Arvind Subramanian: Katherine Boo, India and China

Arvind Subramanian: Katherine Boo, India and China Boo's reportage on a Mumbai slum highlights the Indian state's inability to provide the basics Arvind Subramanian / Mar 28, 2012, 00:41 IST

The even-handedness that stems from Katherine Boos natural and abundant empathy is one of the many appeals of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her gorgeous book on one of Mumbais slums, Annawadi. Thus, both cassandras-cum-state interventionists such as Amartya Sen and hope purveyors-cum-market enthusiasts such as the late management guru C K Prahalad can claim vindication in the book.

And yet, Indias generalised economic dynamism, which allows the books teenage protagonist, Abdul, to support a family of 11, leavens life with hope and entrepreneurial possibilities. Prahalads point was that the poor had exploitable purchasing power, and the explosive sales of cheap and small-sized sachets of washing powder, paan and other consumables over these last few decades seemed corroborative evidence. Boos book shows that the Prahalad strategy works in part because the poor can acquire purchasing power in unlikely ways.

First, by hustling in waste: one might say that for many Annawadi residents, life is all about crap and scrap. In a nice twist, globalisation plays a key positive role in this hustling. When global commodity prices boom, so does the value of commodity-related waste aluminium, plastic, copper, steel the scavenging for which provides sustenance for the slum dwellers. Similarly, when foreign tourist traffic slows down, the supply of waste declines, thus depressing slum incomes. Blinkered to the lives of the marginalised, we instinctively equate globalisation with the free flow of goods, forgetting that bads such as detritus which are not bad at all for the poor are globalised too.

Second, the poor acquire purchasing power by partaking of the venality and corruption of those in power. The book is a reminder that the perpetrators of corruption are not its exclusive beneficiaries. As Boo writes: For the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

The trickle-down of public funds looted is a source of income for some of the poor. Electoral politics compels venal politicians to share their loot even if, or especially because, it is ill-gotten. After all, Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi have spread TV ownership in Tamil Nadu despite their motives and means being thoroughly dubious. Trickle-down must also occur because of the pseudo-accountability required of poverty interventions. To allow donors to feel good about themselves, they must see first-hand the changing reality on the ground. Some collateral benefit, even if cosmetic, is unavoidable.

But the most important and depressing development insight that Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers is this: the related pathologies we variously call weak public institutions, ineffective governance, and corruption are especially costly, and most difficult to escape from, for the poorest.

Boo perceptively notes that succumbing to the narrative of jugaad the creative entrepreneurial spirit associated with circumventing regulation and corruption growth-addled India is in danger of overlooking the colossal costs for the poor of deteriorating Indian governance. And her explanation of these costs is novel. It is not just that navigating, say, the Indian judicial system can be time-consuming, financially draining, and livelihood-destroying. The Indian system severs the link between effort and result, engendering deep despair: We try so many things, as one Annawadi girl put it, but the world does not move in our favour.

Worse, since life at the bottom has a dog-eat-dog quality, a collective action trap condemns the poor to coping with, rather than having any chance of reforming, Indias institutions. Instead of uniting, poor people competed ferociously with one another for gains as slender as they were provisional, Boo writes. As a result, the gates of the rich, intermittently rattled, remained unbreached... The poor took down one another and the worlds great cities soldiered on in relative peace.

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Arvind Subramanian: Katherine Boo, India and China