[Critics say that many of the new rights are simply a euphemism for
expensive handouts meant to please voters. Others say that if bureaucratic
attitudes and efficiency are not improved, the rights are mere window dressing
on a broken social-services system.]
By Rama
Lakshmi
 |
Rama Lakshmi/The Washington Post - Six children from Dalki Sahi, India, walk home from their school. It is a nearly two-mile journey through forestland, farms and creeks. Many drop out of school because of the distance. |
DALKI SAHI, India — Three years ago, a group of parents in a
remote tribal hamlet handed local officials a petition demanding a new school.
Their children had to walk nearly two miles through farmland, forest and creeks
to reach the closest government school although, they argued, India’s new Right
to Education law entitled them to something closer.
But while the new law may have stirred the people of Dalki Sahi in
the eastern state of Odisha (formerly known as Orissa) into action, they still
do not have a new school. Across India, amid questions about whether the
government can really deliver, many are asking whether the law was merely a
well-intentioned promise dressed up as a legally enforceable fundamental right.
In the past eight years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government
has enacted a set of laws that give Indians the right to peer through official
files and to get schools, rural jobs, forest land and, most recently, food
at rock-bottom prices. Some call it India’s silent rights-based revolution.
The laws signal a radical shift in the way the government delivers
social services — telling people they have a right to them and urging Indians
to stop waiting passively and instead force the usually apathetic bureaucracy
to perform. Advocates of the approach say the laws are slowly altering the
inherently feudal, top-down relationship between the government and its
citizens.
The government boasted about the new rights in an advertising
campaign this year, and members of Singh’s Congress party say they
plan to use the laws in catchy slogans in the national election scheduled for
next year.
Singh’s government, battling inflation and a string of corruption
allegations, passed the latest rights-conferring law this month, guaranteeing
more than 800 million Indians cheap food grains and adding more than
$6 billion to the annual food subsidy bill. The new law has roiled
economists because it comes at a time when India’s economic growth has been the
slowest in a decade, the rupee is at a historic low compared with the U.S.
dollar and foreign investors are no longer lining up.
Critics say that many of the new rights are simply a euphemism for
expensive handouts meant to please voters. Others say that if bureaucratic
attitudes and efficiency are not improved, the rights are mere window dressing
on a broken social-services system.
“In other countries, they actually provide food, jobs and pension.
In India, we talk about mere rights to all of them. Who are we fooling?” said
Surjit Bhalla, chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging-market advisory firm
in New Delhi. “All these so-called rights amount to throwing away money and
breeding corruption. These rights are nothing but populism and welfare.”
But activists say the new laws are changing Indians’ relationship
with the government and making them more assertive, even if there are no
instant results.
“People are no longer going with folded hands and groveling in
front of officials,” said Ranjan Kumar Mohanty of People’s Culture Center, or
Pecuc, a nonprofit group working on rural community development in Odisha.
“They are demanding their rights, not asking the government for charity.”
Phulomani Baskey is a 35-year-old mother of two school-age
children in Dalki Sahi. “For so long, we just accepted it as our fate that
there was no school nearby,” she said. “But when we heard that the government
has guaranteed to build one if we demanded, we decided to write letters.” She
said the village’s demand “is stuck in the endless paper-and-pen process of
bureaucrats.”
On a recent day, only six of the 45 children in Dalki Sahi walked
to school, four them barefoot. The school they reached after their long walk is
woefully short of teachers and classrooms, and it had no girls toilet.
“Since the new law, I have received dozens of such demands for new
schools and improvements in existing schools,” said Dharanidhar Das, a school
inspector. “It scares us when ordinary people walk in talking about their
rights. We have to respond. There is no running away now. But it cannot happen
overnight.”
In March, education officials from several state governments,
including Odisha, wrote to New Delhi saying they did not have enough resources
to build new schools or improve existing ones and asking for more time or the
easing of some requirements as they try to implement the three-year-old law.
India’s new push toward entitlements began with the Right to
Information law, passed in 2005, which increased government
accountability.
“The Right to Information law gave people a solid taste of what a
right is,” said Nikhil Dey, an advocate of India’s rights program and a member
of a farm and factory workers group. “. . . Now the genie is out of the
bottle.”
In the past three years, 14 states have also enacted laws that
guarantee citizens a right to timely public services.
Varun Gauri, a senior economist at the World Bank in Washington,
said India’s move toward guaranteeing new social rights is part of a growing
global trend visible across countries such as Brazil, Colombia, South Africa
and Indonesia.
“By saying you own these rights, what you are really saying is
that there is someone in this vast bureaucracy who is accountable, who has an
obligation,” Gauri said. “It avoids the dole language by saying people have
dignity. People are not saying, ‘Give me this.’ Instead they are saying, ‘Make
it a fair playing field so that I have a chance.’ ”
Singh’s Congress party has discovered that the rights-based approach
also appears to bring political benefits.
The popular rural job law that Singh launched eight years ago
guarantees 100 days of public work a year to anyone who demands it. The law set
a standard minimum wage across India, kept people from slipping into poverty
and — most importantly, political analysts say — helped the Congress party win
a second term in the 2009 elections.
But critics
say the program has created an industrial labor shortage and made
people unproductive by giving them easy money for unskilled manual work. Last
year, the government spent more than $4.9 billion on the program.
Some Congress party members privately say the new food security
law will also be an election game-changer.
But some rights advocates are cautious.
“Passing these rights laws is politically attractive,” Dey said.
“But it is also tricky because it can come back to bite you if you just raise
people’s expectations without delivering efficiently.”
