India and smug mediocrity

Indian democracy is equating excellence with elitism

The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, Covishield, and the one developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech International, Covaxin, in collaboration with the Indian Council for Medical Research and the National Institute of Virology have been approved by Indian government authorities.

The Serum Institute of India in Pune and Bharat Biotech have already produced millions of doses of the Covishield and Covaxin vaccines, respectively. Curiously, the two vaccines are being spoken about in the same breath in government pronouncements. For example, while the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been reported to have an efficacy of around 62 per cent, similar claims cannot be made about Bharat Biotech's Covaxin as Phase 3 trials for this vaccine are still underway.

Despite the several large-cap pharmaceutical companies in India, only Bharat Biotech has come up with a vaccine against Covid-19. However, there is a prematurely self-congratulatory note in the reports of breathless Indian commentators about these two “Indian” vaccines. Looking beyond vaccines, should Indian pharmaceutical companies remain satisfied with waiting for patents to expire and be known mainly for producing low-cost generics?

On a related note, Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singapore diplomat, has suggested in an article dated January 18 that “India needs to open up to global competition” and draw upon the strengths of its human resources as evidenced by the success of persons of Indian origin in the US. Undoubtedly, Indian immigrants have done extremely well in the US. However, most of them were educated in the country’s better educational institutions and they are an ambitious and hard-working set of people. Therefore, we cannot generalise from their success abroad about resident Indians. For all we know, if these immigrants had stayed back, their careers may have been cramped by the above average tendency of India’s central and state governments to favour sycophants.

Talent and hard work can often go unrewarded for officers of the civil services recruited by the Union Public Services Commission and those in the government’s scientific establishments. Indian officialdom is convinced that objective standards cannot be adopted to evaluate merit and the only fair option is to go by seniority defined as date of joining the government. It is beyond absurd that seniority is based on the year of recruitment and the rank within the cohort of the year of appointment. The status-quoists would argue that the political class cannot be trusted to be objective and fair and if the seniority system were to be abandoned, it would inevitably result in the ruling party picking their favourites with merit a distant second in consideration. Nevertheless, it is high time that more weightage was given to merit in government appointments, defined as relevant academic qualifications and work experience, without completely jettisoning seniority.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

A few days back, the Supreme Court stayed the implementation of the three farm laws and named four persons for a Committee which would mediate in the ongoing stand-off between the agitating farmers of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and the central government. Since this Supreme Court announcement was made on January 14, one member of the proposed committee has opted out. As agriculture is a state subject, the highest court in the land was expected to rule on whether the adoption of these three laws passed at the initiative of the central government are consistent with the Constitution. The government’s inability to reach an amicable understanding with the agitating farmers and the court judgment both smack at best of mediocrity in decision-making.

Turning to the revival of the Covid-19 ravaged Indian economy, since April 2020, the centre’s fiscal push has been inadequate to raise overall demand. As for longer-term lending with maturities over five years, this cannot be revived without the active participation of public sector banks (PSBs). However, PSBs cannot be nursed back to better health without speedier resolution of the many insolvency cases pending with National Company Law Tribunals. On a related note, it is time for PSBs to be consolidated into the two larger ones, namely the State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda. The government must be considering several options to resolve these issues, including recapitalisation of PSBs but the hype about issuance of Rs 5,500 crore of zero-coupon bonds to Punjab and Sind Bank was not merited. This route cannot be used in large enough volumes to recapitalise PSBs.

Changing tack, scientific research and technological advances in the US are substantially ahead of India. For example, a few driverless taxis are said to be ferrying passengers in Phoenix since October 2020. It has also been reported that an artificial intelligence tool called “Deepmind” sponsored by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has made significant advances in predicting the shapes of proteins. Indians can legitimately expect the government to create an environment which promotes cutting-edge technologies that the country could expect to commercialise in the 2020s. Instead, we hear this pedestrian repetition about when India’s GDP would touch $5 trillion.

The growth of regional parties in India has been accompanied by a trend to deride the English-speaking population of the country and accuse them of claiming to be synonymous with excellence. Unfortunately, merit has often come to be portrayed for vote garnering purposes as symbolic of exclusive elitism. It was inevitable that as India tries to improve upon equality of opportunity, there would be mistaken and motivated perceptions. However, it appears that, in the name of equality of opportunity for vernacular speaking small-town/rural India compared to the privileged in mega cities, government’s acolytes and hangers-on are being appointed to high levels much too often. To sum up, India’s health care workers in public and private facilities should get 100 per cent marks for their dedication in confronting the deadly Covid-19 virus. However, on cost efficient and timely implementation of scientific, economic and public-health initiatives, the cumulative overall score for central and state governments is at best a humdrum and complacent 40 out of 100.

j.bhagwati@gmail.com

The writer is a former Indian Ambassador, Ministry of Finance official and World Bank Treasury professional