By Kollengode S Venkataraman, (written in 2001)
Among Desis, even highly-educated Desis, all kinds of subjective and anecdotal indicators are tossed around in conversations on how rapidly things are improving “back home” such as: The availability of a) high quality private school and college education, b) enclaves pr luxurious flats and access to contemporary household gadgets, c) private modern medical establishments, d) consumer electronics, Internet access and cable TV, e) old-age homes, f) the wider choice of food in restaurants…… The list goes on and on.
Add to this the overflowing crowds of vacationing NRIs seen in jewelry stores and expensive sari stores in India during their visits.
While all these things and more are available, when we ask if they are affordable to the average Indian who earns in rupees and spends in rupees, we confront the uncomfortable answer that most of these are affordable only for the wealthy and the powerful in India, and not for the “average family” (husband and wife, 2 kids, 2 parents) struggling to live in their 800 sq. foot flats in urban India’s concrete jungles.
Traditionally, village folks in India list man’s needs as roti, kapda, aur makaan (unavu, udai, uraividam in Tamil) or food, clothing, and shelter. The order in which people list the three is significant. As an animal, man is instinctively driven first by hunger and thirst, and only then as a social animal, by the sense of shame, and only then he thinks about a roof over his head. So, rational indicator of social development in today’s “modern” world is the percentage of income an “average” family earning “average” income spends on roti.
The US Department of Agriculture’s statistic on the money the American family spends on food is revealing. It is remarkable that in the US the proportion of money a family spends on food has decreased from 21% in 1940 to 11% in 2000. This, in spite of all the economic ups and downs and the structural changes in the economy, from the one dominated by manufacturing in the 1940s to the one driven by services in 2000s. Life in the US is still manageable for the average guy.
% Income spent on food by the average US household (Ref: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/76967 :
1940: 21%
1960: 18%
1980: 13%
2000: 11%
In today’s India, an average urban Indian family (couple, two kids, two parents) earning in rupees and living in rupees spends a whopping 40%-50% of its income on food alone. How do I know? Personal experience. If you want reference, Google-search In 2000, an average urban middle-class family in India spent. Approximately 60% to 70% of an average urban family’s budget in India was spent on basic food items in the 1960s, which steadily decreased toward roughly 42% to 48% by the late 1990s and 2000 (source: Google-search under Between 1960 and 2000, % of family income an average urban middle-class family in India spent on food). But still not anywhere clos to the number in the US.
Add to this another 30 to 40% of their income going towards the even more sky-rocketing cost of housing – for a small 800 sq. feet 1-bed room flat, that is. “Average” young couples struggle to make down payments for their flats without parental support, which brings its own complications in the complicated checkerboard of relationships among the in-laws. That is why average Indians are leaving India in hordes to wherever destiny takes them. Instinctively they believe any place else would be better. And they are right.
With so much availability and so little affordability, is there any wonder why corruption has permeated society in less developed nations in so many perfidious ways?
Besides, with more than 80% of an average Indian family’s income gobbled up by food and shelter, very little is left for other activities-recreation, hobby, travel, health care, fine arts.
Recently my friend told me about the bill for the last stages of his mother’s hospitalization was Rs. 700,000. In India, there is no equivalent of Medicare or health insurance, and the quality of healthcare in government hospitals so wanting, and the private medical industry borders on racketeering. So older people dread hospitalization. With their liquid assets eaten away by inflation, they are forced to depend on their sons and daughters physically and financially.
Now you can see how easy it is for us to send our kids to tennis lessons, piano classes, golfing, Indian dance classes… … We have the luxury of disposable monies and disposable time too.
And we in the US also use other taxpayer-funded social services — public education, good roads, libraries, and parks, for example, to make effective use of our disposable time and resources in the activities of our choice. These activities, affordable only to the affluent in India, are well within the grasp of middle-class NRIs here, not to speak of the affluent desis.
The problem with emerging economies is that their development is skewed. A large number of low-income vernacular-educated families — not to speak of very low-income families — are overrun by sweeping changes whose beneficiaries are mostly urban middle class, or the rural propertied class. END