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Indian Journal of Human Development, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2009
Basic Socio-economic Security in Rural India and China: A Comparative Study of Selected Villages K.P. Kannan and N. Vijayamohanan Pillai*
The present paper is a condensed version of an empirical exercise conducted in the light of our conviction that social security in the context of the developing countries must be viewed not only from a contingency orientation (as in the developed countries) but also as a basic measure of freedom from multi-dimensional deficiency. The four realms of security that may be considered to constitute such a basic social security are: food security, housing security, health security, and education security, with an inherent dimension of employment security. The empirical domains of this case study were selected from the states of Kerala and Orissa in India and from the provinces of Jiangsu and Gansu in China. The selection of the regions was to anchor the study to a comparative plane: Kerala and Jiangsu as well-performing or ‘advanced’ regions, and Orissa and Gansu as poorly-performing or ‘under-developed’ regions in respect of the local social security experiences. Such a comparative study is expected to go a long way in facilitating an understanding of the impact of macro policies at the ground level through the responses of ‘actually living people’ articulating their conditions of basic socio-economic security. In the light of our field experience in India and China, it appears that the macro situation of poverty and human development are reflected, to some extent, in both the selected provinces at the village level in China, whereas it is not so much in the case of India. Despite this difference, it should be noted that Kerala state in India and Jiangsu province in China are similar in achieving a measure of basic socio-economic security.
INTRODUCTION Given the dimension of the informal economy and the existence of massive and persistent poverty in the developing countries, the concept of social security has to be suited to the actual situation of those countries and to include the idea of elimination of poverty in its multiple manifestations as a necessary condition for attaining development. Thus, in a developing country context, social security may be viewed in terms of a basic social security (BSS), primarily taking into account the dimension of deficiency, and a contingent social security (CSS), primarily taking into account the dimension of adversity (Kannan, 2007a)1. The former is a foundational requirement in the sense that the commonly accepted notion of social security for meeting contingencies (CSS) will not make any sense in its absence. The four realms of security that may be considered to constitute basic social security are: food security, housing security, health security, and education security. Inherent in all these is a dimension of income/employment security (Kannan, 2007a). * Professor and Associate Professor, respectively, at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
240 Indian Journal of Human Development
It is in this theoretical light that a study was jointly conducted (by the present authors at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram) along with Prof. Zhang Xiaoshan and his group of researchers at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, to examine the micro-dynamics of social security experiences through an intensive and in-depth case study. The regions selected were the states of Kerala and Orissa in India, and the provinces of Jiangsu and Gansu in China. The selection of the states/provinces was to anchor the study to a plane of comparison: Kerala and Jiangsu as well-performing or ‘advanced’ regions, and Orissa and Gansu as poorly-performing or ‘under-developed’ regions in respect of social development, in general, and t