Historians looking back on the second decade of the twenty first century would do well to point to the week beginning March 12 as one of the most significant periods for policymaking: in that week, the nation received, from two sets of policymakers, divergent views on how progress is, and ought to be, measured.

In one view, the dominant view needless to say, economic progress is evident whichever way you look at it: poverty levels, the indefatigable Planning Commission asserted once again, are declining. The Economic Survey, taking a grander view, assured the nation that even with GDP growth slipping to a lower than desired 6.9 per cent, it still shone against the broken lights of the global economy's condition. And, the Survey trilled, why worry, next year any way, it should climb back to 7-plus per cent.

Single or multi-layered?

Surprisingly, the Prime Minister himself shot down the Plan panel's observations suggesting, in turn, a more “multi-layered approach to poverty estimates…”

The PM's intervention could not have been more exquisitely timed. On March 12, two days before the Railway Budget, The Economic Survey and Union Budget, an official released the findings of the first phase of the Socio-Economic Census 2011, the first comprehensive survey of the population in the post-reform era.

As a story in this paper the following day put it, the findings show “how life has radically altered for many Indians over this period — and how it hasn't”.

Nearly two-thirds of households in India have access to phones and LPG for cooking. But less than half the households have access to basic toilet facilities and over a third have no access to safe drinking water.

What the Census was offering was a chance for that multi-layered approach to poverty that Dr Manmohan Singh felt was required to plumb poverty's layered depths. If more than half the population has no basic amenities but could stay connected, surely that calls for a re-evaluation of growth so as to capture its quality as well.

Choosing the right mix

By the end of the week, with two sets of data and basically two epistemologies of progress, what we had acquired was an opportunity to re-examine our sense of what a prosperous India can, and should, be. An idea of economic progress premised on an arbitrary number (poverty line), and on GDP measurements has to be now set against another set of data that reveal multiple aspects of poverty.

If more Indians had mobiles than ever before, it was evidence of policy success in the provision of more goods to a larger number; by telling us that a great many Indian households did not have potable water or sanitation facilities, the same Census data reveals how that market penetration had not translated into enhanced capabilities for more than half the population.

Eco-Social indices add up

Basically, the Census data appear to be telling us that poverty is more than the sum of measurable output (or its scarcity). It has confirmed more definitively what has been known for long, that India's “social” or “human indices” are wanting.

Policymakers have tended to dismiss such notions of human development: more often than not, they have viewed the two sets of data, one economic-based, on GDP numbers, as more representative of India's progress, than the social data as evidence of its backwardness.

In reality, the two are intimately linked in a way that has been “hidden in plain sight” to quote Edgar Allan Poe. A household without access to potable water or hygienic sanitation will suffer cumulative deprivations that prevent its members from enjoying the intended benefits of well-meaning legislation (such as the Right to Education), or from instruments of mobility and communication and financial inclusion.

An idea of wellbeing

Without saying so, the Census now underway may offer the policymaker an opportunity to define progress in terms of various indices instead of one, indices that add up to the notion of well-being.

They could do worse than take a leaf from the recommendations of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, an international panel chaired by Mr Joseph Stiglitz.

Set up by the President of France, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy in early 2008, the Commission, with Prof Amartya Sen as chair and Mr Jean Paul Fitoussi of France as Coordinator, was asked to examine the way metrics are used to measure societal well-being, particularly GDP figures. Its report was completed by September 2009; meant primarily for social scientists (mainly economists), the findings were published in a non-technical volume called “Mis-Measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up” to “reach out more broadly.”

The authors, Mr Stiglitz, Prof Amartya Sen and Mr Fitoussi, were interested “not just in better metrics but in using a discussion of metrics to engage a broader dialogue about societal values and objectives.”

The Commission argues for a “dashboard” of metrics instead of the single GDP, which measures output alone to capture “well being” or the “quality of life” in its multi-dimensionality (akin to the Prime Minister's multi-layered approach?). These include material living standards such as “income consumption and wealth”, health, education, “personal activities including work, political voice and governance, social connections and relationships, environment present and future conditions, insecurity of an economic as well as a physical nature”.

For the Commission, the measurement of well-being has to account for the future too, so sustainability as a “complementary” to a current state of well-being has to be looked at separately: for instance, in the “simultaneous preservation and increase of several ‘stocks': quantities and qualities of natural resources, and of human, social and physical capital.”

Judging by “human development” indicators, India still has a long way to go before it can claim to have arrived at sustainable well-being. It could start that journey by engaging in and pioneering a redefinition of what deprivation really entails for a lot of Indians even above that poverty ‘line'.

>blfeedback@thehindu.co.in

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