India ranks 79 out of 176 countries on the 2016 Corruption Index published by Transparency International.
Implementing new policies in terms of allocation of resources is the most important aspect of development in the coming quarter.
As much as 2016 was a year of reforms, it was also a year where the reformist claims were disputed. Predominantly, it was asked whether there were any real reforms, or whether it was just the Prime Minister’s speeches that talked about them. Further, it was increasingly seen that the people who supported the Prime Minister and his party were maintaining the narrative that reforms were abound, while the other faction was saying the opposite.
The 2017 Economic Survey and the annual Budget forecast a 6.75 to 7.5 per cent GDP growth rate for the forthcoming fiscal year. India’s growth rate appears to be high. Then why is it that India falls short on a number of development parameters? To assess the situation, we try to look at areas where India has grown in the past year and those where it might require a reallocation of resources. We compare India to its neighbours in 2016 and to itself by looking the Corruption Perceptions Index, the Human Development Index, and the Inclusivity Index.
Corruption
The incumbent Prime Minister has taken the narrative against corruption at different levels. While there are anecdotes and reports that suggest that corruption is being dealt with an iron hand, there are others that suggest otherwise. However, the Corruption Perceptions Index seems to favour the former.
India ranks 79 out of 176 countries on the 2016 Corruption Index published by Transparency International. In the sub-continent, we’re doing pretty well. Sri Lanka is ranked 95, Pakistan is at 116, Nepal at 131, Myanmar at 136 and Bangladesh at 145. China comes closest to India with the same rank of 79, while Bhutan is way above us at a rank of 27. So, from the looks of it, India seems to be the least corrupt of all the neighbouring countries barring Bhutan.
The fight against corruption has taken the centre stage in the past few years. In 2012 and 2013, India ranked 94 with a score of 36, with no improvement between the two years. In 2014, it moved up to 85, and in 2015 it further improved to rank 76. The 2016 rank is lower than the 2015 one, but in 2016, India’s score went up by 2 points (to 40). The addition of 8 more countries in the 2016 index impacts the ranking in its real sense. Hence despite the negative perception in the ranking, India has marginally improved its position.
Clearly, there is some ‘walk the talk’. But, it may not enough. As much as we might be the least corrupt nation-state regionally, at a global level, India still ranks below 79 countries on corruption. The consolation is that we’ve moved 20 ranks up from 2012. Whether that is enough or not is anybody’s guess. On the colour coded map, however, it is still recognised as one of the ‘highly corrupt’ countries.
Human Development
Taking cue from Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s remark, “Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable and unethical”, we look at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report that ranks countries on the basis of the Human Development Index (HDI) it formulates.
Industrial forecasts, job opportunities and social services are fundamentally designed to make policymakers more informed about ways in which they can improve the lives of the people, much like everything else that is measured. An objective judgement of this progress is given by the HDI which maps out education, health and income using the following proxies: expected years of schooling for kids and average years of schooling for adults for education; life expectancy at birth for health; and gross national income for income. The geometric mean of the normalised indices is then used to rank each country.
India currently stands 130 of 188 countries under the category ‘Medium HDI’. Bhutan is at 132 while Bangladesh is at 142. Sri Lanka and China have ‘very high HDI’, each being at a rank of 73 and 90 respectively. Nepal at 145 and Pakistan at 147 are ‘low HDI’ countries.
Clearly, India is far away from being an example of human development. Sanitation and healthcare services require attention. And even though the government has mobilised schemes to this end, in terms of outcome, it clearly hasn’t made much of a difference.
While education enrollments are increasing, the Annual Statement of Education Report (ASER) portrays that learning outcomes are still lacking, even in primary class students. Clearly, more interventions and deliberations are required to make education work in India. Income levels are extremely low too. In fact, more than 90 per cent of the people are not even on the tax grid, leading to a strong black economy that doesn’t take employee benefits vis-a-vis insurance, provident fund, etc. into account.
The top five countries on the index are European, with the exception of Australia. There are some specific policies that these countries implement which gives them the edge.
One such example is that of ‘flexicurity’ in Denmark, defined as “coexistence of flexibility, in the form of low adjustment costs for employers and employees, and security”. It aims at promoting employment security over job security. So, the labour force is flexible which helps companies and employers have the cushion of a social safety net. India too needs to make certain adjustments to its labour laws to climb up the ladder on the HDI.
Inclusive Development Index
The Inclusive Development Index, published by the World Economic Forum is quite a holistic measure of the progress a country is making. It uses 12 development parameters under three broad pillars: “growth and development”, “inclusion”, and “intergenerational equity and sustainability”.
The rankings are divided into advanced (30 countries) and developing countries (79 countries). India ranks 60 of the 79 developing countries. Most of its neighbours are ahead. Bangladesh is at 36, Nepal at 27, Pakistan at 52 and Sri Lanka at 39. Clearly, India is the worst of its neighbours.
The report specifically stresses concern on India’s rising debt to GDP ratio, questioning the fiscal spending of the country. It points out that educational enrollment rates are relatively low across all levels, consequently translating into low formal labour force participation. It also points out that the tax system could be made more progressive in order to develop infrastructure which is currently inhibiting new business creation. Another reason for lack of environment to do business in India includes corruption and a large administrative burden.
Among the top-ranked developing economies are countries like Lithuania, Azerbaijan and Hungary, and the ones that showed the most-improved five-year trend were Lesotho, Nepal and Georgia.
Where do we go from here?
The budget and economic survey have highlighted several important points, but implementing new policies in terms of allocation of resources is the most important aspect of development in the coming quarter. Education, healthcare and food will need a boost, as the HDI numbers clearly suggest. There is also a case for enhancing businesses in India, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises which carry the potential to thrive. Implementation will be instrumental in outlining the priorities of this government in the coming fiscal year, which should be based on the above data points and indices.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.