Less Than A Grain Of Truth

The Supreme Court for its highly illogical (illegal?) decision that thepolitically motivated dissolving of the Bihar assembly was unconstitutional (sofar so good), but that the consequences of this anti-constitutional act wereokay, especially given the "political realities" (so far, terrible). I amnot a lawyer, but how does one challenge a flawed Supreme Court ruling?

The media also has been under some criticism, especially after a leak aboutthe Prime Minister having a meeting regarding the falling stock market turnedout to be a false leak. There is talk of whether there should be a regulatorymechanism set up to force journalists to be honest.

I think this advocacy is a non-starter—the consumer is the one whoultimately will correct the imbalances and punish the guilty. How can aregulator decide what is intentionally false, and what is the result of pureignorance?

P Sainath - an award-winning rural affairs writer for his book Everyone Lovesa Good Drought - in his article Lost theCompass? (Outlook, October 17, 2005) is very critical of therole of the media, especially its role in ignoring the real India, the aamaurat.

He laments, "Rural India is a giant canvas that is begging the media to doa portrait, many portraits. But it has failed resoundingly". He worries thatrural suicides do not get as much media attention as celebrity suicides.

But the one "woman bites dog fact" of Sainath that grabs genuineattention is his startling and shocking claim that "foodgrain available perIndian fell almost every year in the [economic] ‘reforms’ period.

And by 2002-03, it was less than it had been at the time of the great Bengalfamine [of 1943]". This in your face journalistic fact is then highlighted asa blurb by the helpful editors.

The fact that the consumption of foodgrains is highly income inelastic—i.e.consumption of foodgrains increases very little with income, once an individualis sufficiently beyond starvation levels—is a well-known occurrence, at leastsince the time of 19th century German statistician Ernst Engel, and economistshave ceased to study the problem of stagnation of cereal consumption with incomegrowth.

This is a stylised fact which, after centuries of growth among centuries ofcountries, has not been violated. Engels’ law does not state that absolute percapita consumption declines with income growth, only that the rate of increaseslows down.

An absolute decline of consumption does occur with many goods —these arecalled "inferior" goods, and foodgrains is just such an inferior good.

So Sainath’s point that foodgrain consumption declined in the 1990s wouldbe consistent with the poor actually having higher incomes after the reforms!But his "fact" that per capita foodgrain consumption has actually declinedto the average level prevailing in a famine year is a priori startling.

Actually not that startling, because Nobel prize winning economist AmartyaSen warned us that the Bengal famine was not due to a shortage of supply offoodgrains. Nevertheless, I do find Sainath’s claim as somewhat of a shocker.

Alas, none of Sainath’s two claims is anywhere near the truth. Per capitaconsumption (strictly speaking, availability) of foodgrains averaged 364 gramsper capita per day in the 1950s, and 391, 398, 420, 441 and 419 in subsequentdecades with the last number being for the period 2000 to 2003 (all data fromthe widely and easily available Government of India, 2004-05 Economic Survey,Table S-17).

Contrary to Sainath, per capita availability of foodgrains peaked in thedecade of the reforms. What about the particular year Sainath mentions, 2002-03?It turns out that in that year the availability was a high 457 grams a day!

These statistics would suggest that Sainath’s wild assertion about percapita consumption in 1943 is equally wildly off the mark. If he is right, itwould mean that in 1951, per capita availability of 334 grams a day was some 25per cent lower than the famine year of 1943—surely, not possible. In 1941, thepopulation of India was 383 million (inclusive of Pakistan and Bangladesh).

Total production of foodgrains was 48 million tonnes and 1.8 million tonnesof foodgrains were imported. This yields a per capita availability of 342 gramsa day, lower by 3 per cent than a decade later, and lower by a third thanSainath’s very low 2002-03 levels.

This is the age of the journalists—they have more power and influence thanever before. Today, ideas spread more through journalism than through theacademia. Policy makers listen to them, especially if the journalists’expertise corresponds to their ideology.

Populism pays and pays much more than hard-headed factual analysis. Bykeeping the guilt in check, it makes the Scotch of the elite go down that muchbetter.

Ordinary folks do not have the knowledge, or the interest, or the time, tofact check the data spitted out by journalists. Unlike academics, journalists donot have to cite their sources—it takes too much space and affects the flow.

In return for this privilege, journalists have a responsibility to not betraythe trust, or at least not to betray it so blatantly.

Surjit Bhalla is president, Oxus Investments, and the author of Imagine There’s NoCountry. This article first appeared in Business Standard, and isreproduced here with the author's permission.