Courtesy: Gulf Today
Ashoak Upadhyay
A
s if the pandemic isn’t enough to keep the opinion pages of the media abuzz with garden-variety, rehashed pontifications on how to stay locked up and savour social distancing from the weak, the oppressed and the Other, we now have paralyzing moaning on the dismal state of an abstraction called Indian economy. Suddenly there is a spring in the air; the latest GDP data, on growth or lack of it, has given snore-mongering opinion shapers something to wax eloquent about. Shocking data on the growth of output measured by the GDP indicate that during the first quarter of this year that haloed metric declined by 23.9 per cent. The circus is in town! That star performer the Little Big Number returns as Spectacle supremo, its theatrics shaping even for a brief while, the economists’ moment in the sun. Through the dense fog of the pandemic you can get a glimpse of the short-changed destinies of this blighted republic: encoded in one metric.
First off the block: Pronab Sen talks with Karan Thapar deconstructing the metric to explain why we are in a bigger hole than the metric lets on. It’s not a fall of 24 per cent, he tells Thapar; factor in the unorganized sector, the GDP has fallen 31-32 per cent…and it will only get worse in the next two quarters and for the whole year the GDP will swirl down the sink! The situation is grim; he is baffled by the government’s lack of response…need a fiscal stimulus otherwise the damage could become “irreparable” says the former Chief Statistician of India now Country Director of the International Growth Centre, anguished Pronab Sen,
Raghuram Rajan, former RBI chief weighs in with his own gravitas and forebodings. The decline in GDP should frighten the government he says and bureaucrats “out of their complacency.” A stimulus package is necessary he intones to prevent an “atrophied” economy. . ““Without relief measures, the growth potential of the economy would be seriously damaged,”
“If you think of the economy as a patient, relief is the sustenance the patient needs while on the sickbed and fighting the disease. Without relief, households skip meals, pull their children out of school and send them to work or beg, pledge their gold to borrow, let EMIs and rent arrears pile up…Similarly, without relief, small and medium firms – think of a small restaurant — stop paying workers, let debt pile up, or close permanently. Essentially, the patient atrophies, so by the time the disease is contained, the patient has become a shell of herself,”
Rajan’s metaphorical language is moving and it conjures a distressing world of terminal illness in the midst of a pandemic to be sure but redeemable by the government playing the good Samaritan. The problem with this spectacle of crisis is that it doesn’t get us closer to the truth, to the reality of what is happening on the ground; it tells us little of the manner in which the national output or its monetary benefits are distributed, or, the ways and modes by which that output is accumulated perhaps at the cost of other lives, of all life itself.
The little big number reveals little; it hides a great deal.
It is a category that was not meant to do that. It was created to simply measure output. Simon Kuznets always felt uncomfortable at the way it acquired an importance and value far beyond its means and capabilities. It was to become a category with omniscient powers bestowed on it by the rich nations to create a post-war category of tyranny. The arsenal of hegemonic powers acquired a new weapon with the GDP that would now measure not output alone but by that act and an aura of mystical power bestowed upon it determine a nation’s ranking on the scale pf development and Progress itself. From that to defining Wellbeing was only a matter of time.
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The Little Big Number: It reveals little. In mirroring itself it creates a language that becomes master of all discourse shaping destinies through a supply chain of tyrannies that is universal in its influence. Its discourse is fed and perpetuated and honed in the groves of academe where generations of bright minds wrestle with ways to pamper its ego, to pump it up, to turn its persona more cosmopolitan and complex so less can resist its allure.
It’s a little big number that alters Time and Space by foreshortening the present. It reduces the here-and-now to a given set of tangibles and rules out possibilities. It thrives on its exclusivity, its certitudes and it does this by focusing primarily on output–its original function–as the sole arbiter of well-being. Squeezing the present into this narrow tunnel, the number dreams big on the future—a future that is always beyond reach—a future defined as the acme of Development and Progress in almost unattainable terms that makes it all the more seductive. Regardless of the consequences—on all life and the environment.
The little big number incarcerates consciousness, shepherding it into a hall of mirrors in which are reflected narcissism and despair. Plato’s Cave of flickering shadows casting the illusions of an attenuated reality—the economy, stupid!—as the beginning and the end of time and space. There is no thought left with the frenzied focus on the GDP for the poor and shat-upon, the dispossessed and the minorities—those insects!- lurching about outside the Cave, the hall or mirrors. They have been excised out of this attenuated consciousness tthat has time only for the spectacle of the little big number.
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So the little big number, now falling like the heartbeat of an economy about to atrophy tells us little about those living outside its considerations. It tells us little of how the migrants were shafted during their frightened flights from their urban cages they pecked in for the meagre morsels thrown their way; of the vast throbbing presence of livelihoods earned in the unorganized world as domestic help, construction workers, small entrepreneurs living off cash pushed under the bus by a demonetization planned in Plato’s Cave to weed out the weak.
The little big number tells us little of how big business controls by appropriating the resources historically owned by the toilers of the land; of how the output from extraction below the earth that indigenous people have nurtured and lived off for centuries could constitute a part of that number, bigly (as President trump would have called it) and not the nurturing care-giving harvest reaped by those indigenous peoples.
The little big number says little about the little people but creates the big illusion of speaking on behalf of all. There’s no guarantee that even when it rides high, as it did during the halcyon days of the UPA I and UPA II the fortunes of the wage earner smiled. It was during the first decade of the 2000s when growth, that is GDP hit 8 per cent and was expected to rise, incomes of factory workers were falling as were the number of jobs in the organized sector. The GDP=Growth=Jobs magic remedy was an illusion because the metric just meant the growth of more output with less jobs as productivity rose, which meant factory bosses needed lesser numbers of workers to produce more. And if that wasn’t bad enough, same decade especially the latter half witnessed the emergence in India of contract labour in the organized sector. In an ironic reversal of developmental logic that we had been told was sacrosanct backward practices of the unorganized sector such as non-permanency of jobs and absence of social security privileges found their way into the advanced sectors managed by business school graduates trained to trim labour costs in the pursuit of shareholder value. Not before long “temp jobs” had become standard practice, growing hugely popular in the organized sector eager not just to cut wage costs but undercut the power of collective bargaining.
The little big number short-changes our Present, enticing us with an ill-defined but vociferously peddled future– “make in India” fashions policies that legitimise the transfer of resources and power to a the privileged owners of capital: household savings through low interest rates, natural resources through loosened environmental regulations; “reforms” of labour laws that would strip labour of its dignity and rights spinning the workplace back to conditions that Dickens immortalized in his novels. And of late the corporatization of the farming sector, (evident in the June ordinances) all so as to present an increasingly small handful of the wealthy with the power to convert the last bastion of large scale employment and the source of livelihoods for millions into a vast industrial enterprise.
The little big number conceals–bigly. Its mesmerising fall prompts sincere ex-policy wonks to wax Keynesian eloquence at a State power that at first glance, and from the viewpoint of the metric’s fall itself, appears inept, lack lustre, flailing, blindsided by the pandemic. Both Pronab Sen and Raghuram Rajan, outstanding policy makers therefore exhort New Delhi to wake up and act. But it has been active; It is thinking on its feet; it is not inept according to its lights, its priorities. It believes in Hindu majoritarianism and is working towards its logical conclusion, the Ram temple being its most shining achievement. In the process, it is turning Hinduism into what Vinay Lal calls Temple Hinduism. It wanted to bring J&K to heel and it did so with its boot on the Kashmiri face and numbing it into silence with communication lock down. And it believes in free market capitalism untarnished by lame duck welfarism and those democratic-socialist ideals of the earlier Congress regimes. Think of the decisive way labour laws were ‘reformed’: ponder those ordinances that are out to corporatize the last outpost of a creaky past that has no place in this Present marching towards a Progress-ridden Future! A five trillion economy! Ten million jobs a year to Make India a vast Temple! Rampant Capitalism and Temple Hinduism bound by digital tech. With so much going for it, what’s in a number?
Best left to those “GDP junkies”
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Notes Pronab Sen talks to Karan Thapar: https://thewire.in/economy/karan-thapar-interview-pronab-sen-economy-gdp Raghuraam Rajan: https://thelogicalindian.com/trending/indian-economy-raghuram-rajan-23554 --On jobs and high growth read here: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/ashoak-upadhyay/get-real-more-growthless-jobs/article20605600.ece --Dirk Philipsen: The Little Big Number. Princeton University Press. 2015
