Government needs to redefine its own role in facilitating access to services in rural areas

The deputy chairman of the Planning Commission recently disclosed that the government of India would be redefining the measures of poverty from one based on income and nutrition levels to a more holistic measure, based on a cocktail of development indicators. These indicators would include measures relating to access to basic facilities, such as quality education, good health and clean drinking water.
Prima facie, this is a good move because the ultimate objective of any country must be to provide its populace with a “decent” standard of living. But such a formulation of poverty measure would beg several questions: How do we define “quality education'? What do we mean by good health? On whose shoulders does the onus lie for ameliorating this condition? If the measure is important to target poverty removal, will we be aiming to provide the opportunity to access services or provide the services themselves?
Come to think of it, there are a number of indicators that we have on the supply side to measure the availability of infrastructure and performance on various development benchmarks. At the most macro level, we have the all-encompassing Human Development Index, both as an international benchmark as well as a national benchmark for states.
Then there are indicators, such as infant mortality rates, literacy rates, life expectancy, access to safe drinking water and sanitation that give us a fairly accurate understanding of the services that we are able to deliver. Indicators such as number of hospital beds per “1, 000” population, percentages of population having access to piped water supply, number of schools per district, access to toilets and so on, would provide an understanding of the physical infrastructure provision. Therefore, a broad supply side assessment of lifestyle improvements required can well be assessed. But where are the standards on quality of service?
So, what would the new definition of poverty achieve? It would necessitate a complete mapping of access to all such services onto households of different income classes, to identify the number of households that have neither the desired level of income nor the creature comforts that can guarantee them a “decent” living. Then, what? If the intent is to provide the opportunity to access services, and that too of a prescribed minimum standard, then a large part of the effort would be on ensuring the setting up of the social infrastructure — traditionally seen as the government’s responsibility — and ensuring that the poor have the disposable income to pay for the services.
If the intent is to provide the services themselves by pricing the services at an affordable (maybe free?) level, then the level of effort is of a totally different scale. Or, is the intent merely one of having an internationally defensive position of levels of poverty in the country? The greatest challenge to the government here would be: how do they get their various ministries and departments to work in the same direction towards common goals? Poverty alleviation programmes would then require the National Rural Health Mission to coordinate with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to coordinate with the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (for rural electrification) and so on…
Maybe, the government needs to, in addition to redefining poverty, redefine its own role in facilitating access to services in rural areas. It has to stop viewing its interventions as a largesse to deprived communities and approach it as a matter of right of the people to a minimum standard of services — failure to deliver on these is a failure of the government! In re-defining its role and performance, the government can possibly draw lessons from the public-private partnership programmes (PPP) in the urban and infrastructure sectors, which it has implemented with varying degrees of success.
The media has been replete with stories from the corporate world on the business opportunities that they are seeing at the bottom of the pyramid. Be it the financial sector (ICICI Bank), the telecom sector (Nokia), the transport sector (Hero Honda), the healthcare sector (Novartis), the energy sector (Suncast Energy Corp), the education sector (Infosys’s campus connect programme), partnerships are being forged to serve the future market. How can the government lend its not unsubstantial weight to accelerate this process and convert it into a tsunami of rural-based initiatives?
Let me, as a starting point, suggest the identification of a PPP cell in the rural development ministry whose sole aim would be to seek convergence between the interests of the corporate sector, government and people. We urgently need good models of integrated rural development where all such actors come together, with the support of think-tanks and local NGOs, to demonstrate the synergistically exponential development that is possible in rural areas — rural India is just waiting for the recognition and opportunity.