Policy-Research in India - The Need

Many in India don't believe, or even want to take notice of the data provided by multilateral institutes like the World Bank, the IMF and similar ones. I won't deny that I too had a degree of suspicion while looking at the data presented by these bodies not too long ago, more so at their prescriptive remedies that were packaged with those data. But that was before I entered academics from a research mindset.

And then I found that other than those, we don't have many quality primary researches undertaken in India from policy-perspectives without the much-needed aid from those multilateral institutes or their country-level counterparts like the IDFC, the DFID etc.

The background gets important as many debated from local media on 'India Poised' to the other opposite end that looked at the immaturity of India as a superpower in global media. In one case, we presented perception as evidence. And in the other case, the global media - as they are used to - cited evidence rightfully or wrongfully, from global researches of credibility.

And the obvious question comes, why don't we Indians argue, as Argumentative Indians suggest of our characteristics, with evidence as evidence and not as perception as evidence. We need to pay better attention at the sources of the evidence and their credibility and methodology. If we did that, we aren't likely to engage ourselves in much of the wasteful arguments on wishful thinking to hypes, and thereby can get into implementation of our policies, which matter more.

Facts, figures, statistics, sources with debates and the counter-arguments backed by evidence again are a basic prerequisite for any policy-making. During policy-making only, we take our status quo starting with where we stand, decide our destination from possible alternatives and reason why we need to be there, and also decide which path to take to reach that destination from medium-term to long-term perspectives. It's in this stage that policy makers debate on how that destination and path suits us best by analyzing the interests of all involved stakeholders.

The evidence and debate comprises facts, figures, hypothesis, and sources of those facts in the footnotes with the references on how one deduced those conclusions. Any sensible man would feel sorry at the plight of 1.1 billion Indians if our campaigns, and even policies are based on wishful thinking of media and politicians like that of 'Make 2007 the year of India' (what was wrong with 2006, 2005, 2008, what is wrong with rest of the world in 2007?), or the 'Cradle Campaign' as announced lately as a remedy to feticide of female child as soon as another horrific (but expected) story breaks out. Then there was the infamously famous campaign of 'Garibi Hatao' (Abolish Poverty) by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

And rest of the world, more so developed world, don't pay much heed to these 'wishful thinkings', and these wishful thinkings didn't deliver much, expectedly. We know what happened to 'Garibi Hatao' even after almost three decades. Shouldn't we ask questions, and look for evidences when faced with such policies and campaigns? Isn't that what we should be learning (and teaching) as the first year students in any colleges - as against any self-concluding hypothesis in social sciences.

Many of us may recall seeing the evidences 'produced' by last US Secretary of State Colin Powell on the floors of the United Nations back in 2002, broadcast live in global media to build global opinion in his case for invading Iraq, which looked so real as if we could feel the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) lying in Iraq. And while many were convinced by those evidences of WMDs, they conveniently forgot to ask those fundamental questions - 'Hey, what are your sources? Where are the footnotes? What's the credibility of the sources?'

And the world, more so people from Iraq, continues to pay dearly for not asking those questions. Expectedly, these are debated in the U.S., because that country, seldom failed in policy-making; and this failure (a deliberate ploy as per many conspiracy theories) is therefore widely debated, and scrutinized.

American people not only have been holding Bush-administration responsible for that intelligence-failure, but also have squarely put that responsibility on the failure of Media. Media too got carried away by that hi-tech presentation, and therefore forgot to ask those elementary questions.

Coming back to India, we seldom see debate and arguments with evidences at the policy-making stages. Those policies, from time to time, originate from the tables of some bureaucrats or from the minds of some ministers like words from the Bible. We know the quality of debate that takes place in our parliament, and we also know the qualification of our parliamentarians in meaningfully contributing to such debates.

We, in popular media and in our day-to-day life do a lot of (wasteful) debate on those without evidence, may be because the policies themselves didn't have any evidence in the beginning. These were and are mostly ad hoc measures - be it our independence or economic reforms (were we prepared and therefore planned how to prevent the expected riots that followed our independence? No. Did we plan how to proceed in following market reforms like China did? No. And probably these two are the two biggest events of free India).

Irrespective of the fact that policy-research has remained a neglected field, and whatever policy-research is carried out remains in the wrong hands mostly; there's no denying of its importance; more so in transient economies where India stands now. India, to really come out from her various hurdles and thereby to take a better place in competitive global economy, badly needs better policymaking.

Policymaking comes under institutional infrastructure, and plays as important and complimentary a role in economic development as other two categories of infrastructure do, i.e. the hard infrastructure (roads, ports, power) and soft infrastructure (education, healthcare). If we had the right policymaking environment, we would not have had the inhuman daily traffic problem in Mumbai or the power shortage in Maharashtra now, or in some other state at some other time. With wrong policy making, our policy makers allot more than thirty times on university education than on primary education on per capita basis.

Does India need a graduate Indian thirty times more than a literate Indian? Policy-making, even at its rudimentary senses for a country of 35% or more illiterates shouldn't say so.

And even when they do invest so much on university education, then why not invest on a few of them for policy making as well. We haven't seen our bureaucrats and ministers ever attend a seminar as audience rather than as speakers as if by virtue of some gift, they possess the answers to all the problems. It's indeed unfortunate that a country that claims to be building her case to be the hub of the knowledge-economy, policy research remains to be seen as words from certain sacrosanct sources.

Let me cite my evidences with more examples.

In December 2006, to pursue my academic research, I was searching for some data on the Internet usage in India. My limited research yielded me following confusing figures with their local and global sources:

Ø CIA World fact Book - 60 million (2005)
Ø Internet World Stats (Dec'06) - 40 million
Ø IAMAI-IMRB (Sept 2006): 37m ever users and 25m active users
Ø IOAI-Cross-Tab: 25 million (around middle of 2006)
Ø eStatsIndia: 30.5 million by 06-end.
Ø European Travel Commission (eTForecasts, September 2004): 37.0 million.
Ø PricewaterhouseCoopers (July 2004): 30.0 million
Ø eMarketer (April 2005): 21.3 million
Ø Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, February 2005): 15.7 million
Ø TRAI (Indian Govt.) figure on subscriber base (June'05) = 5.9 million (subscriber, and not user here)

So, as any person, forget about a researcher, I was confused (in spite of having worked with leading e-commerce companies for five years). Two of the most respected here, the EIU and the CIA World Factbook defined the range, and rest all were somewhere in-between, true the time period was different. And anybody could have played with any figures. So when we read in media that 'Internet usage has grown by 60%', one must be careful to note on what base (earlier research); otherwise it doesn't make any sense.

And imagine when someone would like to make some policy-making to make Internet penetration more widespread based on the above set of data. We simply don't know where we stand exactly, and unless we know our exact position; how do we set our destination?