HRD Highlights

HIGHLIGHTS OF HDR MAHARASHTRA - 2002

Every human development report must stir consciences and should further our progress towards a humane society.

Maharashtra indeed has a lot to be proud of, and these aspects have found emphatic mention in the report. Do we rest on our laurels or do we spur ourselves to greater action and glory? To decide on this question, an exercise of this kind has to be constructively critical. This is also to enable us to pause and reflect on achieved progress. It is the moment to measure the 'unintended consequences' and limit their negative impact. It is time for stocktaking followed by midway course correction before designing a new blueprint.

Maharashtra produces less food grains than its requirements. It is endowed with poor quality soil. Only 14.5 per cent of the net sown area of approximately 17.75 million hectares are irrigated. Agriculture is vulnerable to drought and directly affects the lives of the farm labour and small landowners and in many ways, impacts the entire population across the State. This translates to migration to urban areas in times of distress that eventuates to a permanent shift, with unintended consequences. There is further aggravation because of a dominance of a cash crop preference, which guzzle irrigation waters disproportionate to the area under cultivation depriving any scope for equity. The other dimension to this is that water users have been asked to band together, on the strength of successes of voluntary enterprise of the people, to ensure equitable distribution to all legitimate claimants of their share to it. In most irrigation projects, originally set out cropping patterns in the command areas have not been either adhered to or ensured, that could have promoted some equity in distribution.

Apparently, efforts at urbanisation, which is actually the effect of people's movement towards a well ordered, prosperous and egalitarian living cannot be mutually exclusive of attempts to improve the quality of life and choices in the ruralscapes. If not in simultaneous action, it requires to be attended to in tandem.

Maharashtra has the second highest per capita State Domestic Product, among 15 major States but its spatial distribution is uneven. The per capita net SDP was Rs. 20,644, higher by about 40 per cent of the all-India average of Rs. 14,712 in 1998-99. However, a major portion of Maharashtra is poor in terms of income as the distribution of income is skewed with Dhule District being the poorest and having a per capital SDP of Rs. 11,789; in contrast Mumbai districts are the richest with Rs. 45,471, almost four times the level of Dhule. There is also substantial incidence of poverty as measured by cereal consumption and calorie intake. Majority of the rural and urban population is under nourished and this is reflected in turn in their poor health.

The skewed development offers a rich and prismatic insight into why Maharashtra is where it is today. Its growth is urban-centric, has a non-agricultural focus and has had its visible consequences. It is obvious to anyone that this trend has to be reversed, or in the least, the highly undesirable side effects are contained.

The 'instrumental' freedoms to promote human development and the societal arrangements to facilitate the process must be enhanced and strengthened to bring about the desired outcome. The unintended consequences of the outcome is required to be monitored continuously and corrected for which even data bases have to be improved and kept in the public domain for a liberal society to measure the march of the society.

Given the realities on the ground, and societal experience of the way resources, both human and material are deployed and used, several areas need focused attention. They are :

1. Managing water resources better by

Conservation of water for drinking and irrigation.
Optimising water shares to lands, increasing equity in distribution.
Increasing the proportion of irrigation of arable land.

2. Stabilizing income potential from agricultural operation by

Provision of farm inputs to improve productivity of the lands and predictability of incomes
Reducing vulnerability of small farmers/farm labourers
Discouraging migration of unskilled labour to urban areas which do not have the capacity to absorb, and encouraging reverse migration.

3. Empowering women by

Strict enforcement of the legally marriageable age which would, in turn

Improve their health
Give them the time to complete secondary education
Correct female-male ratio
Delay childbearing tasks till they are ready

w Punishing female foeticide
w Avoiding the system of male-proxies for elected women and restore true power to women
w Targeting improvement of women's health to reduce anemia and make possible for children born being healthier

4. Targeting compulsory elementary education for all children by

w Providing school-based nutrition in a workable manner which in turn would

Improve their nutrition status
Simultaneously, ensure attendance and facilitate learning

w Focusing on immunisation and other health related programmes to improve child's health

5. Improving health care by

w Extending further the medicare facilities, especially in the rural areas
w Ensuring such facilities grow in the public domain, with public funding
w Making such facilities more accessible
w Monitoring the delivery capabilities and ethical aspects of the system

6. Enhancing

w Nutritional status of that slice of population which consumes now less than 90 per cent of calorific value per day per head
w Food security by providing improved access for the poorer population to the PDS
w Netting more and more of eligible women and children under ICDS
w Literacy levels, especially preventing lapsing of neo-literate communities into illiteracy

The Maharashtra Human Development Report 2002, has tried to bring out, quantitatively wherever possible, the status of the development of our men, women and children, the extent of the variation and disparity in different aspects of their development and the quality of life they lead.

This Human Development Report would be more than justified if it contributes to appropriately sensitising the option makers and the policy makers to address these issues in a more concentrated and meaningful manner.

PREFACE

Like a lion who looks back with a sense of pride and self-esteem as to how much he has achieved wondering how much remains to be conquered, (Sinhavalokan) we need to sit back and ask ourselves, what have we done all these years that would qualify us to be called a civilized society. Human beings are different and better than the animals in that they are endowed with the power to think, power to reason. That being so, we are expected to cherish and exert ourselves for achievement of values such as equality, liberty and fraternity. Equality in terms of availability of equal opportunity for development and enhancement of quality of one's own life. Development of an individual is intimately linked with social development and vice versa.

This theory was well known to all of us for quite long and all of us have been trying in that direction. But it needs to be done in a more organised way with proper planning and through time-bound programmes. Preparation of human development report is therefore of paramount importance both for knowing exactly where we have reached and for future planning.

World Human Development Report 2000 adds a new dimension to the concept of human development and its evaluation. It lays emphasis on the state of human rights in a particular society to assess its development. It sees an organic relationship between human rights and development. Assessment of human development, if combined with the human rights perspective, can indicate the duties of others in the society to enhance human development in one way or the other. The human rights approach may offer an additional and very useful perspective for the analysis of human development. Human rights have intrinsic value as ends in themselves. They also have instrumental value.

There are causal links between the realization of one right and that of another rights to food, rights to free speech, rights to education and so on. They are all linked with each other and cannot be viewed, achieved and evaluated in isolation. This is precisely what the great Man of Indian Reneassance Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade said a hundred years ago. In his Presidential address to the Social Conference of which he was also the founder at Satara in May 1900, he said, "you cannot have a good social system when you find yourself low in the scale of political rights nor can you be fit to exercise political rights and privileges unless your social system is based on reason and justice. You cannot have a good economic system when your social arrangements are imperfect. If your religious ideas are low and groveling, you cannot succeed in social, economic or political spheres. This inter-dependence is not an accident, but is the law of our nature. Like the members of our body, you cannot have strength in the hands and the feet if your internal organs are in disorder; what applies to the human body holds good of the collective humanity, we call the society or state. It is a mistaken view which divorces considerations, political from social and economic and no man can be said to realise his duty in one aspect who neglects his duties in the other directions."

The world Human Development Report 2001 has brought out another very important fact to our notice. It says, "The link between economic prosperity and human development is neither automatic nor obvious. Two countries with similar income can have very different HDI values; countries with similar HDI values can have very different incomes." This underlines the need to view development as on overall development of human society.

HRDs by UNDP have emerged as the principal advocacy platform for sustainable human development. The need however, is to translate advocacy into action plans. It is therefore the process and change in mindsets that is critical for successful action based on the State HRD. Change in mindsets of policy makers and of those who are entrusted with the all-important responsibility of implementing the policies. Good economics has become imperative for good politics in the new global context, as also on the basis of our own past experiences in development planning.

Maharashtra is widely acclaimed as a progressive and developed state. The progress that the state has achieved in different sectors since its inception on 1st May 1960 is laudable. However, much remains to be achieved. Government will have to play a proactive role in social investments such as drinking water, health, education, employment generation etc. Such investments would be expected to ensure that all sections of society benefit equally from the growth of economy. A host of policy initiatives have been taken and efforts are being made to redress regional inequalities as well as the backwardness of specific areas. However, there has to be a frame work of analysis for determining the impact of such policies aimed at redressing inequalities and their implications for the key indicators of social development. It is in this perspective that a State Human Development Report acquires considerable significance as an important policy tool for leveraging greater resources and focussing attention on areas critical to an overall social development.

With valuable assistance from the planning Commisison and under guidance of UNDP, we have been able to come out with a comprehensive status-report-cum-policy document which would enable us to herald a new ear of overall human development in the State.

Dr. Ratnakar Mahajan,

Executive Chairman,

State Planning Board,

Maharashtra.

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