Citizen: Our Protagonist for the Middle

Shashank Mani’s Middle of Diamond India: National Renaissance through Participation and Enterprise (Penguin Viking) reveals the hidden stories of those in the Middle, that is those in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities, who have been overlooked owing to their location and language. Book excerpt – Pg 202-206 The village square balances the tower Niall Ferguson explains a perennial societal dynamic in his book The Square and the Tower as the contrast between the village square, where citizens such as Barrister, Ganga Singh and Priti reside, and the tower, from which the ruler keeps control. In a networked world, the traditional power of the tower is being eroded as the square is energized by citizens and their association. For many decades after our independence, we were dominated by the tower. Through the vote, the citizen could change governments and caste politics created social upliftment for the marginalised. Now that the Middle has critical mass, a new phase is possible where the aspirational common citizen in the smaller towns and districts, able, motivated and networked, can accelerate development to add to the political benefits of democracy. The Square in the Middle will add to our republican energies and bring the nation to life. The tower will continue to play an important role as a regulator and arbitrator in society. But with 800 million citizens gathering in the ‘Middle Square’, the country needs a new dynamic and building role involving the citizen, with increased opportunities to associate. The size, complexity, use of technology and modernization of the Middle Square is asking for a new horizontal relationship among citizens. This will supplement existing vertical relationships with government. The Tower must remain and in some cases should be strengthened, but it should not overshadow the Square. In this imagination, the government would cater to the Bottom of the Diamond directly, not a trivial number at 250 million citizens, who remain poor and require direct support. Citizens in the Middle, on the other hand, must be given enabling platforms to associate and build. Instead of using the state to serve the vast majority in the Middle, we need to reimagine development by enabling citizens, a goal our founders believed in. This does not require copying the West in welfarism or changing the Constitution; it can be achieved by recognizing the importance of the Square in our republic and recasting government as an enabling watchtower. Our current approach for serving the citizen imitates the method adopted by the UK, France and Germany, who designed the state to work in welfare mode after the Second World War. The UK, France and Germany increased their spending on welfare services by increasing government spend from 10 per cent of national income to 40–50 per cent of national income between the 1950s and the 1980s. At 10 per cent of national income, the government was primarily focused on the ‘regalian’ functions of police, courts, army, foreign affairs, general administration, etc. The state expanded considerably after the Second World War. Anxious about post-war recovery, it increased its spend, which added 30–40 per cent of GDP as government spend over three decades. This increase was split into two broad buckets—providing health, education and other services and replacement and transfer payments to the needy. The spend of the state stabilized at the 40–50 per cent of GDP range in the 1980s even though in the UK, the Thatcher regime and in the US, the Reagan administration sought to lower it. Today, in India, the government spends on average 15–20 per cent of GDP, combining Central and state spending. This takes care of both the ‘regalian’ functions as well as welfare activities. India must plan an increase in this spend as it increases its tax base. However, instead of creating a bloated welfare state, it can use its republican energies to keep government spend limited to the 25 per cent range. It must invest in improving the core functions, with higher spending in state institutions, and allocate higher amounts for a safety net for the 250 million citizens at the Bottom. In the Middle, it should rely on citizens to provide services while regulating these activities better to unleash greater civic action. This service, regulated better by a stronger state, will not be from a centralized top-down entity but will be local, contextual and therefore more effective and efficient, also generating local employment. Instead of implementing policies and spending money mechanically, it will seek citizens’ participation by easing their path and providing behavioural nudges.10 India still has an opportunity to avoid the path Europe took, creating a bureaucratized state that smothers societal action. It should also not go down the laissez-faire route of the US, where big business at the Top, the 1 per cent, dominates the economy. This will further exacerbate economic disparities in the largest democracy in the world, which is unsustainable. The state must take a middle path by improving its core functions and building capabilities to enable enterprise and economy in the Middle, where the majority lives, so that societal action is used locally and with greater efficiency. The police, army, administration, judiciary and foreign affairs are functions ready for an inter-generational overhaul at the seventy-fifth anniversary mark. These capabilities will strengthen what some call the ‘Power On’ approach to ensure that social strife, national calamities, regulatory functions and national defence can be managed well. This will take up bandwidth, energies and investments from the government. The second capability that the state should build will enable citizens to experience a different type of state power described as ‘Power To’, which will give flow to the republic and support ‘positive freedoms’, especially in the Middle. A smaller but stronger state with an enabling function for powering 800 million citizens in the Middle, including provision of local service through enterprise, will keep our fiscal burden low and the services localized and effective. This can happen only if the government actively brings people together. Over seventy-five years, our democracy has classified citizens through the process of voting every five years. We can use this knowledge to bring together citizens on a continuous basis in the act of building. A first step has been taken through JAM, but this still serves as a conduit of digital service from government to people, albeit an efficient and safer one. The requirement is for a stronger association that enables collaboration ‘between citizens’, aided by technology and platforms, a topic covered later in Chapter 11. This must start by changing our mental framework towards citizens, labelling them as creators who come together to build, rather than mere voters who vote a government into power. Advances in technology, connectivity, attitudes and a can-do spirit in our Middle will allow this model to succeed. This change in narrative would require courage from citizens, civil society, the private sector and government leaders and a departure from unilateral welfarism, which has created a complex and inefficient state in Europe but is still seen as a key goal of governance. In the Middle, the government should ‘shift from offering solutions driven by the national bureaucracy to incentivizing, enabling, and inspiring experimentation and innovation from the local and individual upward’. The Swachh Bharat Mission is an example of such a partnership and an example of Power To, where the government played the role of a convener and enabler and the citizen participated actively. Open defecation is an issue that could only be solved through large-scale citizen participation. Various civil society organizations, including Yatri alumni, were mustered to build capacity, and largescale communication was used to create awareness, which has been elaborated in Chapter 13. While this programme was a national initiative, it was largely powered by local citizens at the district, mandal and village level. Extracted with permission from the author and the publisher Penguin Random House India. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. 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