I . Introduction — A new multipolar world
The economic crisis of 2008 will certainly prove to be a landmark—it belongs to the category of events that separate “before” from “after—as were 1929, or 1991. After 1929 our understanding of the functioning of markets and role of governments was never the same.
The world changed again in 1991 when the “second world” disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union and we ceased to think in terms of two competing economic and political systems.
The 2008 economic crisis will no doubt prove to be another such watershed. India and China, together with other East Asian countries and even Sub-Saharan Africa, helped anchor the world’s faltering economy.
The crisis accelerated the relative shift in power—the developing world’s share of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms has risen from some 33% in 1980 to 43% in 2010.
In this, Asia’s share alone stands at 21%. And Asia’s stock markets now account for almost a third of global market capitalization, ahead of those of the US and Europe.
The financial crisis also made it clear that emerging economies need to be involved in decisions affecting the global economy. In the formulation of a response to the economic crisis the G7 evolved into the G20.
In this new multipolar world, India has clearly emerged as a key player. While scenarios differ on whether India will overtake China in terms of growth rates, there is no doubt that India will be one of the powerhouses of this century.
II. Two Indias
India’s global profile is rising—from a slow-growing poor country to a burgeoning economic power:
· India grew fast before the crisis–9% per year–and has resumed fast growth–8.6% post crisis.
· India is globally recognized as a key player in the IT revolution, and in sectors as diverse as pharmaceutical, cement, steel and space
· Indian nationals hold key positions in corporations, academia and policy making worldwide
· India has acquired a prominent voice in global fora; it is playing a historic role in fostering South-South exchanges and has an influential position in the BRICs.
But there is also another India:
· India’s GNI per capita ($1170) is lower than that of 161 other countries. World Bank’s poverty numbers show 456 million people in India are poor—about one-third of the world’s poor, and more than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
· India lags significantly on health and nutrition targets: It is home to half of world’s underweight children, and it accounts for 1 in 5 maternal and child deaths worldwide.
· Social exclusion remains a stark reality—Scheduled Tribes lag twenty years behind the general population, Scheduled Castes ten years; gender norms can be quite restrictive and gender gap persists in realms such as child mortality and labor force participation.
If India is to play a crucial role in the new multipolar world—as an engine of growth, as a provider of knowledge, as an example of social and economic transformation under democratic auspices—it will need to close the gap between these two realities.
Closing the gap will require addressing some key challenges in the areas of infrastructure, agriculture, education, gender, and governance.
III. Infrastructure: Address institutional constraints to public provision
9% growth hides an infrastructure crisis. Innovation in the private sector has often got around this—60% of firms and a large percentage of homes rely on back-up generation, and on an industry of logistical firms. But this has costs, and sooner or later infrastructure constraints will bite, and growth will slow, absent major change. This is especially true in urban areas.
PPPs are often hailed as a solution. Private participation in infrastructure took off in the early 1990s in telecoms and power supply. Highway, port, and airport concessions began to emerge in the late 1990s, with water supply and solid waste management following.
In the 1990s Latin America had major infrastructural gaps, and PPPs were thought to be the solution (including by the World Bank). But gaps were effectively closed only in telecoms (which was not an issue for India) and in Chile (a small country with by far the best governance to manage private sector involvement). Elsewhere, there was insufficient private involvement, or private involvement that was high cost, often corrupt, and with frequent renegotiation to extract better deals from the state and society.
The lesson is that improving governance, and solving institutional problems, is unavoidable to improve infrastructure provision, and is necessary for effective private involvement.
IV. Agriculture: Feeding India and the world
The challenge here is so well-known. India has enormous untapped potential—productivity in Eastern states, for instance, is well below what it is in Punjab, and sustainability is an issue in states like Punjab.
The policy reforms that are needed to increase agricultural productivity have been discussed extensively—infrastructure provision; subsidy reform; marketing reforms, a more predictable regulatory environment to encourage private sector initiative, to name a few—and both the union government and some states have taken important steps, such as in building rural roads. But much more needs to be done. Higher productivity in India is essential to feed India and feed the world.
V. Education: Focus on results, not inputs
The two Indias are very visible in education: Graduates of India’s famed Institutes of Technology literally drive growth. But basic and secondary education are dismal.
In fact, even in tertiary education quality is in islands of excellence, not widespread. The demographic dividend can turn into a demographic curse if the millions of young people entering the labor market every year are not equipped to take up the jobs that a fast-growing economy can create.
There has been progress in enrollments, including of girls, and this should not be overlooked—it is an impressive achievement. But the issue is quality. The evidence (for example from the Annual State of Education Report) is that quality remains extraordinarily low and has not improved in the last five years, despite big increases in the inputs going into the system.
The Right to Education is a great aspiration—but it only tackles part of the agenda. It is weak on the quality issue, and is primarily input-focused. Getting better school facilities is a good thing, but will have little or no impact on quality.
Indeed requirements on meeting the curriculum may make it more difficult to improve quality, since teachers may strive, not to raise competencies based on where children are, but to stick to the curriculum.
The imposition of infrastructural and teaching norms on the burgeoning private system could also be highly costly, since it could make the low-cost private schools unviable or push them into illegality or resort to bribing school inspectors for licenses.
The private sector is no panacea—its quality is only slightly better than that of the public sector. But the answer should be to work out ways to support the quality agenda there too, not impose top-down input standards.
The pedagogy for tackling basic education is known—and tested in the field—but the incentives now are not there. This is also an institutional problem.
VI. Gender: Growth alone is not enough
Women have gained in India—more girls going into school, benefiting from the progress in poverty reduction. But historically-shaped gender disparities are still important, especially in Northern India, and are both a burden on girls and women and a lost resource for social and economic change.
Three areas merit attention:
· As everyone knows, the provisional 2011 Census report shows a sex ratio for children 0-6 at 914 females per 1,000 males, the lowest since Independence, and declining since 2001 in all but seven states.
Rising prosperity doesn’t deliver for girl children. This happened in China and Korea also—sex ratios in highly patriarchal societies initially worsened with rising prosperity. This needs to be tackled head-on.
· There are also many “missing women”—relative to what one observes in countries with low discrimination—in older age groups, as observed in the forthcoming World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development.
The main explanation appears to be that general institutional weaknesses in public health, water and sanitation and health systems hurt women more in countries where there is more subtle discrimination.
Maternal mortality is part of this story—Indian women have a 1 in 70 chance of dying during childbirth, compared to 1 in 280 for Vietnamese women and 1 in 1400 for Chinese women!
Early marriage also contributes—about 60% of Indian women are married by the time they turn 18 and almost 25% have had their first child by then, compared to only 4% in Vietnam. This has serious health implications.
· A major issue concerns the role of the political system in bringing about change. There are very few women in national politics.
Yet evidence from reservations in panchayat finds
(a) that women panchayat leaders lead to different local choices over public goods (against the view that they would be puppets of their husbands) and, even more significant,
(b) men who experience women leaders significantly change their view and are more likely to vote for women when there is no reservation. Countries have experimented with various mechanisms to increase the representation of women in national politics, but seldom has this happened automatically.
VII. Governance: A domestic as well as international agenda
Most issues come back to governance and institutions.
Governance ranks as high on the international agenda, as it does on the political agenda in India. Governance is not only an issue to be left to law enforcement agencies; it is by itself a major development challenge and needs to be addressed as part of any development strategy.
Not only because it affects primarily the poorest and most vulnerable but because misgovernance or corruption undermines the effectiveness of public policies, the proper targeting of social programs, the quality of service delivery, the exercise of fundamental rights, etc.
India’s public discourse is focused on these sets of issues at this time. Approaches and solutions that have been spelled out by senior policymakers are welcome and in the right direction.
Several states in India are also innovating on governance and that these innovations are often mainstreamed at the national level. This dynamics is extremely promising. The Public Services Guarantee Act, enacted in Madhya Pradesh by which civil servants are to be sanctioned for unwarranted delays in the provision of public services such as a power and water connections, or the granting of legal documents and social allowances, is a promising incentive mechanism towards improving service delivery.
As much as India can contribute to the international agenda on governance, it can also benefit from it.
Grand corruption is increasingly international, as it involves illicit international financial flows, sophisticated financial schemes, tax evasion, money laundering, and the theft of public assets.
It can hardly be dealt with unilaterally and requires a high level of cooperation between defrauded countries and recipient ones for effective legal action. Grand corruption and security are also closely related which is why India recently joined the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering and combating terrorism.
VIII. Conclusions
India is playing a progressively larger role in the new multipolar world we inhabit. Other countries increasingly look at India as an engine of growth, a source of knowledge, and an example on how a pluralistic society evolves over time.
Dealing with the challenges outlined here—addressing institutional constraints to better deliver infrastructure and quality education, spur agricultural productivity increases, fully include women in the development process, and strengthen governance, which in the end will translate in a wealthier, more equitable India in 20 years—calls for political will and commitment. But it can be done. India has shown itself to be capable of momentous transformations.
India has so much to share with other developing countries and indeed the whole world can learn from India. It is time India asserts its role in a multi-polar world.
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.