2. V. S. Naipaul has written about Indian migration to Trinidad in The Loss of El Dorado (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969) and in a fictional account in A House for Mr. Biswas (London: Andre Deutsch, 1961). His first trip to India in the early 1960s yielded the travelogue An Area of Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964). More recently, Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores the story of her great-grandmother’s migration from Bihar to British Guiana.
3. Dalits were once referred to as untouchables, then by Mohandas K. Gandhi as harijans (literally, “the children of God”). The term “Dalit” signifies those who are suppressed, and it is how they refer to themselves. They are part of what the government calls its “Scheduled Castes,” and eligible for affirmative action benefits, including set-asides in government universities and government jobs. Human Rights Watch documented violence against Dalits in a landmark report entitled Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999)—see especially chapter 4; the report is available at www.hrw.org/reports/1999/03/01/broken-people-0. In addition, South Asia Terrorism Portal keeps a chronology of massacres in central Bihar (1977–2001), available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/terroristoutfits/massacres.htm.
4. Research in neighboring Pakistan by the World Bank economist Jishnu Das found that the children of women with just one year of formal schooling studied for at least an hour each day: Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim Ijaz Khwaja, “What Did You Do All Day?: Maternal Education and Child Outcomes,” The Journal of Human Resources 47 (Fall 2012): 873–912, available at www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/akhwaja/papers/WhatDidYouDoAllDay.pdf.
5. Jeffrey Witsoe, Democracy Against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). William Dalrymple briefly describes the early days of Yadav’s Bihar in The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (London: HarperCollins, 1998). And Sankarshan Thakur wrote a political biography of Yadav in The Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2000).
6. I quoted this social worker in “Push for Education Yields Little for India’s Poor,” The New York Times, January 17, 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/asia/17india.html.
7. H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic Glossary, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1891). A more contemporary encyclopedia of India’s official Scheduled Castes can be found in K. S. Singh’s The Scheduled Castes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). The nineteenth-century treatise is by Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya: Hindu Castes and Sects: An Exposition of the Origin of the Hindu Caste System and the Bearing of the Sects Towards Each Other and Towards Other Religious Systems (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1896). The British bureaucrat John C. Nesfield described the pecking order in A Brief View of the Caste System of the North-western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1885).
8. Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, “Belief Systems and Durable Inequalities: An Experimental Investigation of Indian Caste,” published online by the London School of Economics, available at http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/bpde2004/hoff.pdf.
9. Somini Sengupta, “A Vision of Stars Grounded in the Dust of Rural India,” The New York Times, June 15, 2005, available at www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/world/asia/a-vision-of-stars-grounded-in-the-dust-of-rural-india.html.
10. The 2014 Annual Status of Education Report is available at http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/nationalfindings.pdf.
11. The University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research carried out the Indian Human Development Survey in 2011–2012. The dropout rates are used with permission from the lead author, Sonalde Desai, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.
12. Karthik Muralidharan “Priorities for Primary Education Policy in India’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan,” April 4, 2013, available on the University of California–San Diego site, http://pdel.ucsd.edu/_files/paper_2013_karthik.pdf.
13. The World Bank calculated a weighted average of teacher absenteeism rates. The data is available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/36660_Teacher_absence_in_India_EEA_9_15_04_-South_Asia_session_version.pdf.
14. J. P. Naik, Policy and Performance in Indian Education (1947–74), published by the Azim Premji University, is available at http://182.18.153.100/sites/default/files/userfiles/files/Policy%20and%20performance%20in%20Indian%20Education%20-%20Naik.pdf.
15. A more recent examination of the Korean education system by the journalist Amanda Ripley describes it as a “hamster wheel,” where kids study all the time, including in evenings, with tutors, where much of their real learning seems to take place. “In Korea, the hamster wheel created as many problems as it solved,” Ripley writes in The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). If nothing else, she concludes, it prepares them for the hamster wheel of the modern economy.
16. Provisional results of the 2011 Indian census are available at http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/data_files/india/Final_PPT_2011_chapter6.pdf. Brij Kothari, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, and his colleague Tathagata Bandyopadhyay tested 11,462 individuals in four Indian states on their basic ability to read a simple paragraph from a Class 2 text in their native language, Hindi, and found that the census estimates for those states had been overestimated by 16 percentage points.
17. Myron Weiner, The Child and State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), available at http://press.princeton.edu/titles/4838.html.
18. Numerous country-specific studies are cited at www.cgdev.org/files/2844_file_EDUCATON1.pdf; and at www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/post-2015-consensus-education-assessment-psacharopoulos.
19. Author interviews with Karthik Muralidharan in 2013. A lecture he has posted online also offers some of his findings and can be viewed at www.fsmevents.com/younglives/session04/onDemand.html.
20. Diarrhea statistics are in a 2012 UNICEF report, “Pneumonia and Diarrhoea: Tackling the Deadliest Diseases for the World’s Poorest Children,” available at http://data.unicef.org/corecode/uploads/document6/uploaded_pdfs/corecode/Pneumonia_Diarrhoea_2012_35.pdf. Malnutrition rates worldwide are compared in the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index, which concluded in its 2014 report that India suffers from serious hunger, at levels comparable to far poorer countries like Angola, Nepal, and Uganda; the report is available at www.ifpri.org/publication/2014-global-hunger-index-challenge-hidden-hunger. There is a world map available at http://public.tableau.com/profile/ifpri.td7290#!/vizhome/2014GHI/2014GHI. That conclusion was based on a survey carried out in 2013 and 2014 by the United Nations children’s agency, which found that 30 percent of children under five were underweight. In an article entitled “Of Secrecy and Stunting,” The Economist reported on it on July 5, 2015 (www.economist.com/news/asia/21656709-government-withholds-report-nutrition-contains-valuable-lessons-secrecy-and). The Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development published a fact sheet on the 2013–2014 Rapid Survey on Children: www.wcd.nic.in/issnip/National_Fact%20sheet_RSOC%20_02-07-2015.pdf. This latest estimate on childhood malnutrition represents a significant decline from 2005–2006, when India’s own National Family Health Survey concluded that 42.5 percent of children under five were underweight. (http://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/frind3/00frontmatter00.pdf). The decline came amid a period of high economic growth and rising average household income, but there were huge disparities between poor northern states, like Bihar, and southern states, like Karnataka. India’s ranking among nations improved, but it was nothing worth boasting of: among 128 countries on which data was available to IFPRI, India came in at 120.
GATES: KEEPING OUT THE LIVES OF OTHERS
&n
bsp; 1. Somini Sengupta, “Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servants’ Slums,” The New York Times, June 9, 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html.
2. The arguments grew especially heated in 2013, when Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economics professor, issued a series of broadsides against Amartya Sen, a Harvard University economics professor. Both were celebrated economists, born and raised in India. Both favored economic liberalization. Bhagwati, in a book cowritten with Arvind Panagariya, argued that economic growth, market driven and encouraged by liberal state policies, would lift Indians out of poverty. Sen argued for more public funding for basic services, including health and education.
3. Across the developing world, the threshold for people living in extreme poverty is $1.25 a day, in terms of consumption, not income. By virtue of its population, India is home to the largest concentration of poor—about 33 percent of all the world’s extremely poor people are Indians—according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals report: www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2014%20MDG%20report/MDG%202014%20English%20web.pdf. How India compares with other countries is contained in a draft report by Pedro Olinto and Hiroki Uematsu of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Equity Department: “The State of the Poor: Where Are the Poor and Where Are the Poorest?” available at www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/State_of_the_poor_paper_April17.pdf.
4. See the World Bank’s table “Poverty Headcount Ratio at $2 a Day (PPP),” available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.2DAY/countries.
5. Gaurav Datt, Rinku Murgai, and Martin Ravallion, “India’s (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty Since 1950” (mimeo, Department of Economics, Georgetown University, 2015). Cited with permission from Ravallion.
6. Between 2009 and 2011, the bottom 10 percent saw the greatest improvement in their living standards, at about 6 percent a year, according to an analysis by the World Bank, its chief economist, Kaushik Basu, said in an interview in 2015.
7. The World Bank measures inequality by the standard Gini coefficient. A chart that shows India’s inequality measurement compared with the other nineteen largest economies in the world is available at http://forumblog.org/2014/02/emerging-world-worry-inequality/.
8. http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/peoreport/peoevalu/peo_icds_v1.pdf.
9. The government reports a sharp decline in child labor, from over 12 million in 2001 to just under 4.5 million in 2011. The census data is available at http://labour.gov.in/upload/uploadfiles/files/Divisions/childlabour/Census-2001%262011.pdf. The International Labour Organisation cites older government data, available at www.ilo.org/legacy/english/regions/asro/newdelhi/ipec/responses/index.htm. UNICEF compares India’s share of child workers with those in other countries in its State of the World’s Children report, available at www.unicef.org/sowc2011/pdfs/SOWC-2011-Main-Report_EN_02092011.pdf.
10. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s assessment report on India, “Current Status of Victim Service Providers and Criminal Justice Actors in India on Anti Human Trafficking,” is available at www.unodc.org/documents/southasia/reports/Human_Trafficking-10-05-13.pdf.
11. In 2012, a year after Phoolo was taken, the Delhi newspapers were ablaze with news of another child abduction. A thirteen-year-old girl came forward to complain of an uncle who had sold her to an agent, who had in turn sold her to work for a couple, both doctors, in south Delhi. The girl told child welfare officials she was fed two chapatis a day and beaten when her work was not satisfactory. When her masters went on vacation, leaving her locked inside the apartment, she climbed out onto the balcony and screamed for help. She too was from an adivasi village in Jharkhand.
12. “Mama” literally signifies a maternal uncle, though in this case, it refers to someone feared, because they have a gun. “Jungle ka-mama-log” refers to uncles of the jungle. “Bhai” is the word for brother, and in this case “bhai-log” connotes men who are older and demand submission.
13. World Bank, “Poverty and Social Exclusion in India” (2011). Extracts from the study are available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1121703274255/1439264-1288632678541/7520452-1292532951964/Session3_Das_Dec20.pdf.
14. “Government of India Rapid Survey on Children 2013–2014,” available at www.wcd.nic.in/issnip/National_Fact%20sheet_RSOC%20_02-07-2015.pdf. That is significantly better than in 2005–2006, when the National Family Health Survey, on which a World Bank analysis relied, found that 55 percent of adivasi children were underweight, compared with about 43 percent among Indian children as a whole. An earlier analysis by the World Bank found sharp disparities among the well-being of Indian children as a whole and adivasi children. That analysis, cited previously, relied on data from the 2005–2006 National Family Health Survey.
15. The International Food Policy Research Institute compiles statistics by country for its Global Hunger Index; see www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/ghi14.pdf, table 2.1.
16. www.naandi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/HUNGaMA-Survey-2011-The-Report.pdf.
17. Martin Ravallion, “A Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction in Brazil, China and India” (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank Development Research Group, 2009), available at http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-5080.
18. Skeptics point out that even with the digital identification efforts that are designed to marginalize middlemen, India is unlikely to get rid of them entirely. Indeed, there have been reports of Indian citizens paying middlemen to procure digital identification.
19. Rukmini S., “Just 5 Percent of Marriages Are Inter-Caste: Survey,” The Hindu, November 13, 2014, available at www.thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece. The article cited India Human Development Survey data, which had been collected by the University of Maryland and the National Council on Applied Economic Research.
20. Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
21. Among industrialized countries, the United States ranks close to the bottom on public spending for family benefits. Things could have been different: in 1971, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that would have established a federally funded network of child-care centers. President Richard Nixon vetoed the legislation, suggesting that such a “radical” piece of legislation could diminish parental authority. His statement is available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3251.
22. Gregory Clark, an economics professor at University of California–Davis, wrote about the relationship between ancestry and economic mobility in “Your Ancestors, Your Fate,” The New York Times, February 23, 2014, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/your-fate-thank-your-ancestors/.
GUERRILLA: PAYING FOR BROKEN PROMISES
1. Many such killings are chronicled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which tracks insurgencies in India, including by the Maoists; see www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/timelines/2010/westbengal.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Jhumpa Lahiri paints a rich portrait of this generation in Calcutta in the novel The Lowland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
4. Human Rights Watch counted thirty-six schools in Jharkhand and sixteen schools in Bihar that Maoists attacked in 2009 alone; see www.hrw.org/en/node/86827.
5. Dilip D’Souza wrote about this doctor, Binayak Sen, in Chhatisgarh, in his book The Curious Case of Binayak Sen (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012). Arun Ferreira wrote a memoir of his time in prison, on charges of being a Maoist, in Colours of the Cage: A Prison Memoir (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2014).
6. Somini Sengupta, “In India Maoist Guerrillas Widen ‘People’s War,’ ” The New York Times, August 13, 2006, available at www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/world/asia/13maoists.html.
7. Conversation with Monideepa Banerjie, the reporter who covered the Lalgarh insurgency for the television news station NDTV.
ST
RONGMAN: ASPIRATION GETS INTO POLITICS
1. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, is literally translated as the National Volunteer Organization, a name that is more neutral than its mission. Established in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and driven by what its founders saw as a need to build a strong Hindu nation, it has chapters across the country. The FAQs on its website are instructive: see www.rss.org//Encyc/2012/10/23/Basic-FAQ-on-RSS.aspx. Books about the group include Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1987); and Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1996).
2. Only men are entitled to join the Sangh. There are women in the Hindu radical movement, but they do not belong to the Sangh. There is a parallel organization to the RSS for Hindu women, which doesn’t have the same political influence or name recognition as the RSS.
3. Ramachandra Guha, ed., Makers of Modern India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010).
4. This amendment to the Constitution of India can be viewed at http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend26.htm.
5. Agency for International Development case report, “India Drought 1972/1973,” available at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnadq774.pdf.
6. Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003), and Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s Emergency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
7. “Prime Minister Indira Gandhi Responds to Charges That Democracy in India Is Dead” Saturday Review, August 9, 1975, available at www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1975aug09-00010?View=PDF.
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