Even in many parts of fogged out India, the government's "India Shinning" media campaign, planned as an image-making pre-poll exercise, looks a bit rich.
It's meant to rev up the feel-good factor, the general sense of self-congratulations that's gripping the nation at the start of the new year -- a soaring Sensex, forex reserves crossing the $100-billion mark, millions of tourists pouring into tourist destinations and the highest quarterly growth -- of over 8 per cent ever recorded in liberalised India.
On top of that you have Finance Minister Jaswant Singh smugly adding his two bits to the India shining slogan -- what about GNS (Gross National Satisfaction), he asked, rather than GDP (Gross Domestic Product)?
There's something about too much good news too suddenly that tends to upset the equilibrium. Like a sumptuary feast it reeks of excess and is liable to produce indigestion.
It's reasonable to assume that the government is eager to keep up the pitch between the euphoric state election results and the general election to come.
In an age of politics ruled by sleek TV packages, spin doctors and marketing gimmicks what is less reasonable is to pretend that the warts have gone. "India Languishing" is not so easy to shove under the carpet.
How brightly is India shining -- and for whom? Only a few months ago the UNDP released its human development report with some stinging home truths -- India's ranking had slipped from 124 to 127 (among 175 countries), with the likes of Namibia, Botswana and Morocco, not to speak of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, ahead by many points.
Development in India, the report pointed out, was dangerously skewed -- 23.3 million people went hungry, the largest number in the world; forty million children failed to attend primary school, which is more than a third of the world's total.
Basic education and healthcare remained severely handicapped: "Under-nutrition and poor infrastructure resulted in unduly high mortality rates among the poorest rural population...and gaps in literacy between low social classes and the rest of the population remain extremely high, particularly in Rajasthan, UP, Bihar and Karnataka." In other words, the blight of the BIMARU states is far from banished.
The scenario for unemployment figures is grim and the government has lately been forced to admit that job loss in the past year has been inordinately high -- some estimates place 84 lakh jobs lost or a growth in annual employment of just 0.1 per cent.
So where is the new affluence most visible and what is fuelling the stock market and foreign investment? Sections of middle-class urban India are on a roll.
Young entrepreneurs are rich like never before. Salaried professionals are on a spending spree. The service sector in all its range of industries -- outsourcing, communications, hospitality and pharma -- have created, in just a decade, a vast new generation of competitive professionals with disposable incomes.
Easy credit, dropping interest rates and all the new gizmos -- cellphones, cars and mortgaged properties and splashy holidays -- have created an aura of affluence among the twenty-and thirty somethings. Suburban culture has come of age in glittering bursts.
It are these pockets of confident, new-rich India that make India Shining a fashionable mantra and are a magnet for foreign investment. Yet foreign investment, like any other form of investment, is dependent on the promise of high returns. It can go as easily as it comes.
Yet this is only a small slice of India Shining, and to its credit it has got a so far without too much government assistance. Real reform, by way of serious cost-cutting in government expenditure and privatisation, hasn't happened in a big way.
Overall growth, of which agriculture is a key component, remains pegged to the vagaries of the monsoon. When Indian politicians, like Indian farmers, count their blessings, they still look skywards first. It is only when they start implementing dream projects like the Golden Quadrilateral do they realise how swiftly such schemes can be grounded.
It's only when they survey their Red Fort promises two years down the line do they realise that not much really happened with that roster of yojanas announced.
India Shining is not a delusion so much as a pepped-up, highly coloured vision, a foray into hyper-reality. It's the peppermint coating on the full unexpurgated taste. It can never become the reality until there is some understanding of a place called "India Languishing..."
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