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
This is the second edition of the India Exclusion Report, for the year 2015. As with the first Report 2013–14, the attempt of this collaborative, trans-disciplinary annual enterprise is to bring together experts from many fields—scholars, human rights and development workers, policy makers and persons from disadvantaged communities— to examine the outcomes of public policy, law, programmes, budgets and institutions, and their functioning for all peoples, and specially disadvantaged peoples.
The particular questions that these Exclusion Reports ask are: who, if anyone, is excluded— or adversely included—from equitable access to public goods; why and by what processes are such exclusion and adverse inclusion accomplished; and what can be done to change this to a more just and equitable set of outcomes?
There has been an attempt to ensure that this series of Exclusion Reports is based on strongly empirical evidence. At the same time, the diverse contributors to these Reports are bound by a kernel of shared normative and political convictions related to ideas of the just state, the just society, equity and solidarity. The Exclusion Reports are guided by specific constructs of the public good, exclusion and the role of the state, which we elaborate in the following two sections.
Public Goods and the Role of the State: The notion of the ‘public good’ as used in the India Exclusion Reports departs from the neo-classical economist’s conception: goods that are by nature such that their consumption by one does not reduce availability nor exclude consumption by others. (In the language of economics, the terms for this attribute are ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non- rivalrous’). Instead, in the tradition of social and political philosophy, the Reports look at public goods as goods, services, attainments, capabilities, functionings and freedoms—individual and collective—that are essential for a human being to live with human dignity.1 In this sense, the Exclusion Reports do not regard the ‘publicness’ of the good in question to be intrinsic to the good itself, but something that is determined by the political community at a particular point of time. Housing, for instance, is considered a public good in many societies, but much less so in India where, for instance, there has been no major and effective programme of urban social housing to date. Likewise, contestations continue over whether healthcare, especially tertiary healthcare, and education, particularly higher education, are indeed public goods.
Exclusion and the Role of the State: The second important construct in the series of India Exclusion Reports is ‘exclusion’. In the way we deploy this word, ‘exclusion’ refers both to complete denials, and to discriminatory and unjust access— or what may be described as adverse inclusion— of individuals and groups to public goods. The Exclusion Reports do not adopt the popular usage of the idea of social exclusion. They recognise that exclusions may be caused by the norms, institutions and functioning of society, markets or the state, but the focus of the Report is pointedly and primarily on the role of the state.
The Exclusion Reports focus on the role of the state in preventing, enabling or augmenting exclusion, because we believe that it is the moral duty of a democratic state to prevent or reverse exclusion by social or market forces, and to facilitate and protect equitable access of all persons to all public goods. ere is also the practical consideration that in a democratic state, one can hold the state and its institutions legally accountable in ways that one cannot hold society and markets accountable.