father goes to find work in the city every day, leaving the mother and the daughter, who is the elder child, to look after the farm and household chores. The girl rarely attends school, while the brother, who is younger, is studying. 

But even he will drop out when he reaches 14 or so, as he will likely join his father in the city to seek work. Our common misperceptions about rural folk apply here on the surface — the preference for the male child to attend school — but the true picture is not one of entrenched prejudice or inertia, but of making do with what’s on offer.

It is the boy, after all, who can be sent away to the unknown city where a basic knowledge of the English alphabet and numbers will stand him in good stead. His schooling, of whatever little value, may yet be enough for him to, say, use WhatsApp on his basic smartphone and find work as a carpenter or a mason. What is tragic is that both brother and sister have had to seek work when they should be in school.

The book lights up when Mr Krishna records his encounters with the youth in villages. He writes movingly about Bhura Ram and Raju, just another bunch of teens who befriended him in the village. They were storehouses of talent: Each of them could “snare a hare, shin up a palm tree to get the fruit, milk a cow, cook a perfect chapatti…figure out which wells to drink from and which ones to avoid, and kill a snake with one strike of his lathi.” Yet, none of these skills are helpful in the city. 

Mr Krishna is excellent in recording individual stories, but his prescriptions for alleviating distress are unfortunately painted in too-broad brush strokes. Like most well-meaning Indians, he is keen that outcomes improve and that an oversight committee of some sort, involving the villagers themselves, take charge of bettering the situation on the ground.

What he speaks less about is leadership, that other piece of the puzzle vital in a country like ours, where the government is still looked upon to deliver social goals. Many of the items that Mr Krishna name-checks — road connectivity, electricity supply and so on — have still not reached India’s villages. Just the other day, Twitter trended a picture of a group of Urja volunteers carrying a transformer on their shoulders in the absence of a road in an Assam district.

It is problems like these that need to be eliminated first. For too long, the state of the village has been taken as a given when the traditional image of the government is of an unaccountable, corruption-infested monster. Technology can plug this. Already, the discretionary nature of government doles is being phased out in favour of a system that allows the common man to directly reach out to the officer in charge. 

To its credit, the current government seems to be on the right track in reforming the basics of the village economy. How far putting in place enabling infrastructure will go in reducing rural distress remains to be seen, but Mr Krishna and others who battle despair at the state of our land should take heart from this long overdue task.