The Times of India

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2003

Where Welfare Works: Plus Points of the TN Model

JEAN DREZE

Sometimes a little bit of fieldwork is worth years of academic study. So I
felt last month after returning from a brief reconnaissance of rural Tamil
Nadu with a former student.

It was a revelation. Our main object was to visit schools, health centres
and related facilities. I have done this off and on for some years in north
India, and it is almost always a depressing experience.

Millions of children waste their time and abilities in dysfunctional
schools. Health centres, where they exist at all, provide virtually no
services other than female sterilisation. Ration shops are closed most of
the time. And other public amenities, from roads and electricity to drinking
water, also tend to be in a pathetic state.

The situation seems radically different in Tamil Nadu. Though we visited
only three districts (Kancheepuram, Nagapattinam and Dharmapuri), the basic
patterns were much the same everywhere and they are likely to reflect the
general situation in the state. For instance, each of the nine schools we
visited enjoyed facilities that would be quite unusual in north India: A
tidy building, basic furniture, teaching aids, drinking water, mid-day
meals, free textbooks and regular health check-ups.

More important, the teachers were teaching, and most of them were even using
the blackboard, a rare sight in north Indian schools. There was, of course,
much scope for improvement, but at least children were learning in a fairly
decent and stimulating environment. It was a joy to observe the mid-day meal
programme in government schools. Everywhere, the meals were served on time
according to a well-rehearsed routine. The children obviously enjoyed the
whole affair, and the teachers also felt very positive about this
arrangement. Nowhere did we find any sign of the alleged drawbacks of
mid-day meals, such as stomach upsets or disruption of classroom activity.

Seeing this first-hand, one wakes up to the fact that mid-day meals should
really be seen as an essential feature of any decent primary school, like a
blackboard. We were also impressed with the health centres. They were clean,
lively and well-staffed. Plenty of medicines were available for free, and
there were regular inspections. The walls were plastered with charts and
posters giving details of the daily routine, facilities available, progress
of various programmes and related information. Patients streamed in and out,
evidently at ease with the system.

What a contrast with the bare, deserted, gloomy, hostile premises that pass
for health centres in north India. Another pleasant surprise was to find
functional anganwadis in most villages. In north India, anganwadis are few
and far between, and those that exist have little to offer, when they are
open at all. Often, the local residents are not even aware of the fact that
their village has an anganwadi.

In Tamil Nadu, however, a functional anganwadi seems to be regarded as a
normal feature of the village environment. Anganwadis have separate
buildings, two or three helpers, cooked lunches, teaching aids, health
check-ups and regular inspections. The helpers we met were well-trained and
gave us credible accounts of their daily routine. The public distribution
system (PDS) provides yet another example of the striking contrast between
Tamil Nadu and north India as far as social services are concerned.

In north India, collecting wheat or rice from the local ration shop is like
extracting a tooth. The cardholders are sitting ducks for corrupt dealers,
especially in remote areas where the latter have overwhelming power over
their clients. Quite often, people have no idea of their entitlements and
are unable to take action when they are cheated. But in Tamil Nadu we found
that even uneducated Dalit women were quite clear about their entitlements
and knew how to enforce them. This pattern is consistent with secondary
data: The National Sample Survey indicates that consumers in Tamil Nadu get
the bulk of their PDS entitlements, in contrast with north India where
massive quantities of PDS grain end up in the black market.

I am not suggesting that social services in Tamil Nadu are flawless or even
adequate. Even there, civic amenities fall short of the norms prescribed,
say, by the directive principles of the Constitution. Also, there are
significant social inequalities in the provision of public services. But at
least the rudiments of a credible welfare state are in place, and Tamil Nadu
's experience (like Kerala's) points to far-reaching possibilities in this
domain. An obvious question arises as to why social ser-vices function so
much better in Tamil Nadu or Kerala than in the bulk of north India.

This question is beyond the scope of this brief article, but I venture to
suggest that the contrast relates in part to the role of women in society.
For one thing, women's votes in Tamil Nadu matter a great deal, because
women are relatively well-informed and vote with their own mind. This forces
political leaders to pay attention to women's aspirations, including those
relating to health and education. For another, women are the prime movers of
social services in Tamil Nadu. All the facilities I have mentioned (with the
exception of ration shops) are staffed mainly by women. And everywhere we
went, there were signs of their special competence in these matters.

It may not be an accident that the only north Indian state whose
achievements in the field of social development are comparable to those of
Tamil Nadu, namely Himachal Pradesh, also happens to have much in common
with Tamil Nadu in terms of the role of women in society.

Copyright © 2003 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.