Modi’s many tasks
Narendra Modi has grand ambitions for his country, and self-confidence to match. But he has yet to show how he will deliver, says Adam Roberts
YOU WOULDN’T KNOW by looking at scruffy Vadnagar that it has a famous son. Tourists occasionally visit the walled part of the Gujarati town for its ornate wooden doors and balconies. A pair of stone gateways hints at a history stretching over two millennia. The town claims a mention in the Mahabharata, a saga of ancient India.
The railway station is single-track. Next to it, where the celebrity’s father once ran a tea stall, is a motorbike-repair shop. Over the road is his modest, whitewashed former school. Only in a street nearby, beyond a Sufi shrine, do you find hints of the great man. Neighbours all introduce themselves with the same surname: Modi, Modi, Modi.
Most of them recall something of the childhood of Narendra Modi, such as when he brought home a baby crocodile from a lake. They speak with respect more than fondness. He rarely helped his father with the tea stall. Friends from the school recall that he liked theatre and insisted on taking the part of a king. From childhood his passion was politics, and he soon joined the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement. A fellow RSS member recounts a playground scrap with Muslim rivals. A neighbour attended his teenage wedding. An unwilling groom, he soon fled town, leaving his wife behind. He rarely goes back.
This report is about the country of which Mr Modi became prime minister a year ago, and its nearly 1.3 billion people. Vadnagar is a useful starting point for understanding India today and making sense of his plans for the next 10-15 years. Even that time scale implies ambition. Elected politicians usually look no more than five years ahead. But this 64-year-old has never lost an election, and after the landslide victory in May 2014 that propelled him into the top job he made a triumphal speech insisting that “ten years is all that is needed” to modernise India. By 2022, the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it will be clear that this is “India’s century”, he says. Sit with him and you come away impressed by an intensely driven outsider determined to leave his mark on national affairs. He can sound arrogant, vainglorious or hubristic. More than any Indian prime minister since Indira Gandhi, he personally embodies power. Last year’s parliamentary election pitted his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against the incumbent Congress Party, plus regional parties, in 543 constituencies. It became a presidential contest in which Mr Modi, an energetic campaigner and charismatic speaker, steamrollered rivals. Congress, weakened by years of corruption scandals, poor leadership and slowing economic growth, failed to put up much of a fight. The media mostly fawned.
A Modi election delivered a Modi government. He appointed nonentities to many ministerial posts and is keeping the more impressive ones on a tight leash. It was Mr Modi, rather than Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, who crafted many details of the budget delivered in February.
During 70-odd interviews conducted for this report, including many with enthusiastic supporters, it was notable how often (and unbidden) words like “megalomaniac” and “authoritarian” were used to describe him. But Mr Modi’s ego seems easily big enough to leave him untroubled by such views. For a visit in January by America’s president, Barack Obama, he wore an expensive-looking navy blue suit with pinstripes made up of his name, repeated hundreds of times, stitched in gold thread.
One of the ways he has made his presence felt is by cutting bureaucrats down to size. He sacked the heads of the finance, home and foreign ministries soon after coming to office. That may have been necessary, since many civil servants have resisted reforms, but his style has spread dismay. He dominates his government but has struggled to silence members of the RSS as well as Hindu-nationalist-inclined members of his own administration who try to spread religious discord.
This report will explain how he uses the power he has accumulated, and how India is changing on his watch. It should be noted, however, that the country was already in the throes of considerable structural upheaval before he took over, including broad demographic change. Southern Indians are relatively old, urban, educated and middle-class and have ever fewer children. Similarly, Indians living on the west coast are becoming more like people in South-East Asia, both socially and economically. Largely because of those changes in the south and the west, India’s total population should reach replacement levels of fertility (an average of 2.1 children per couple) before 2020. That will be a historic turning-point, though there is so much momentum elsewhere that the population will keep on growing for quite a while, peaking at about 1.64 billion in 2065.
Much of that growth will be in the north. In landlocked states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (which between them have over 300m people, almost as many as America) people remain mostly poor, rural and ill-educated, and have larger families. Their problems are similar to Africa’s. Public hygiene is poor and many treatable diseases linger. The economy relies heavily on rain-fed farming, and electricity is in short supply. Women, girls and female fetuses are discriminated against. Add religious clashes and the menace of Maoist revolutionaries in rural pockets, and it is no wonder that southerners can sound exasperated by their northern kin.
But there are common trends too, most of them uplifting. One is a steady stream of people moving off the fields. Over the next 40 years about 11m extra people a year are expected to push into Indian towns and cities. As a consequence, demand for non-agricultural work is growing. By one estimate, India needs to create 10m additional jobs a year to employ a youthful and increasingly literate population.
The virtues of impatience
Indians everywhere are becoming more demanding. Consumers expect better phones and internet connections, a chance to own a scooter or take a holiday. They want education, hospitals and reliable power. A vocal minority worries about a toxic environment, complaining of rivers like sewers and urban air thick with deadly particles from bad fuel.
Voters are now holding politicians responsible for things they can control, such as corruption or economic prospects, and even those they can’t, such as rainfall that damages crops and puts up the price of onions. Voting by religion or caste has not yet disappeared. But the young, urban and educated treat their politicians as they might a phone supplier: if the service is disappointing, they switch.
That impatience is a wonderful thing. Politicians are now pressed to deliver or get ejected, even sent to jail if found to be corrupt. Voters increasingly expect them not just to dole out a few freebies but to create conditions for their lives to become materially richer. They can see that many other countries are better off than theirs. Talk of a $2 trillion economy sounds good, but income per person in 2014 was still only $1,627, according to the IMF. (National statistics, shown on our map, use a different basis and put it at $1,364.) And inequality is rising. Credit Suisse last year counted 182,000 dollar millionaires in India. A far wider circle than that needs to prosper.
A year is time enough to ask how Mr Modi is beginning to shape the country. The first thing to note is that he is doing what he knows, applying the methods that worked for him in Gujarat, where he ruled for a dozen years. To his mind, effective political leaders are much like chief executives. He models himself on Singapore’s business-minded first prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew. In conversation, he praises the Singaporean for his “enormous work”. Like Mr Lee, he sets goals with dates attached, decides how they are to be implemented and monitors progress. At times he micromanages.
The taskmaster
Given Mr Modi’s predilection for tasks, The Economist has compiled a list of 30-odd official pledges announced in the past year to outline his government’s ambitions. A selection appears in the table above; the full list is available online. All have deadlines attached to them. Around half the tasks are meant to be completed by the next election, in 2019. Others are for later, so it will be some time before Mr Modi’s mission can be declared a success or a failure.
He occasionally praises small government, but the list contains a striking number of big tasks for the state. Half of the goals involve grand, state-heavy expansion, including a commitment for state banks to open millions of new accounts, as well as building 30km (19 miles) of new roads every day between now and 2017, 100m toilets by 2019 and 100 new “smart cities” by 2020.
Only a few tasks are about streamlining officialdom or creating conditions for private businesses to thrive. These include a plan for a national goods and services tax, meant to be introduced by next April but likely to be delayed; getting ranked in the top 50 of the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” index by 2017; and relaxing the visa regime to attract 11m foreign visitors a year by 2018. A more liberalising government might have aimed to sell off dozens of state-run firms (as an earlier BJP government did) or pressed for an easing of labour laws across the country.
Mr Modi is interested in concrete things like infrastructure and defence hardware, leaving more intangible matters like education, health and the environment to others. Public spending on health suffered cuts in this year’s national budget, even though the country’s health-care system is vastly underfunded. On the plus side, the government has set targets for improving the skewed child sex ratio, eradicating tuberculosis and measles and immunising 90% of children against a host of diseases.
Education is not receiving enough attention. India’s abundance of young workers is not automatically an advantage: what the country needs is people with better skills at every level of organised employment. Mr Modi’s list includes a dizzying target to provide vocational training for 500m people by 2022, but he has said almost nothing about improving higher education. He should aim for more competition and investment in that field.
Mr Modi understands projects. “He ran a government of events in Gujarat; it was exhausting,” says a man who knew him well in Ahmedabad. Setting out a list of specific tasks to be ticked off can be a good idea, but it is an operating mode more appropriate for a chief minister than for a transformative prime minister. The most successful leaders create the right conditions so that others can achieve ambitious goals. Mr Modi’s government needs to push broad reform, not just individual targets. The main constraint to that is usually politics. That is the area where change under Mr Modi has been perhaps the most radical.
Sources:
Books:
"The Other One Percent; Indians in America". By Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh. [under review by publisher].
"Getting India Back on Track; An Action Agenda for Reform". Edited by Bibek Debroy, Ashley J. Tellis, Reece Trevor. "Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries". By Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. Public Affairs. "An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions". By Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze. Allen Lane. "India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State". By Gurcharan Das. Penguin Global. "Forged in Crisis; India and the United States since 1947". By Rudra Chaudhuri. Harper Collins.Reports:
Report of the Fourteenth Finance Commission 24th February, 2015
Doing Business 2015 data for India
India Development Update: Towards a Higher Growth Path April 2015
Websites:
http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/site/home.aspx
This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "Modi’s many tasks"
From the May 23rd 2015 edition
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