Manipur Growing?

The official claim that Manipur is growing at an impressive rate of over 9 percent may actually be true even though there are no visible signs of general prosperity that such a growth rate is expected to bring.

This is also unlikely to be a case of an incubating prosperity engine remaining hidden from public view only to suddenly show up when the time is ripe. On the other hand what we may be witnessing may be a case of a grand fallacy in the interpretation of numbers. It could also very well be that this fallacy is a deliberate ploy to assuage the sense of discontent amongst the people at the state of things in their living environment. Either way, it does not put the government in favourable light. If the fallacy is real, then rejoicing over it would be a sign of imbecility. If the fallacy is a deliberate ploy, nothing can be more sinister.
But first, let us explain what we presume might be a fallacy in the often vaunted achievement of the state’s economy. Consider this scenario. A small time vegetable vending woman in the Khwairamband Keithel who has invested Rs. 50 for a few pieces of cabbage and some herbs, at the end of the day, if she manages to sell them off for Rs. 100, that would be a neat profit of 100 percent. That 100 percent profit in absolute terms would be Rs. 50 a day or Rs 1500 a month if she is able to work seven days a week for the entire month and replicate the profit margin every day of the month. In terms of percentage profit, 100 percent sound extremely impressive but in terms of real worth, it is hardly enough for a family bread winner to keep the family hearth burning. Contrast this with another scenario, say of Sony Corporation showing a quarterly profit margin of 2 percent. This 2 percent would probably translate into several score thousand crore rupees. Need it be elaborated further as to which is the more impressive figure, Sony Corporation’s 2 percent or the vegetable vendors 100. The other common sense derivative is, it is far easier for a small business to make high percentage profits but not so with big corporate houses. It would for instance be insane to imagine Sony Corporation recording 100 percent profit in any given year. This is also the reason why the US’s 3.4 percent growth rate is still much more awesome than China’s 11 or India’s 8.
So let us hold our horses before celebrating Manipur’s claimed 9 percent GDP growth. For in its case, as also in all other impoverished states, percentages can be very deceptive. The resultant euphoria of claimed high growth rates can even be very falsely illusory. What is essential under the circumstance is for those in the field to evolve other indexes of real, substantive, growth, measurable in terms of the direct implications it has on the general quality of life in the state, visible immediately or else projectable in the near future. At this moment, despite what the government claims, there would be few takers to believe quality of life has improved in Manipur. It may be a case of systemic decay where the state government has little power to intervene and rescue, or it may as easily be a result of gross administrative mismanagement which has brought the state to such a pass, but there can be absolutely no denying that life in the state today is miserable for most. Unemployment is continually on the rise, real incomes in the non-government sectors are dropping, standard of education provided by the government is in a deep pit and the better ones availed by private institutions are out of reach of the majority, poverty is deepening, safe drinking water is dripping dry from the municipality taps, uninterrupted electric power supply is fast receding into distant memory, quality health care, like education is passing over from the government institutions to private ones, in the process putting them out of reach of the poorer sections of the society. Above all these, the body count counter continues to tick on a daily basis on the one hand, and the new tradition of “grenade gifts” has literally petrified the population on the other. These are hardly any signs of all round social prosperity. Amidst all these, the claimed 9 percent growth which again is probably accounted for by Central doles, makes very little tangible meaning. It certainly is no cause for celebration. Not just as yet.