Number Fetish: Middle-class India's Obsession with the GDP

Abstract

India has been fixated on the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This number averaged about 3.5% per annum from independence to the early 1980s, leaped to twice that in recent decades before falling off in the last five years to about 5% per annum. The GDP emerged at a specific moment in the evolution of capitalism and was never intended to be a measure of the quality of life of people. Gross Domestic Product discussions reveal a desperate desire on the part of many in India to be seen as having arrived into the first world. In a context marked by the paradox of electoral democracy alongside mass poverty and rising inequality, focusing on the GDP legitimizes an unjust social order. The GDP number seeks to transform politics in a technical and asocial direction, and the obsession with it powerfully undergirds the hegemony of a neoliberal vision of India.

Keywords:

• India
• GDP
• neoliberalism
• BRICs
• middle class
• globalization

Acknowledgements

Jairus Grove, Jyotirmaya Sharma, and Srirupa Roy provided invaluable support and encouragement in the writing of this essay. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 More generally, just the titles of a spate of recent works indicate the ubiquity and still-ongoing nature of efforts to cohere India as a representational unity, to render it into a picture: ‘The idea of India' (Khilnani, 1999); ‘Imagining India' (Nilekani, 2008); ‘The India Model' (Das, 2006); ‘Reinventing India' (Corbridge & Harriss, 2000); ‘India: a portrait' (French, 2011); ‘India Becoming' (Kapur, 2012), ‘India: A Sacred Geography' (Eck, 2012), ‘Mapping India' (Lahiri, 2012), ‘India 2020: a vision for the new millennium' (Kalam & Rajan, 2003), ‘India: the emerging giant' (Panagariya, 2010), ‘India's Emerging Economy' (Basu, 2004), ‘India: Emerging Power' (Cohen, 2001), and ‘India Arriving' (Dossani, 2008).

2 O'Neill, quoted in James Pressley, O'Neill sees rosy BRIC future even as China, India slow. Daily News and Analysis, December 28, 2011: http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_oneill-sees-rosy-bric-future-even-as-china-india-slow_1630735 - accessed on September 21, 2015. Pressley (2011).

3 See full text of Ahluwalia's speech at this forum delivered in Tokyo on May 25, 2005, at: http://newasiaforum.org/future_of_asia_MSAhluwalia.html. Ahluwalia (2005a). Last accessed on September 21, 2015.

4 See full text of his speech delivered on April 20, 2005, at http://planningcommission.nic.in/hindi/aboutus/speech/spemsa/msa035.pdf. Ahluwalia (2005b). Last accessed on September 21, 2015.

5 See PM Manmohan Singh's speech to the McKinsey Corporation in New Delhi, on October 23, 2007, accessible at: http://archivepmo.nic.in/drmanmohansingh/speech-details.php?nodeid=581 (Singh, 2007); and PM's speech to the India Economic summit, Nov 29, 2005, New Delhi, accessible at http://archivepmo.nic.in/drmanmohansingh/speech-details.php?nodeid=224 (Singh, 2005). Both last accessed on September 21, 2015.

6 Speech by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on ‘India's Economic Reforms: Recent Changes and Future Challenges' at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 24, 2006. Accessible at : https://www.indianembassy.org/archives_details.php?nid=636. Chidambaram (2006). Last accessed on September 21, 2015.

7 Within a few years the purpose of the Report was served as far as Goldman Sachs was concerned and it has already begun to move on. In the decade spanning 2002–12, from an insignificant base, BRIC funds invested $70 billion into equity markets in the region. In a six-year span between 2001 and 2007, stock values doubled in China, and increased by 370% in Brazil and 500% in India. By the end of the decade, however, nearly all these economies were in varying degrees of slowdowns. Stock market values hit a three-year low, and GDP growth rates stalled in Russia and Brazil, slowed down in India, and declined a bit in China.

8 See Roy (2010) and Karim (2011) for excellent, critical introductions to microfinance and the way in which it has swept through developmental discourse in the era of neoliberalism as a panacea of third world poverty.

9 Kuznets quoted in Hamilton (1998, p. 25). For a thorough critique of the way the GDP measure has come to be misused and a comprehensive history of its emergence, see Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi (2010).

10 We get a good sense of why this is the case through this example: In 1991, Tata Steel in Jamshedpur produced 1 million tonnes of steel worth $0.8 million while employing 85,000 workers. By 2005, the same factory had slashed its workforce down to 44,000 but was now producing 5 million tonnes of steel worth $5 million. In a society with nearly full employment, increments in productivity mean greater growth, profits, and rising wages; in one with a large degree of un- and underemployment, it means jobless growth. See Bhaduri (2008) for details.

11 Data from the main website of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) India: http://nasscom.org/indian-itbpo-industry.

12 Financial Times, ‘Demographics: Indian workers are not ready to seize the baton’, September 13, 2010. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/573033de-bec6-11df-a755-00144feab49a.html#axzz2DVLY20v1. Last accessed on September 21, 2015.

13 See Mackenzie (2006) for an insightful discussion on this matter. Also, on the role of narrative in economic discourse, see McCloskey (1984).

14 A recent essay that explores this relationship of the Indian middle class to the rest of society with acuity is Bhatt, Murty, and Ramamurthy (2010).

15 Considerations of space preempt elaboration here, but see Krishna (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sankaran Krishna

Notes on contributor

Sankaran Krishna teaches political science at the University of Hawaìi at Manoa, and works in the areas of political economy, South Asian studies, and postcolonial theory.