Democracy, Corruption and Literacy in India.
warning: Its a long post.. read only if the issue interests you.
Now before we go further, let us define “good” governance. Governance is good if the following happen
• Improvement in basic social development indicators like infant mortality rate, longevity, nutrition, literacy , availability of electricity and water,etc.
• Social justice and Low violent crime rates
• Poverty reduction/ growth in per capita GDP.
• Low or zero corruption at all levels
Interestingly , the first three above can co-exist with corruption, though not high levels of corruption.
So when we Indians discovered that chanting WLD dos not work, we started wondering why because according to time honoured Indian tradition chanting is supposed to work ..in fact it is known to have worked miracles in the days gone by. .. and has a lot of support even today. One can see it on various websites, including this one.
So we theorized that democracy has not worked for India because the voters are illiterate and therefore ignorant of the value of their vote and can err in making a choice. There may be something in that argument, or was till 20 years ago. The current (2011) literacy rate in India is 74% with many states showing a higher percentage. In fact the literacy rate on a nation-wide basis has been 50% or above since 1991 which was a good 20 years ago. So do we have people who are literate and still ignorant ? Probably yes, because literacy in India has been defined with a very low standard and data collection on literacy has had errors.
So can we hope for better governance (and less corruption) when people become literate AND are not ignorant ? From empirical evidence , the answer is encouraging but not entirely encouraging. The two states of Kerala and West Bengal have had high literacy and political awareness for quite sometime now. Interestingly both are also high on social development indicators and have low violent crime rates . Both states have also had Communist governments. But they have not shown economic development much above the national average. Both have virtually no organized industry, partly because of the strong trade unions particularly Communist-backed Trade unions.
There is also the fact that in Kerala, many social reforms (especially in education and equality of women) were initiated by the local ruling family before democracy came. It is therefore difficult to isolate the impact of democracy on good governance in Kerala.
But even if we overlook the pre-democracy interventions in Kerala, political awareness working with democracy has managed to improve life / reduce corruption at the basic needs level but has not contributed to economic growth.
The silver lining is that, multiple research studies across Indian states have established a clear relationship between high literacy rates and low corruption (at the level of obtaining basic government services). As can be expected Kerala has the lowest corruption index.
Bengal , however, is somewhere in the middle for corruption rankings. So again there is some missing factor (besides high literacy and awareness) which contributes to lower corruption.
Several things must also be however noted
• Higher literacy has resulted in low corruption for basic services. But higher literacy rates alone might not be able to stop corruption at the Central govt level (like 2G, CWG etc) or even at the state level like the Adarsh scam in Mumbai or Robert Vadra case in Haryana..
• In terms of governance, Delhi is a good (or bad) example . Literacy is high, but governance in Law and Order is very poor. We have seen a spate of rape cases in the last few months.
• Another glaring example .. Bangalore Municipal Corporation . The people who elect corporators are literate and politically aware , but we don’t see much governance happening. Garbage clearance is a major challenge, forget about good roads
So , while I wanted to end this part on an optimistic note, I am back to square one, i e , we have no clue how to stop corruption and improve governance. Higher literacy / awareness might help in basic services, but will not help elsewhere.
Democracy, Corruption and Literacy in India.
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