BOOK REVIEW

Ramprasad Sengupta and Anup K. Sinha (eds.), Challenge of Sustainable Development: The Indian Dynamics, Centre for Development and Environment Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, 2003, pp. xvi + 380, Price Rs. 950.

Human development involves various aspects such as calorie and protein intake of people, levels of attainment in education and health, availability of infrastructural services and political and social empowerment. The volume under review discusses development issues with special reference to India and is spread over 13 Chapters.

In Chapter 1, the editors Ramprasad Sengupta and Anup Sinha discuss the issues of Population, Life Support and Human Development and give a brief summary of the main arguments in the other Chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 address issues of population growth and its stabilization. Chapters 4 to 7 discuss the issues of life support systems for a given population by way of provision of water and food and in Chapters 8 to 13, the issues of education, health and urbanization are discussed.
In Chapter 2, Ashish Bose has discussed issues relating to both population stabilization and life support for the rural poor. Bose points to the factors leading to inefficiency of family planning programmes, and the errors due to factors such as migration that may be responsible for the difference between projected and actual values. The first section of his paper reviews long range population projections made by the United Nations Population Division, Registrar General's Technical Committee and Population Foundation of India and proceeds to match the Census count of 2001 against the projections. The second section presents four successful models of demographic transition-Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. The third section briefly describes the methodology of Household Misery Index and lists the most vulnerable states and districts. Bose concludes by pointing to the role of gender in the provision of life support in the identified vulnerable districts and in the Himalayan villages in Uttaranchal.

In Chapter 3, Gita Sen analyzes demographic transition in the new analytical paradigm of reproductive and sexual health, women's empowerment and rights and other interrelated issues in demographic behaviour. The new paradigm of demographic thinking that emerged from the deliberations of the Conference on Population and Development held at Cairo in 1994 emphasizes the importance of micro-level demographic behaviour. Sen emphasizes that micro-macro congruence is to be achieved through initiatives in the extension of female education, reproductive health care, empowerment and cultural changes that are based on a proper understanding of the micro-behavioural foundations of macro-demography. Sen decomposes any population growth into three components. The first is a momentum effect at any time, the effect of a young age-structure caused by population growth in the recent past. The second is the effect of mortality decline. The third component is that of total fertility rate being above the replacement level.

In Chapter 4, Bandyopadhyay and Mallik have discussed the problems of sectoral and regional water balances, and issues relating to sustainable use of water. They have indicated how the ecological process of cycling of water over South Asia provides fresh water supply through precipitation. They point out the very uneven distribution of surface water endowment and its utilizable potential across different river basins. They provide also the estimates of static and dynamic ground water resource potential for different river basins, while explaining the dynamics of the process of recharge. A. Vaidyanathan discusses issues in water management and sustainable water use in India, in the context of patterns of population growth and trends in agrarian development in his paper presented as Chapter 5. His central thesis is that scarcity of   water is a rather fuzzy concept and its nature and extent differ greatly between countries and regions, and that there is considerable scope for conservation and therefore the need is to focus on policies involving institutional changes.

C.L. Acharya and A.K. Sharma have focused in Chapter 6 on the supply side issues of meeting food requirements of a growing population. Their contention is that balancing the considerations of ecological sustainability and the inexorable trend of urbanization while feeding the growing population is the essence of the challenge. In Chapter 7, Utsa Patnaik discusses the political economy of agriculture in India and critically examines the impact of trade liberalization on the foodgrains market and land use patterns. According to her the land of tropical developing countries has to be conceptualized as a nearly fixed resource, particularly under non-expansionary economic policies of the neo-liberal regime, which imply cuts in rural investment expenditure. Given the symmetric nature of global demand, a considerable primary export thrust is at the expense of the basic food consumption of the domestic population in the absence of adequate investment. Anita and Banerjee have highlighted in their respective papers in Chapters 8 and 9, how a process of 'recolonization' in the field of health care contributed to the creation of a bureaucratized public health system leading in turn to the unwarranted promotion of unnecessary and expensive private health care that resulted in disparities.

Tapas Majumdar in Chapter 10, discusses the fact that although the literacy rate has crept up, over the last 50 years, at an unjustifiably slow rate, the sheer size of the literate manpower of India poses a massive challenge of adequate utilization of human capital. According to Majumdar the role of the state in the education sector including the higher education sector, has to remain significant if only for channeling funds for subsidizing education substantially for the foreseeable future. Also the role of the state must include providing leadership over a new public choice question, that of selecting the right kind of literacy for all in the newly emerging technologically oriented society. Lastly the main hope for real change would remain, according to Majumdar, with the generation of supporting public action in favour of the adopted education policies. While Majumdar emphasizes the feasibility of universalization of education of children from the point of view of costs and financial resources, V.N. Reddy in Chapter 11 examines the problems and prospects of implementation of such programmes. His study is based on an econometric analysis of past performance of educational attainments using data of the various rounds of NSSO on enrollment and school attendance of children.

Annapurna Shaw in Chapter 12 addresses the issues in urban growth with respect to the provision of basic services of safe drinking water, sanitation and waste disposal. She points out that the state of development or availability of capital finances cannot fully explain the variations in the state of affairs regarding provision of civic services across states or regions in India. Finally, Shaw has evolved an indicator of urban environmental status for states based on total urban population, urban density, urban growth (1981-91) and size of chemical industry of the state and correlated it with state of its industrialization and development. Given the resource crunch and the process of economic reforms, urban local bodies are being required to depend on capital market borrowing, privatization and partnership arrangements and community participation.

Amitabh Kundu in Chapter 13, analyzes the financial implications of such institutional innovations for infrastructural development and their far-reaching welfare implications for the common people. Kundu's analysis reveals that the poor are likely to get priced out of the various schemes that are being launched within the private and joint sector or through subcontracting arrangements. The companies participating in the schemes would ensure a change in the perspective of infrastructure sector and force dilution of social objectives. Similar would be the impact of public sector schemes that have increasingly been made to depend on institutional borrowings and capital market. As a consequence, larger cities and better-off colonies would get much more attention as also share in investible resources due to their higher affordability and being blessed with political patronage. These would accentuate the gap in terms of the level of basic amenities between the rich and poor localities within the cities. The projects that are likely to be financed through the capital market would, by their very logic, be commercially viable and ensure profitability to the investors and other stakeholders. In case of an eventuality of their failing to generate the desired rate of profit, local bodies may be left with no funds even for general administration since much of its revenue earnings will be diverted for paying the investors or for completing the project. Thus the policy of liberating the local governments from the regulatory legislative controls of the state would place them under the direct control of financial institutions.
In India, recognition and appreciation of the problem of human development will be the first step in bridging the gap between what needs to be done and the politics of business. The volume is a comprehensive one including all the aspects encompassing efforts to be made in that direction.

Richa Minocha
Lecturer Social Sciences,
IIHS.