By Harsh Mander
Harsh Mander is a writer and social activist, and founder and Director of the Centre for Equity Studies (CES), New Delhi. He was the former Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court, in the Right to Food case. Email: manderharsh@gmail.com
India Exclusion Report 2013–14 seeks to track and map the extent to which central and state governments in India have succeeded in ensuring access to a range of basic public goods for all people. A widely collaborative effort, the re-port relies on a range of evidence from many different sources to understand which classes, categories and groups of people are excluded from these public goods; the processes, laws, policies and institutions through which such exclu-sion is accomplished; the consequences of this exclusion on the people who are left out; and recommendations for public action, policies, laws and institu-tional reforms that are required to address, prevent and reverse such exclu-sion, and promote a more adequate, equitable and better quality provisioning of public goods.
At the very start, it would be useful to reflect brie y on the key concepts and terms, namely, public goods, exclusion and role of the state, as interpreted and presented in the India Exclusion Report 2013–14. This discussion around the conceptual framework of the report also provides the rationale for why it is fo-cussed on exclusion by the state and not on exclusion by societal processes pe-riod.
This report defines a public good to be a good, service, attainment, capability or freedom — individual or collective — that is essential for every human being to be able to live a life of dignity. The basic assumption of the report is that it is the duty of accountable state action to ensure that all persons are enabled to live such a life of essential human dignity and worth.
This understanding of a public good departs in many ways from the definitions of the term in liberal economic theory, and Keynesian, neo-classical and welfare economics he term was first proposed by Adam Smith in 1776. He re-ferred to goods ‘which though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society are, however, of such a nature that the profits could never replay the expenses to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect.’1 He concluded that the government must provide these goods as the market would fail to. Our understanding of public goods is also located within the conviction of the central role of the state in ensuring equitable and just provision to all persons. But as we shall observe presently, the state does not in all cases have to directly provision every public good.