THE MADHYA PRADESH HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2002 USING THE POWER OF DEMOCRACY FOR DEVELOPMENT i “The service of India ..... means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity” Jawaharlal Nehru defining the challenge of a newly independent India, 1947 They are only exhausted Who think they are They are only exhausted who no longer Have a reason to strive And dream and hope Those who are exhausted have lost The greater picture, The greater perspective. They are trapped in their own labyrinth, Their lovelessness, selfishness, I hear them talk about the end Of history. BEN OKRI But for those of us who haven’t yet tasted Mental Fight: An anti-spell for The best fruits of time yet, the twenty-first century To whom history has been harsh, We think differently. We know that history is all there to be made in the future. Is time exhausted? No, time is yet young, There is no exhaustion where there is much And has timeless millennia ahead, To be hoped for, much to work towards, Way beyond our furthest dreams And where the dreams and sufferings Of our ancestors Is nature exhausted? Have not been realised, Ask the oak-trees, the hollies, Or redeemed. The flowers, birds, fishes, and lions. They will continue for as long But when you can no longer dream As the earth allows them. No longer see possibilities No longer see alternatives; Is humanity exhausted? When you see only limitation Individuals are, nations are, Only despair, and negation, Some civilisations are becoming so; Then you are in the way But humanity isn’t. You are also the problem The exhausted obstruct The hungry nations are hungry still. The creation of a greater future. The starving people dream of food. The unfree fight for freedom The exhausted should therefore clear The oppressed plan for liberation. The stage for new dreamers- The small scheme for might. For warriors of love, justice The invisible prepare for higher visibility. And enlightenment ii Foreword his is the Third Human Development Report of Human Development Report was certainly inspired of Madhya Pradesh. While introducing the by the pioneering work of UNDP under the leadership Ttwo earlier reports we have mentioned the of late Mahbub-ul-Haq, our Reports have been home reasons that prompted us to prepare Human grown efforts, undertaken entirely on our own voli- Development Reports. The first Report in 1995 was, tion and with our own funds, people and limitations. like we mentioned, a report on our failures, on what We have felt that this ownership is important so that remained to be done. In that sense it benchmarked the Reports lead to action. our status on human development indicators and I must acknowledge here Dr. Manmohan Singh shared concern and urgency. Looking back, the Report who encouraged us to continue on this path when we served its purpose. It served to mobilise public broke new ground with the first sub-national Human opinion towards the new agenda we had adopted of Development Report which he released in 1995. Our according the highest priority to human development first Report led to UNDP organising a national goals, working on some of them as Missions and seminar at Bhopal coordinated by Professor Richard working on them through a model of collective action Jolly to persuade other state governments to prepare made possible by Panchayat Raj. similar reports. We take some pride in the fact that the Our second Report in 1998 acknowledged that idea did indeed spread and several state governments governments do not have the luxury of merely have since produced similar state-level Human documenting status in human development but Development Reports. The Government of India has instead are voted to office to make change in the also produced a national HDR in 2001. human development situation. It could not be a Professor Amartya Sen whose writing has been an passive record of statistics and comparative profiling. inspiration for our work released our Second Human Therefore we reported on our efforts or the road Development Report. We had made a commitment to covered and focussed as much on agency as on tasks. him on that occasion that by the time our third Report Both Reports had one limitation in that often we is due, we would have universalised access to elemen- were forced to rely on statistics of Census 1991, which tary education. We are happy to report that we univer- by the time of the second Report of 1998 was indeed salised access to primary education in 1998 and have outdated. This Third Report has the advantage that at almost universalised access to elementary education. least some of the results of Census 2001 have been To ensure quality, we have become the first state in made public. This in fact prompted us to postpone our India to enact a People’s Education Act which seeks Report to 2002 instead of 2001 which ought to have to create a legal safeguard for quality. Quality for been our deadline to keep to our three-year frequency. elementary education would no more remain an issue It must be stated here that while the preparation that agitates only the academic but a user issue that iii FOREWORD involves learners, parents, local bodies, elected context. Human development goals cannot be pursued representatives at several levels, state legislature, in isolation of these larger factors which sub-national teachers and academic institutions. We have legally governments are today unable to influence. ensured the preparation and publication of Public In this Report we also present the need to develop Education Reports and their submission to the State indicators of measurement that are relevant to our legislature each year. context. To the professionals guiding the development We are aware that in the area of health we need to of HDI and related indices, we would like to suggest strengthen our efforts. We feel that here too the answer that disparities in India have not merely a class or too lies in decentralisation to the district and below gender dimension but also a caste/ tribe dimension. It district levels for management. We must also build is time we develop in India, like the UNDP did the health action from below by mobilising the local Gender Development Index in 1995, a Scheduled community. Management of health institutions must Tribe- Scheduled Caste Development Index to capture be brought under community control. We have made the inequality in opportunities to human develop- some significant beginnings in the area of decentralisa- ment faced by the people belonging to the scheduled tion through our Mission for Community Health and castes and scheduled tribes in India. for management of hospitals through Rogi Kalyan A Human Development Report produced in India Samitis. cannot be indifferent to the stratification on the basis Livelihood security for the poor is our most of caste and the glass ceilings that exist even with our important challenge. We have been trying to address commitment to equality before law and programmes this issue through a variety of programmes for for affirmative action. Similarly the growing alienation creating entitlements and enhancing opportunities. of tribal communities on account of the statisation of We feel that resources under programmes of the their resource base of forests and minerals has a Government of India especially in the areas of negative impact on reducing human poverty of these anti-poverty programmes and food subsidies must be groups. This can be resolved through imaginative better targeted to vulnerable areas and vulnerable policies at the national level that combine the sections of our people. Macro economic policy must objectives of natural resources conservation and focus on employment creation as a clear objective in development. Policies that build on such arguments itself. can be initiated or reinforced through the creation of This Third Human Development Report registers a Scheduled Tribe — Scheduled Caste Development the progress we have made on the human development Index. This will be the effort in our next Report. agenda. Here again we report on action and how we have sought to use the power of democracy for devel- opment. We also present some of the constraints faced Digvijay Singh by the states like Madhya Pradesh in realising a human Chief Minister, Madhya Pradesh development vision in the current macro-economic 1 November 2002 iv Madhya Pradesh Morena Bhind Gwalior Sheopur Datia Shivpuri Chhatarpur Tikamgarh Guna Satna Panna Rewa Nimach Sidhi Mandsaur Sagar Rajgarh Katni Vidisha Damoh Umaria Ratlam Shajapur Bhopal Ujjain Jabalpur Shahdol Raisen Sehore Narsimhapur Dewas Jhabua Indore Dindori Dhar Hoshangabad Mandla Harda Chhindwara Seoni Betul Barwani Khargaon Balaghat Khandwa v Acknowledgements he Madhya Pradesh Human Development report has been prepared by a team comprising of Shri Dilip Raj Advisory Group TSingh Chaudhary, and Shri R. Gopalakrishnan from the Government of Madhya Pradesh, and personnel of ‘Sanket’,an Dr Vijas S Vyas, Prof. Suresh Tendulkar, Dr Vinod Vyasalu, independent multi-disciplinary research group based in New Dr NJ Kurien, Dr K Seetha Prabhu, Dr R Sudershan, Dr Rajan Delhi, Raipur and Bhopal. The ‘Sanket’ Project Team Katoch, Dr Ravi Narayan, Mr Sanjay Kaul, Dr R Govinda, consisted of Sandeep Dikshit, Puja Gour, Madhura Mr Ram Sharan Joshi, Ms Anjali Noronha, Shri P Sainath and Chaphekar, Manish Shankar, Sanjay Shrivastava, and Sweta Dr Suraj Kumar. Verma assisted by Maheen Mirza, Monika Banerjie and Dinesh Sinha. Management assistance to the project was given by Shri Sultan Ahmad of the Directorate of Institutional Finance. The third Madhya Pradesh Human Development Report has benefited from many individuals and institutions. Members of the Empowered Committee of the State Government, chaired by the Chief Secretary Shri A V Singh encouraged academic freedom for the report.