ARE WE CHASING THE WRONG KIND OF GDP?

By Ruma Dubey

Tomorrow is GDP day. It is the day when we will once again announce to the world that we are the fastest growing economy on earth while China nurses its growth pangs. It is a day of great rah-rah and back thumping. But seriously, are we “growing?”

Every open space around you is disappearing faster than you can blink your eyes and a residential tower or commercial building “with ample parking space” comes up. Planting trees and providing more gardens is simply not done as we are growing and we need more and more space to “grow.” Education is getting costlier, malls have replaced all outdoor activities, mindless buying has become the favourite time-pass. We make roads, again break it and rebuild it; redevelopment is happening all around us – another sign of growth. Breaking down old infrastructure is growth and not spending money on preserving or nurturing them to exhibit our past heritage. People can remain healthy as long as they join gyms and spend tonnes of money on well-being but inherently healthy people are not wanted as it means less business to doctors, hospitals and the entire paraphernalia which comes up around this healthcare industry. War and civil unrest are great business opportunities and so is crime as they together generate billions of dollars’ worth business for making weapons, build secure systems. Increased border tension means more weapons, more money for defence spending. India is today the largest importer of weapons in the world – a tag which goes along with fastest growing economy in world?

While we go on talking and writing about growth, have we stopped once to wonder what exactly is this “growth” that we are talking about? Let’s look at this from a very simplistic view point – the one thing which immediately comes to mind is increase in wealth. And when we dig deeper, we think of growth in terms of improvement in quality of life, better education, better health, good food and care. When all these get better than what it was before is what we call growth. But all these – education, food, care, generate costs. When we deduct the cost we pay with the growth we have got, we get value. Thus growth is all about value and less about costs, right?

But what we are seeing as growth today is all about costs. We can get better education, healthcare, better homes, better quality of life but all come at a very high cost – much more than the value it generates. It means what we pay for and what we getting is imbalanced. Like you get good houses in Mumbai but do you get value – the potholed roads, the sloth and grim, the traffic jams, the poor quality of construction, leaking roofs, all these bring down the value; so you have grown but not really getting value for the money you are spending.

What we really need is an economy which promotes well-being where natural resources are preserved, humans are not exploited; basically a healthy social and natural environment. This sounds almost Utopian and too idealistic for a country which is leading growth. But like Bhutan, though much smaller than us, can’t we achieve growth while preserving the environment and not constantly trading it off for development? If India is having its “acche din” why has our ranking on the Happiness Index fallen? Because we pay heed only to inflation, IIP, capital goods, market indices; we have paid no heed to simple parameters like mutual trust, willingness to pay taxes, speed at which are ready to give up honesty to corruption, examine our social safety nets. Nowadays, do we even talk about these things?

So as we get ready for the GDP tomorrow, let us also mentally measure whether we have grown in the real sense. For an individual, happiness does not come from a good job, higher education, wealth, marriage, children; it comes from a strong inner self, with the ability to confront and conquer one’s own weaknesses. Ditto for a nation – we need to get stronger from within, pursuing GDP alone is like chasing a butterfly in a field of orchids.