Economist, you are wrong! India’s poor are very much a part of its digital success story

The Economist, a British weekly magazine, now depends on its American subscribers, having switched from backing the extinguished British Empire, to American supremacy.

It has a combined print and digital subscription globally shy of 2 million. It also claims to reach 35 million via its social media platforms.

While giving itself an unproven seventeen-fold reach, it had no difficulty in scoffing at the scale and reach of India’s digital revolution. It once praised Aadhaar, but that must have been a slip. Because it regularly slams the Modi administration under the present editor’s watch, citing the original sin of the 2002 post-Godhra Gujarat violence. This apparently gave it the temerity to exhort Indians not to elect the Hindu nationalist BJP, or failing that, Modi as Prime Minister.

This is from a magazine representing a people that had its war-time Prime Minister Churchill murder over 4 million Indians in the man-made Bengal Famine of 1946. A Raj administration that shot unarmed men, women and children at Jallianwala Bagh with nary an apology. A nation that responded with ingratitude and silence about 2 million-plus Indians that fought in the two World Wars alongside the British.

A constant criticism in repeated articles is about the Indian government’s alleged antipathy towards civil liberties and the 200-million strong Indian Muslim community. The Economist treats its story-telling as proof. It pretends it knows best.

The Indian digital revolution, though a work in progress, is an astounding success. But the Economist thinks it will leave out the poorest and create a great divide between the haves and have-nots. That our digital reach has been facilitated not just by the crores counted by the biometrically authenticated Aadhaar, but also widespread bank accounts for the erstwhile unbanked is ignored. Common usage of the Internet for online shopping, tele-health consultations, digital payments, music, movie streaming, OTT.

The Economist likes adopting a tone of omniscience. But this is being challenged by others on home turf and across the Atlantic who also lay claim to economic liberalism. But not a dodgy, U-turning version of it. The magazine employs exclusively White staffers, educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Unfortunately, despite its storied history supporting the British financial establishment, it increasingly offers slanted, hectoring, Oxford Union-style leftist opinion. This dished up as sharp analysis garnished with acute wordplay.

The Indian digital economy, at $200 million in 2017-18 is headed towards $1 trillion by 2025, with 900 million active Internet users. In 2020, 25 percent of the adult female population owned a smartphone while 41 percent of adult men did. We know most teenagers, and not a few children do as well.

Rural broadband penetration stands at 29 percent while the national average is at 51 percent (687 million people), as of March 2020. But this is changing rapidly. Rural Internet penetration is growing at a pace three times faster than in urban India. Wireless telephony constitutes 98.3 percent. Teledensity in India already stands at 86.6 percent.

Covid has played its part to hasten matters. School closures forced teaching over WhatsApp, and many people purchased smartphones to access it. India has the largest number of students globally at some 315 million.

Digital illiteracy and unfamiliarity with digital platforms have driven many people to community services like cyber cafes in urban areas, and village choupals that own a TV, computer, smartphones, have connected broadband, electricity back-up. They also have skilled and knowledgeable operators. There are simple EMI schemes to enable poor people to purchase inexpensive smartphones, and Mobile Libraries to borrow them for online sessions. There are ‘Digital Didis’ to teach women how to use it and reduce gender-based hesitancies.

The Economist’s neo-colonial top-down assessment is not surprising, however, given its allergy to the Modi government’s nationalistic assertions, and its successes. India overtook the British ($2.83 trillion) and French ($2.71 trillion) economies at $2.93 trillion in 2019 itself. This is not the India the Economist is used to preaching at, with its endemic corruption, low growth, dependencies, and chronic inefficiency.

This time, the Indian government has, unusually, written to the magazine, calling this latest outing ‘inaccurate and biased’. Perhaps it is a warning to the British establishment that the Economist represents.

The magazine does not byline its articles, hiding under a collective eiderdown. It espouses a lofty if the obscure stance of ‘economic liberalism’ and ‘radical centrism’, which probably means hitch-a-ride on the latest vehicle of Western neo-imperialism in order to survive. It is owned largely by the Agnelli family of Fiat fame (43.4 percent). Other owners are its staffers, Rothschild, Cadbury and Shroder Layton. Currently, it boasts of its first lady editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Oxford and Harvard educated, who joined the ‘newspaper’ in 1994, and became its Editor-in-Chief in 2015.

Being left out most often in the stupendous gains India has made since 2014 is one of the reasons for the Economist’s pique. India does not need foreign help with its digital revolution. India’s software exports at $133.7 billion in 2020-2021, were up 4 percent.

On 21 October 2021, India completed the free vaccination of a billion adults against Covid-19. The Economist can be sure many of these people were amongst the poorest, lodged in remote areas, and included a large number of Muslims. It is now going ahead with inoculating the rest of the adults, some 20 million strong, and then onwards towards children and teenagers between the ages of 2 and 18. All this with the very effective India-made vaccine Covaxin, alongside the Oxford AstraZeneca franchised Covishield. It is also exporting vaccines and making other types under licence such as Russia’s Sputnik. Yet more are in the works.

Democracies, with growing woke sensibilities, are increasingly difficult to manage. But India, with a population of 1.4 billion and multiple religions, languages, customs, topography, does a consistently good job.

This, for whether it is turning the entire nation largely digital, running the world’s largest election machine, or lately, hitting back at Western misinformation motivated by envy, lazy journalism, and sheer disbelief.

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Gautam Mukherjee