Going down the wrong path

India slips on indices of freedom and the government has not even acknowledged there is a problem

The Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office of the NITI Aayog was set up in September 2015. A release on its website says that the “Government of India has decided to leverage the monitoring of select Global Indices (currently 31) to drive reforms and growth in the country”.

The government would track its own performance on four categories — industry, development, economy, and governance. There’s some NITI type jargon but this line makes clear what is sought to be achieved: “Another goal of this far-reaching, widespread exercise is use of these Indices as tools for systemic reforms in the policies and processes which would help in improving investor confidence, creating a conducive ecosystem for investment and enhance ease of living”.

Presumably the indices were being tracked so that India’s ranking could be improved. I’ve been tracking global indices myself for my book and the results are instructive, though it is unclear what the government is doing with them.

For instance, it was clear that on democracy and civil liberties (which presumably come under the governance category), India has decided to pick and hold a particular trajectory. This was revealed by the rankings since 2014.

On the Economist Intelligence Unit “Democracy Index”, India has fallen from 27 to 53; on the CIVICUS National Civic Space Ratings, India has gone from “Obstructed” to “Repressed”; on the Freedom House Freedom in the World, India has gone from “Free” to “Partly Free”, and Kashmir from “Partly Free” to “Not Free”; on the Access to Info RTI Ratings index, India has fallen four places for being “less transparent” in government; on the Pew Religious Restrictions both social hostility and religious restrictions have worsened; on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index it has fallen two places; on the University of Gothenburg V-Dem Index India fell in “one of the most dramatic shifts among all countries in the world over the past 10 years”.

It would appear to the observer that the government has chosen this path, as the laws targeting minorities and firm action against activists and in Kashmir would show. But the interesting thing is that the government appears to be puzzled that this has affected its performance. It sent out a long rebuttal to Freedom House. And NITI has sought to engage with the Economist Intelligence Unit to try and convince it that freedoms in India are intact and minorities are not being persecuted.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

India’s recent economic history and its employment figures, especially the participation of people in the labour force, have been revealed by both the government and on this newspaper’s pages. The numbers on GDP growth and on consumption are also known. It should not be surprising that on this front also the indices are unanimous.

On the Legatum Prosperity Index, India has fallen two places; on the Fraser Institute Global Economic Freedom Index, India has fallen 10 places; on the United Nations Development Index, India has gone from 130 to 131; on the World Economic Forum Human Capital Index India has fallen 25 places; on the World Bank Human Capital Index, India has fallen one place. On the United Nations Happiness Report, quite wide-ranging, India has fallen 22 places.

More puzzlingly on the AT Kearney Foreign Direct Investment Confidence Index, India has plummeted more than 18 places. It was ranked number seven in 2014 and now has dropped out of the ratings (of 25 nations) entirely, slipping from 11th in 2018 and 16th in 2019 and then falling out.

The thing to consider here is that many of the indices publish material that was collected in the previous year, sometimes over the previous two years. This means that the post-pandemic reality of India’s polity is not reflected in some and even most of the indices.

On the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index, India has fallen 39 places to be ranked now behind Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. The government said in parliament that in India even street dogs were fed “sheer” (sweets) by women and so it was not possible to have hungry individuals. However, it is also a fact that a scheme carrying the prime minister’s title has for many months now been giving six kilos of grain and dal to 800 million people, or 60 per cent of the population.

Again, with events in Ladakh it should not come as a surprise that on the Lowy Institute Asia Power Index, India has lost its status as a “Major Power”. On the Fund for Fragile States (formerly Failed States Index), India has fallen 15 places. With what has been done to Bollywood and its Muslim actors, on the Brand Finance Soft Power Index, India has fallen nine places. Across more than 50 indicators that I looked at, India has risen on four but fallen on 49. The four where India has risen as the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, the Global Terrorism Index (where India rose because it has become safer than Yemen and Somalia), the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (where the latest data is unfortunately four years old), and the Global Innovation Index, on which India performs well because of the number of start-ups and because “Bengaluru occupies 11th position in most entrepreneurial cities in the world”.

The indices are reflective of data that the government itself puts out in many ways and of the news that surrounds us daily. India has chosen under its charismatic prime minister to go down a particular path on the side of democracy, minority rights, and civil liberties and that path is being recognised by the world. On the side of the economy and governance, for reasons we don’t need to go into here, the numbers for the last few years have been consistent and are reflected in GDP and employment and consumption.

India will continue down both these paths because the NITI’s monitoring of the indices has not reversed the decline. And the government itself has not even acknowledged that there is a problem.

The writer is Chair of Amnesty International India