EDITORIAL : THE INDIAN EXPRESS, INDIA

 

 

In the present tense

The government’s decision to move to a new index of industrial production (IIP) is welcome. Macroeconomic policy-making requires information about the behaviour of the economy. This requires good data. This is particularly true for monetary policy which is often expected to be used to finetune the economy. When there are signs of the economy growing too fast, or overheating, monetary policy is expected to address the issue. Good data is also essential for businesses making plans whichinvolve estimates of growth of demand and production in the economy.

The current index is based on the industrial production basket of the Indian economy in 1993-94. It includes goods no longer in production such as typewriters, black and white televisions, loud speakers and VCRs. It excludes items like mobile phones and laptops. The weights given to items in the basket of goods produced, based on the 1993-94 GDP production data, are outdated. The coverage of the current index is also inadequate. These problems have made the series highly volatile. Month-to-month variations are sometimes impossibly large. A recent example has been a 100 per cent increase in the production of capital goods, which is almost impossible to achieve by many of the factories which were already seen to be operating at full capacity. The reason was found to be insulated rubber tubes whose production was reported to have jumped sharply. Such behaviour posed a dilemma for policy-

makers. Should they have responded to sharp increases or declines in industrial output? Or, should they have ignored them as merely data problems?

Stretching that logic

What were they thinking? St Agnes school in Kottayam, Kerala, recently made the prize blunder of tagging its students by caste — their identity cards listed this information along with the usual categories of name, class, parent’s name, etc. While angry groups picketed the school and the state government ordered an inquiry, this episode only points to the increasing currency of caste, as something that can be acknowledged and instrumentally wielded, after generations of ambivalence about the category. Of deep concern is the lack of nuance so that affirmative action can be better targeted without reinforcing the hierarchies or identities of caste.

Even as caste was declining as a social force, it was reinstated as a political force. Post-Mandal Commission, electoral mobilisation and social policy have been channelled through caste. Kerala has seen the worst forms of untouchability, as well as some of the most intense, sustained social movements against caste. Despite the strong Marxist impress on the state, even the recent assembly election testified to the way the state is segmented along community and caste lines, and how these factors play into the choosing of candidates and constituencies, and voting decisions (it has been persuasively argued that the LDF did especially well this time among upper-caste Hindus because the UDF was seen as minority-pandering). We will now have a caste census that further entrenches the category, and give it further legal-administrative sanction. Caste is what is called a “polysemic category” — it changes through marriage and migration, and people respond differently depending on whether they are being socially placed or making a bid for affirmative action. However, it is being increasingly treated as a fixed fact. So in that sense, St Agnes school is only a clear example of that creeping caste-consciousness.