El equilibrio entre la vida personal y profesional

The encouraging development of household savings, which made up 75 per cent of all domestic savings in 1984–5 and 82 per cent in 1989–90, is presumably due to an imbalance in income distribution.

If income distribution had been more equitable, the poor would have Figure 13.1: Net national product per capita 1970–1 prices

Source: U.Datta Roychaudhuri and M.Mukherjee, cf. Bibliography, Section 12.2.

POPULATION GROWTH AND NATIONAL INCOME

180

consumed more food and others would not have been able to save more money. If we look at Table 13.2 we see that the Indian pattern of income distribution closely parallels that of the United States, whereas Japan and Germany are less top-heavy. Pakistan and Sri Lanka, however, show an even more inequitable distribution of income than India. Poor Bangladesh on the other hand is closer to the German pattern, but this shows that this type of comparison has its limitations. In Bangladesh it is poverty and in Germany it is wealth which is more evenly distributed. This would also apply to the comparison between India and the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that income distribution is highly skewed in India is of great significance to the issue discussed here.

The rural poor in India have been subjected to a regime of forced saving (that is, to a shortage of means available for buying more food). The contribution of the primary sector to total domestic production has declined from about 60 per cent to 34 per cent from 1950 to 1990, whereas the majority of the Indian workforce (about 75 per cent) still remains tied to that sector. This implies that the rural poor probably have not seen much of the increase of national income. Accurate information on income distribution is difficult to obtain. The experts have to rely on the data on consumer expenditure collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation in this respect. Data for rural India arranged in decile groups have shown that the highest decile group has slightly reduced its share of total household consumer expenditure from 1953–4 to 1973–4 from 26.6 to 23.3 per cent, whereas the lowest five decile groups taken together have edged up from 27.6 to 31.5 per cent. The intermediate Table 13.2: India in international comparison: income distribution

Source: World Bank, World Development Report (1991) (data for the years 1979–85).

POPULATION GROWTH AND NATIONAL INCOME

181 four decile groups have more or less retained their shares of 9, 10, 12 and 15 per cent respectively. The decrease in consumer expenditure of the rural rich does not imply a decrease in their income; it most probably indicates a higher rate of saving.

The pattern of distribution of urban consumer expenditure is roughly similar to that of the rural sector, but whereas the rural and me urban sector look very much alike in relative terms in this respect, they do, of course, differ markedly with regard to the absolute figures of income and expenditure. The urban workforce is still rather small when compared to the rural one, but its productivity is much higher. The number of those who work in the public and private sectors in fields other than agriculture has unfortunately not increased very much in recent years. From 1971 to 1980, their number only rose from 16.5 million to 21.6 million. The lion’s share of these additional 5 million jobs was created by the public sector (4.5 million). By 1980, this sector employed twice as many people as the private one. In this period, the public sector has enlarged its share of the gross domestic product from 15 to 20 per cent and increased its staff from 11 million to 15.5 million (that is, by 40 per cent). During the 1980s the increase in the number of workers actually slowed down. People employed in the public and private sectors in fields other than agriculture actually increased only by about 2 million from 1980 to 1989.

In the fields of industry, construction and energy, which together generated about 21 per cent of the net domestic product in the period from 1971 to 1980, there were a total of 6.2 million workers in 1971 and 7.7 million in 1980. In these fields the private sector was still dominant, but it expanded much less than the public one. In 1971, the private sector employed 66 per cent of the total workforce in these fields; by 1980, its share had declined to 58 per cent. By 1989 this share had declined further to 53 per cent. By now 3.9 million workers in the public sector and 4.4 million in the private sector worked in the fields mentioned above. Thus the era of liberalisation was by no means associated with a large increase of employment in the private sector. The encouraging rate of industrial growth in the 1980s was due to increasing productivity rather than to the expansion of employment.

In order to demonstrate the great difference between the rural and the urban industrial sector in terms of productivity and output per worker, we shall attempt here a very simple calculation. In 1980, the net domestic product at current prices amounted to 1,000 billion rupees. The contribution of 21 per cent of industry, construction and

POPULATION GROWTH AND NATIONAL INCOME

182

energy, mentioned above, thus amounted to 210 billion rupees. If we divide this amount by the number of workers—7.7 million—we arrive at a product per worker of Rs 27,000. This high rate of productivity is achieved only by this particular workforce. If we wish to assess the average product per worker in the large public sector, whose share of the net domestic product amounted to 210 billion rupees too, but which had a total workforce of 15.5 million, we would get only 13,500 rupees. (The public-sector workforce includes all government servants, the army, the railway staff, as well as workers in public-sector industries.) How about the annual product of the peasant or agricultural worker? In order to find out about that we have to arrive at an estimate of the comparable workforce. We should limit this estimate to male workers between the ages of 18 and 58 year. Taking the total number of males between those ages and deducting 20 per cent living in urban areas, we are left with 137 million men. If we deduct from that figure about 25 per cent engaged in rural trades (merchants, moneylenders, carters, artisans) that are not agricultural in the strict sense of the term, we are left with about 100 million peasants and agricultural labourers. The share of the primary sector in the net domestic product amounts to 420 billion rupees; let us deduct one-sixth from this in order to account for primary activities other than agriculture (mining, fishing, forestry, etc.), and we get 350 billion rupees as the total value of the agricultural production for 1980. This is composed of about 120 billion rupees for food grains, 46 billion for oilseeds and pulses, 40 billion for cotton, 40 billion for sugar cane, 20 billion for jute and about 90 billion for animal husbandry, etc. If we divide the total amount of 350 billion by the number of workers—100 million—we arrive at an annual product per agricultural worker of Rs 3,500. This means that the industrial worker is almost eight times more productive than the agricultural one, and even the average worker in the public sector is nearly four times as productive as the peasant. This is due to the different endowment of urban and rural places of work with the factors of production. With few exceptions, the amount of capital in agriculture is negligible and land is scarce.

The total cultivated area of India amounts to c. 150 million hectares;

if this is divided by the number of workers mentioned above, it would mean that there are about 1.5 hectares (c. 3 acres) per male agricultural worker. The relatively low yields still prevailing in India imply that not much can be produced on such a plot of land (for example, about 2.5 tons of wheat, or 2 tons of rice or 1 ton of millet).

This simple calculation has shown that it should be a top priority to

POPULATION GROWTH AND NATIONAL INCOME

183 move a large part of the workforce from agriculture to various types of industries. These do not necessarily have to be located in urban areas, but at present they still are and thus the rate of urbanisation would reflect the extent to which the workforce is transferred in this way. The relatively modest rate of urbanisation shows that such transfer is not taking place at a significant rate as yet.

184

14