India and Pakistan, Bound by Pasts

A conductor leads an Indian military band during a rehearsal for independence festivities. (AP)

NEW DELHI — Choti is poor and Indian. She is also the illiterate mother of eight children. Her five sons go to a village school in the northern state of Rajasthan, but her three daughters don't. They do chores on the family farm instead. "If I send my girls to school," she explains, "what will happen to my goats?"

Nawab is poor and Pakistani. At 55, he pedals around rural Sindh Province on a bicycle, selling milk from metal jugs to sustain his wife and six children. He makes about $1 a day, a few cents more on a good day. "We only make daily life," he says. "We are not happy. We are not satisfied."

Choti and Nawab are almost

Mahadev Salvi, foreground, stitches an Indian flag in Bombay. The demand for flags rose as independence day drew near. (AP)

neighbors, separated by a short distance across the border that colonial Britain sketched between India and Pakistan in 1947. A half-century later, some facts of life remain virtually the same on either side of the 1,800-mile border: poverty, exploding population, illiteracy, devaluation of females. In both countries, there are millions of Chotis and millions of Nawabs.

As they mark the 50th anniversary of their independence today and Friday, Pakistan can still proclaim itself the only nation created specifically for Muslims, and India can boast of being the world's largest democracy. But they share other global distinctions no government could be proud of.

A recent report by a Pakistani economist who has worked for the United Nations and the World Bank declared the Indian subcontinent — of which India and Pakistan form the largest part — "the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished and the least gender-sensitive region in the world."

The two

Women pass a large display featuring Mohandas K. Gandhi, who is regarded as the father of India. (AP)

nations received nearly the same rating on the latest human development index, a composite measure of health, education and income produced by the United Nations. India ranked 138th of 175 countries, with Pakistan 139th.

Widespread deprivation has persisted in India and Pakistan even though their first leaders set social progress as a national goal. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his memorable midnight address to India's constitutional assembly on Aug. 15, 1947, called for "the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity." A few days earlier, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had urged Pakistan's assembly to "wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people and especially of the masses and the poor."

It has not turned out that way. Successive governments have pursued other priorities at the expense of basic needs. "Both countries greatly neglected investment in education and health," said Mahbub ul-Haq, author of the report on the Indian subcontinent.

India long focused on achieving what the British had not permitted in their bejeweled colony: building an industrial base and educating what is today one of the world's largest pools of scientific and technical experts. Pakistan concentrated on industry too — and on an expensive military for defense against its much larger neighbor, with which it has fought three wars. Both also launched successful efforts to become self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs.

For all the similarities between the two developing countries, however, significant differences between their economies leave a mixed impression about which has advanced further in 50 years.

A New Delhi municipal worker polishes a statue of independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi in preparation for Friday's celebrations of India's 50 years of sovereignty. (AP)

Critics initially doubted that Pakistan would be a viable country, but over the decades its economy actually has grown faster, at an average of about 5 percent a year versus more than 3 percent in India. Pakistan's more rapid growth resulted mostly from American influence on what was a major regional ally, which kept its economy more open to foreign trade and investment. India, on the other hand, chose a path that was closer to Soviet-style central planning. India's government took direct control of 40 percent of the economy, rationed business licenses to set up private factories and restricted trade to protect domestic producers from foreign competition.

Both countries liberalized their economies at about the same time in 1991, but even today Pakistan remains more open to foreign goods. In the port city of Karachi, a Westerner can buy maple syrup from Canada, hearts of palm from Brazil and mineral water from France — luxuries virtually impossible to find for sale in India. A Pizza Hut restaurant has operated in Karachi without a whimper of the kind of nationalistic protest that accompanied the opening of American fast food outlets in India.

Although agriculture remains the biggest employer in both countries, India's economy has grown more stable and diversified. Pakistanis, for instance, envy India's ability to manufacture cars. India has also surged ahead of its smaller neighbor in high technology, churning out customized software and launching satellites.

To drive its economy, Pakistan continues to depend on a good cotton crop. Heavy defense spending has represented a major threat to solvency: Defense and payments on loans taken largely to finance the military have soaked up more than 60 percent of the government's annual budgets. In 1994, Pakistan devoted 9 percent of its national output to defense, nearly twice the percentage India did.

Still, average income in Pakistan appears to have always been higher, initially because it absorbed the more productive side of the agricultural Punjab region.

Since independence, both countries have reduced poverty rates, to about 30 percent in Pakistan and 35 percent in India, based on their own standards. About half of Indians were poor in 1947; few reliable measures are available on the status of Pakistan then. The World Bank, using a poverty measure of an income of $1 or less a day, shows a greater disparity, 52.5 percent for India and 11.6 percent for Pakistan.

India, haunted abroad by the image of ragged masses huddled on Calcutta's sidewalks, has launched waves of anti-poverty programs. Many have been loosely targeted, inadequately funded and dogged by corruption. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi complained once that politicians and bureaucrats gobbled up more than 80 percent of every Indian rupee he allocated to help the poor.

Pakistan's anti-poverty strategy differed. Officials believed that higher economic growth would alleviate poverty, but the benefits scarcely have trickled down in a society still dominated by feudal landlords with large ancestral holdings. By comparison, India lessened the dominance of its rural landlords by imposing ownership limits in the 1950s.

As a result, income appears to be more evenly distributed in India, which has more of a middle class. At least 200 million Indians belong to a middle class that Western corporations spotted as an attractive market once the economy opened wider. So far, however, U.S. and European companies have been disappointed in sales, finding that middle-class families have little spare cash to spend on consumer goods.

But both countries have failed to create what impoverished breadwinners like Nawab, the Pakistani milkman, have needed most: decent-paying jobs.

Wages have been held down by large supplies of surplus labor, a result of galloping population growth. Since 1947, India's population has almost tripled, leaving it the world's second-most-populous country with 950 million people. The population of Pakistan — which in 1947 was West Pakistan, the less-populous half of a split country — has quadrupled in a half-century to 138 million, putting today's Pakistan variously between seventh and ninth on world rankings.

Pakistan's population growth rate, more than 3 percent a year, is among the world's highest. India, one of the first developing countries to adopt a family planning program, has brought its annual growth down slightly to 2 percent.

Longer life spans have contributed to the population problem in both countries. The life expectancy of Indians, for instance, has risen from 32 years in 1947 to 62 now.

Family planning in India has suffered from a high degree of coercion, according to Saroj Pachauri, regional director of the private Population Council. Female sterilization has been the predominant method, and reaction against vasectomies forced on rural men helped bring down Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's government in 1977.

Pakistan's efforts to control its population have been weaker. "I wouldn't call it an organized population [control] program," Pachauri said.

At times, it also has lacked credibility. When two-time prime minister Benazir Bhutto waged her first political campaign in 1988, she urged families to have two children, a voluntary limit her government later promoted with the slogan "Two Children, Happy Family." But by the time Bhutto returned to office in 1993, she had delivered her third child. Her second government dropped the two-child campaign.

Greater illiteracy partly accounts for Pakistan's faster population growth. Research conducted in India by the U.S. Agency for International Development has shown that primary schooling of girls for even a few years reduces their birthrates because it improves their understanding of birth control information.

In half a century, India has increased literacy from 14 percent to 52 percent; about 40 percent of Indian women can read and write. Pakistan's literacy rate is 36 percent overall and 23 percent for women.

In both countries, population growth has been spurred by family demands for wage-earning boys as security for parents in their old age. Women keep bearing children to have more sons. Girls are treated as burdens not worth educating and to be married off quickly so they can move in with the husband's family. In India and Pakistan, girls marry at an average age of 18.

"The boys will earn and feed us. It makes sense to educate them," Choti, the Rajasthani villager, said of her sons. "The girl is not going to do a [paying] job. She will go to another house. What will she give to me?"

In both countries, the devaluation of females has taken more deadly forms at times: killings of Indian brides whose families deliver an insufficient dowry, fatal stonings of suspected adulterers in Pakistan, deliberate underfeeding of both Indian and Pakistani infant girls. As a result, India and Pakistan are among the few countries in the world populated by more males than females. For every 100 females, there are 108 males in India and 111 in Pakistan.

The compounded effects of social deprivation in India and Pakistan make it difficult for either country to compete fully in the global economy. India, included on the U.S. Commerce Department list of big emerging markets, likes to compare itself to fast-growing China rather than to Pakistan. But Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who has taught at Harvard and Oxford universities, has noted that China's great economic advances have been built on a solid work force that is better educated and healthier than India's.

"The leaders of both India and Pakistan talk of becoming an industrial tiger," ul-Haq, the Pakistani economist, noted. "They have a lot of gap to cover. No feudal, illiterate society has ever become an industrial tiger."

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.