Manu Joseph: India would do better if it starts treating all Indians as well-off rather than poor

The apex court was hearing a writ petition filed by Sarang Vaman Yadwadankar.

As reported, one of the judges said, “Where is the drinking water in this country? People do not have drinking water. The quality of bottled water will come later on… This is an urban-centric approach… Water bottle should have this content, that content, these are all luxury litigations….” (shorturl.at/EFYLw)

The spirit of the court’s observations could explain many of India’s deficiencies. Poverty in the country results in a tendency to peg everything on it. So India’s plans are often of low calibre. India should instead consider all Indians upper middle-class.

Plastic packaging contains some chemicals that could be harmful, even carcinogenic beyond a point. For instance, antimony, a chemical element that is something between a metal and a non-metal, can be harmful in high quantities. DEHP is another chemical that carries a similar risk.

The issue is not whether these chemicals are in fact harmful. The developed world has already worried about it and come up with guidelines to reduce their presence. The issue is whether we too require higher standards.

If carcinogens in plastic water bottles is seen as a ‘luxury’ concern, it may inadvertently explain a society that still struggles to get potable water to all its people. When we have low standards, we aspire to less.

India’s top court said that it is unrealistic to expect the country to enforce guidelines for packaging that have been adopted by advanced economies.

“The people in rural areas drink ground water and nothing happens to them,” noted the court, according to a news report. The poor, however, are not superhuman. In fact, they die of diseases all the time. These are unnecessary deaths.

The court drew attention to rural India in a historical context too: “Mahatma Gandhi, when he returned from South Africa, travelled across rural areas to understand the plight of the people.” (shorturl.at/1zI8t) It seemed to suggest that in a country where people don’t have bread, someone was asking for cake.

Yet, it’s not clear how asking for higher standards for water packaging has anything to do with water consumed by the poor. It is not as though following better health standards would increase the cost of water for the poor or distract governments from providing them water.

The attitude that just because most Indians are poor, we should not have high standards for Indian life explains why our roads are dangerous and why trains derail; our standards are low at almost every level.

A train that is highly comfortable for passengers will automatically have high safety standards. Like the Delhi Metro, which was initially considered a project for the ‘rich’ but is today a lifeline for the average citizen in the national capital region.

Trains ‘for the poor’ are the ones where the poor continue to travel in great hordes, often in suffocating conditions, all the while facing the probability of a railway mishap.

But India looks at comfort as something of a luxury. In perpetually planning for the poor rather than the rich, India has remained a poor country.

The poor themselves have higher standards than India has for them. This is why so many of them reject government schools in most states, with a few exceptions like Delhi and Kerala.

Some poor and lower-middle-class families spend a considerable portion of their income on sending their kids to private schools.

As a result, a whole category of private schools have mushroomed that cater to their aspirations, which includes escaping government schools designed for them by governments that think they need no better.

India’s low standards for its poor created a low threshold for vulgarity. As a result, for decades, it couched science and technology, including its space mission, in terms that suggested it was primarily a service to the poor. That is the least romantic aspect of science, especially for the talented young.

However, the spirit of the Supreme Court’s irritation is not without substance. There is a segment of the urban population that imitates Western elites whose excessive consumption lends them a certain narcissism that makes them obsess over ways in which their party of life may come to an end.

Also, it is true that some people have phobias, which found a mention in the court’s observations. Fears can be contagious, even among those who are not clinically paranoid. It explains why some people worry about carcinogens in everything.

Indians have also borrowed some luxury abstractions that may diminish the lives of the poor.

Take the paranoia around ‘privacy,’ for instance, and how a class of people who have no qualms giving their biometric data to the US government for a mere visit tried to sabotage India’s biometric identity project, Aadhaar.

So it is not as though there are no “urban phobias” or “luxury petitions.” But, as with the water packaging issue, there is an assumption in India that high standards are not appropriate in a country with poverty.

That only keeps us poor. There is a lesson in this. Individuals, especially the poor, should think big, be grand and look much above their station.