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Southerners feel penalised for progress as the political agenda is set by the north
The first time I visited Hyderabad in the mid-1990s, it was a sleepy south Indian city of Indo-Islamic monuments, dilapidated colonial-era buildings and big trees. But Chandrababu Naidu, the then chief minister, had a vision of transforming it into a global tech hub — a Silicon Valley outpost, powered by low-cost Indian programmers.
As a proof of concept, his government had built a cylindrical office complex on the city’s desolate outskirts. Inside the mostly empty Cyber Towers, I met a Silicon Valley-returned techie, who had set up shop with a dozen local programmers to do jobs for his erstwhile US employer. Gushing over Hyderabad’s tech potential, he insisted other California-based Indians wanted to come home too. “Good luck,” I thought as I left, stepping over the exposed cables.
But Mr Naidu’s dream did come true. Today, Cyber Towers is dwarfed by the vast campuses of global companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and Indian groups such as Wipro and Infosys. Hyderabad is a confident, modern boomtown that feels more akin to a prosperous south-east Asian metropolis than its down-at-heel north Indian counterparts. Hyderabad’s transformation reflects the rising prosperity of India’s progressive and dynamic southern states, and their widening socio-economic divergence from the more backward and impoverished north.
Decades of successful family planning, a focus on education — including for girls — and better governance gave southern states a strong foundation on which to build on opportunities unleashed by India’s economic liberalisation since 1991. Today, southern states’ fertility rates are below replacement levels, indicators on health and education are on a par with upper middle-income countries and poverty has fallen sharply. In the north, meanwhile, women still have an average of three or four children, and fare poorly on most gauges of wellbeing. Despite the south’s rapid progress, India’s national political agenda still tends to be set by the more populous north — the conservative, Hindi-speaking region often called the “cow belt”.
That is now provoking southern discomfort. “There is a feeling of being disempowered and colonised,” a Hyderabad-based academic told me on a recent visit. “There is a deep feeling of resentment that we are not part of the process.” These fissures are being laid bare in a fierce debate over the allocation of public resources to states, in a once-in-every-five years budgeting exercise. They are likely to intensify over the next decade when India redraws its parliamentary map. For decades, New Delhi has allocated funds and parliament seats based on states’ population data from the 1971 census, before the mixed results of its family planning drive sent them on radically different demographic trajectories.
But Narendra Modi’s government, whose core support lies in the Hindi heartland, has decided the 2011 census should be used as the basis for resource allocation over the next five years. This process and parliamentary redistricting due by 2026 are likely to see affluent southern states lose out financially and politically, due to their diminishing demographic weight after years of promoting small families. Money and parliamentary seats will be diverted to the more populous north. Southerners are up in arms.
“This is something being done by the northerners for the northerners,” says Krishnamurthy Subramanian, a finance professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “There is a sense of unfairness. Why are we being penalised for doing good things?” He adds: “Northern states will end up benefiting from their profligacy.”
Tension over resource transfers — both within and between nations — are a growing cause of global friction. They have an extra edge in India, where a population as ethnically and linguistically diverse as Europe’s coexists in a single state. India’s north undoubtedly faces severe challenges. But if redistribution is not perceived as fair, it may unleash dangerous resentment. And tackling northern India’s problems will take more than money. There are lessons to be learnt from Hyderabad’s success: if you lay a strong foundation, investors and prosperity will come. amy.kazmin@ft.com Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/cd5efba4-6d9f-11e8-852d-d8b934ff5ffa
The first time I visited Hyderabad in the mid-1990s, it was a sleepy south Indian city of Indo-Islamic monuments, dilapidated colonial-era buildings and big trees. But Chandrababu Naidu, the then chief minister, had a vision of transforming it into a global tech hub — a Silicon Valley outpost, powered by low-cost Indian programmers.
As a proof of concept, his government had built a cylindrical office complex on the city’s desolate outskirts. Inside the mostly empty Cyber Towers, I met a Silicon Valley-returned techie, who had set up shop with a dozen local programmers to do jobs for his erstwhile US employer. Gushing over Hyderabad’s tech potential, he insisted other California-based Indians wanted to come home too. “Good luck,” I thought as I left, stepping over the exposed cables.
But Mr Naidu’s dream did come true. Today, Cyber Towers is dwarfed by the vast campuses of global companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and Indian groups such as Wipro and Infosys. Hyderabad is a confident, modern boomtown that feels more akin to a prosperous south-east Asian metropolis than its down-at-heel north Indian counterparts. Hyderabad’s transformation reflects the rising prosperity of India’s progressive and dynamic southern states, and their widening socio-economic divergence from the more backward and impoverished north.
Decades of successful family planning, a focus on education — including for girls — and better governance gave southern states a strong foundation on which to build on opportunities unleashed by India’s economic liberalisation since 1991. Today, southern states’ fertility rates are below replacement levels, indicators on health and education are on a par with upper middle-income countries and poverty has fallen sharply. In the north, meanwhile, women still have an average of three or four children, and fare poorly on most gauges of wellbeing. Despite the south’s rapid progress, India’s national political agenda still tends to be set by the more populous north — the conservative, Hindi-speaking region often called the “cow belt”.
That is now provoking southern discomfort. “There is a feeling of being disempowered and colonised,” a Hyderabad-based academic told me on a recent visit. “There is a deep feeling of resentment that we are not part of the process.” These fissures are being laid bare in a fierce debate over the allocation of public resources to states, in a once-in-every-five years budgeting exercise. They are likely to intensify over the next decade when India redraws its parliamentary map. For decades, New Delhi has allocated funds and parliament seats based on states’ population data from the 1971 census, before the mixed results of its family planning drive sent them on radically different demographic trajectories.
But Narendra Modi’s government, whose core support lies in the Hindi heartland, has decided the 2011 census should be used as the basis for resource allocation over the next five years. This process and parliamentary redistricting due by 2026 are likely to see affluent southern states lose out financially and politically, due to their diminishing demographic weight after years of promoting small families. Money and parliamentary seats will be diverted to the more populous north. Southerners are up in arms.
“This is something being done by the northerners for the northerners,” says Krishnamurthy Subramanian, a finance professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “There is a sense of unfairness. Why are we being penalised for doing good things?” He adds: “Northern states will end up benefiting from their profligacy.”
Tension over resource transfers — both within and between nations — are a growing cause of global friction. They have an extra edge in India, where a population as ethnically and linguistically diverse as Europe’s coexists in a single state. India’s north undoubtedly faces severe challenges. But if redistribution is not perceived as fair, it may unleash dangerous resentment. And tackling northern India’s problems will take more than money. There are lessons to be learnt from Hyderabad’s success: if you lay a strong foundation, investors and prosperity will come. amy.kazmin@ft.com Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/cd5efba4-6d9f-11e8-852d-d8b934ff5ffa
