Economy's catching up, social indicators are slipping

INDEPENDENCE SPECIAL: ECONOMY

Unlike the economy, where India was ahead of several of its competitors like China in many respects in 1947 and then slipped badly, India's standing in social indicators was pretty bad to begin with.

And it has only got worse over the past 60 years. India is ranked 126th out of 177 countries on the UN HDI index though its economy is projected to overtake Japan by 2025 and the US by 2050.

If you compare India with India, the picture is a pleasing one. The Bhore Committee set up by the British Government in 1943 found that 2,000 out of every 100,000 women in India died during child birth. Six decades later, the deaths are down to 577 per 100,000. Human development indicators are all moving from red to less fiery shades.

While life expectancy was 32 years before freedom, today it has doubled. If only 1.9 crore children attended primary school in 1950, 11.4 crore go to school now.

While the number of universities has increased from 20 at the time of independence to 378, the number of colleges has gone up from 700 to nearly 18,000 at the end of the Tenth Plan period.

In the health sector, the hospital bed strength has gone up from 30 per 10,000 people to 72 and the number of primary health centres have increased from nil to 25,000 and about 1,50,000 sub-centres today.

The problem arises when you compare India with the rest of the world. With just 61 per cent of adults literate, India's score on the UN Education Index is a mere 0.61 as compared to Zimbabwe's 0.77 and China's 0.84. In terms of the crude birth rate, India's 24 is a lot better than the 47 in 1960, but China's is half India's today.

The progress in reducing the crude death rate is also good; it fell from 23.5 in 1960 to 8.3 in 2004. But Bangladesh's fell from 24.6 to 7.7 over the same period and China from 25.4 to 6.4. India's record when it comes to immunisation is very poor, and just 64 per cent of children in the 12-23 month age group have DPT immunisation, as compared to 73 in Kenya, 85 in Bangladesh and 91 in China.

While India is better than countries like China when it comes to access to an improved water source (14 per cent of India's population has no access as compared to 23 per cent for China), 47 per cent of children under five are underweight in India as compared to just eight for China, 45 for Cambodia and 13 for Zimbabwe.

The picture for children who are stunted or wasted is equally poor. Iron deficiency in children in the country is 75 per cent as compared to 55 per cent in Bangladesh, while the iodine deficiency is 26 per cent as compared to 18 per cent in Bangladesh.

Part of the problem is poor spending "" India's public spending on health is just 1.2 per cent of GDP versus China's two per cent of a much larger economy and as a result, its per capita health spend is just $82 (in PPP terms) as compared to China's 278 and Zimbabwe's 132.

But an equally large problem is the poor quality of spending. According to a World Bank analysis, for instance, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme focuses on supplementing food but not on nutrition and, worse, it focuses on children above three years of age while malnutrition sets in much earlier!

As India moves into the group of middle-income countries, its HDI indicators remain in danger of staying behind those of the low-income group.