Ananthamurthy loved whiskey and a good argument …
I met U. R. Ananthamurthy in 1985 in Iowa City, where he was a visiting professor and I was a student at the Writers Workshop. On the first day of class, a seminar on Indian mythology, he looked around at his ten or so students, and said, “Why don’t we go to my house, and continue the class over dinner and whiskey?” And so we abandoned the classroom for the rest of the term, and met at his house every week. The classes, fuelled by good Scotch and his wife Esther’s tamarind rice, went on until one in the morning.
Ananthamurthy introduced us to medieval Indian thinkers. We laughed, we drank, we argued, and transported ourselves out of the harsh midwestern winter. For Ananthamurthy, there was no division between his students and his private life. In the decades since then, I’ve regularly stayed with him, to seek his advice about my writing, and about the scope and direction of my life. For me and many, many others, he has been an intellectual lodestar, the wisest man I’ve ever met. Ananthamurthy was politically engaged, he was a public intellectual, but first and foremost he was a storyteller. His stories were a vibrant combination of the folk tales and gossip of his village, and the epics, scriptures, and great texts of world literature.
Once I went to receive him at the Mumbai airport, and he came out beaming. When the cabin crew on his flight from Bangalore had seen his name, they had upgraded him to business class. “In India,” he noted, “it still means something to be a writer.”
These were the things he loved: his wife Esther and his daughter Anu and his son Sharath and his son-in-law Vivek and his grandchildren; good whiskey; electronic gadgets; the films of Ingmar Bergman; the evening adda in his house; the Kannada language; and a good argument.
This is what he hated: hypocrisy.
I will miss him so.
(Suketu Mehta in Scroll.in)
“Growth or Development: Which Way is Gujarat Going”, edited by Indira Hirway, Amita Shah and Ghanshyam Shah, Oxford University Press, 604 pages, Price: Rs 1,395.00
The chapter by Sebastian Morris of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, may be considered an exception for showering praise on Gujarat’s high growth. But as YK Alagh notes in his preface, Morris’ chapter “puts to test whether some states are exceptional” and have been able to create a different model, and the answer is a big no. Morris says in his chapter, “A Comparative Analysis of Gujarat’s Economic Growth”: “Growth of regions since the reforms of 1991-03 can be considered in two phases: 1992-04 to 2002-03 and 2003-04 onwards. The very growth achieved in the latter period is mirrored at the regional level with particularly the services sector growth rate moving upwards in the second period. Gujarat like many other states is no exception.”
Rest of the book, presumably taking this as the overall context, seeks to give the impression that reason for Gujarat’s high rate of growth is mainly due to “low labour costs in the state (on account of repressed wages and poor quality of employment), the higher rate of savings (given high income inequality), high tax concessions and other incentives to corporate investments, vast migrations to Gujarat, and the increasing use of capital-intensive machinery in Gujarat—all of these factors may have allowed it hold on to its advantage” (Introduction). The growth rate accelerated in agriculture because of the “Narmada project, and particularly ample rainfall.”
Hirway adds, “Keeping wages low is another major policy for allowing high rates of profits and thereby raising the rate of savings and investment in the economy. This undermines the interests of labour. The state ranks very low among the major 20 states in casual and regular wage rates for male and female workers in both rural and urban areas. In 2009–10, the daily wage rates of male regular workers were Rs 187 and Rs 306.58 in rural and urban Gujarat respectively, and Gujarat ranked 18th and 20th respectively in these rates among the major 20 states in India. It ranked 9th and 20th in 2004-5.” There was failure to reduce poverty through the state-sponsored Gharib Kalyan melas: “Incidence of tribal poverty in Gujarat has increased from 31.2 in 1999-2000 to 34.7 in 2004-5 and to 35 in 2009-10. The state ranks 14th among the major states (lowest is rank one) in terms of poverty among the ST population. The incidence of poverty among OBCs is again 45.4 as against 9.4 among the others”.
Sunil R Parekh in the chapter, “Some Facets of Industrialization in Gujarat Industrial”, points towards how, despite loud Gujarat government claims, the state’s employment rate has suffered. To quote, “The period 2000-10 could be considered as most significant in terms of the flow of investment to industry”. But while employment grew from 3.5 lakh to 11.5 lakh — “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 3 per cent, the gross output registered a CARG of 22 per cent”. In absolute numbers, “the state witnessed new job opportunities of 4,70,353 during the first four decades as against 3,36,355 in the last decade. As compared to the degree of industrialization, this does not represent a significant figure, as more and more industries in Gujarat have now become technology-driven with the introduction of automation”, with the gross output going up “from Rs 365 crore to Rs 6,42,000 crore”. He adds, “One can state that the benefits of rapid growth of industries have not been passed over to labour either in terms of increased employment opportunities or in terms of higher wages or in terms of quality employment.”
Parikh further says, “Gujarat is one of the most industrialized states in India”, but the value added tax (VAT) collected to Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) output ratio is “one of the lowest in the state… In fact, at 3 per cent, it is the lowest among the six major states in India. That is, in spite of Gujarat contributing 17 per cent of the industrial output in the country, its ratio of VAT to output is only 3 per cent, one-third that of Maharashtra. This is really remarkable because Gujarat has one of the highest rates of VAT, 14 per cent as against 12.5 per cent in other states.”
In the chapter “High Growth Agriculture in Gujarat: An Enquiry into Inclusiveness and Sustainability”, Amita Shah and Itishree Pathak suggest how the benefits of better irrigation facilities have failed to reach the poorer sections. Giving the example of a spot study, the scholars says, “Benefits of watershed projects were found to be confined mainly to landed households (despite a clear emphasis to include the landless as project beneficiaries). Among the landed households, those with medium and large landholdings had a larger proportion of beneficiaries as compared to marginal and small farmers within a village. This was vindicated by the fact that identifying beneficiaries from the farmers with marginal–small landholdings was often difficult as a majority of the project beneficiaries were found to be in the medium–large landholding category.” They add, “A substantially large proportion of the beneficiary farmers (that is, about 40 per cent) did not have access to irrigation, especially from groundwater sources even after completion of the project.”
PK Viswanathan and Jharna Pathan in “Economic Growth and the State of Natural Resources and the Environment in Gujarat: A Critical Assessment” say that “a major challenge facing the state’s natural resources (including land and water) is the emerging conflicts between industrial and agricultural sub-sectors to access land and water for expansion of activities in their respective contexts. While the conflicts in accessing and holding the rights over landed resources are most likely to get proper solutions (through state as well as legislature mediated processes), the access and control rights over water resources are going to be highly contested, especially in a water-starved state like Gujarat.”
Ghanshyam Shah in “Governance of Gujarat: Good Governance for Whom and for What?” gives the example of how the government-launched Mukhyamantri Amrutum (MA) Yojana of April 2012, which sought to provide to the below poverty line (BPL) persons medical and surgical care for the treatment of identified diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular surgeries, burns, and neonatal diseases involving hospitalization , empanelled 54 hospitals, half of which are private. “Though the government announced that the scheme would be managed through a corporation or registered trust, so far this has not been done”, he points out, adding, “The government admits that the government institutions are inadequate to provide specialized services, especially for obstetric care, due ‘to the shortage of skilled staff, the poor facilities at government hospitals, poorly trained personnel with indifferent and unwelcoming attitudes’ (Central Bureau of Health Intelligence). This was the reason, according to the government, for its inability to reduce the maternal mortality rate (MMR) rate in Gujarat.”