Opportunities lie everywhere. And in India, everything that doesn’t work creates room for something that does. Sort of. Take inverters and generators. Because power supply is erratic in many parts of India, a new market is born. An unreliable power situation does harm in many ways, but at least one way, it creates opportunities for some.
Or take air purifiers. The worse the pollution, the better the sales of this gadget. A water filter depends on our water supply being contaminated. Home storage water tanks are needed because we get water supply for only a few hours a day. Borewells are dug because of the same scarcity. Voltage stabilisers and surge protectors because the quality of the power supply fluctuates dangerously. UPS systems because a backup is needed. Mosquito repellents because of poor public vector control. Bottled water because we can’t trust the drinking water that comes to us. Private tuition because schools don’t do their job fully. And to a certain extent, even private vehicles, because public transport facilities are poor.
The total expense on all these is not insignificant. Over time, we stop noticing this and start believing that this is how it is meant to be and perhaps even should be. A new house should have an inverter, a water filter and an air purifier just like it has a TV, a fridge and a cooking stove. But this is just the price we pay for inefficiencies that surround us. Our acceptance means they rarely become issues for politicians or even journalists.
It might seem that we are generating economic activity. GDP grows, jobs are created and companies flourish. The market fills any gap, no matter what its source. But not all economic activity is the same. Some of it creates new possibilities. Some merely compensate for the absence of things that should already exist. It is the difference between building a new room and repairing a leaking roof. Both involve expenditure, but only one represents progress.
Two kinds of consumption take place. One which is aspirational in nature. Things that make our lives better. That gives us a sense of progress. And then there is compensatory consumption. What we spend to bring life to a level it should always have been at. Where we spend time and money trying to neutralise friction.
The products themselves are not the problem. An inverter has value. A water filter solves a problem. An air purifier makes life bearable. The question is where that value comes from. A refrigerator allows us to store food in ways we could not before. A smartphone allows us to communicate and access information in entirely new ways. But an air purifier is valuable because the air has become unbreathable. A water filter is valuable because the water is unsafe. Their usefulness is real, but it originates in a failure.
This is the market for something else, which steps in because something is not available. The market for something else is never a perfect substitute for something, but it is better than nothing. Generators are noisy and produce fumes, inverters do not operate all devices. Tuition is time-consuming and expensive.
Education may be the largest inefficiency market of all. Private tuition exists because school education is often insufficient. Coaching centres flourish because examinations have become industries in themselves. Vast sums of money and time are spent compensating for shortcomings in a system that was originally meant to make those expenditures unnecessary.
These two kinds of consumption work in opposite directions. One adds value, the other makes up for value that has been lost. But the inefficiency economy has learned to sell the second as the first. The purchase of an air purifier or a water filter is experienced and marketed as an upgrade rather than a repair, as a step up rather than a patch over a hole. The deficit gets reframed as desire. This is what allows the whole arrangement to survive without ever being named as a failure; it doesn’t feel like paying a tax, it feels like progress.
The deeper consequence of all this is political, and it is the part that explains why the inefficiency economy persists so comfortably. Air, water, electricity, transport, education and security: these are the classic public goods, the things a state exists to provide on behalf of everyone. But when options are found that the otherwise vocal educated middle class can use as substitutes, there is no reason to complain or demand change. They silently exit the problem with their own version of the solution. The poor do not have this option, and their reality does not allow for this kind of immunity. It breeds a new kind of inequality. Like the flyover in cities, those with means skim over the surface of problems, thereby creating the illusion that these problems don’t exist.
One could argue that what one calls the inefficiency economy is the real economy. There is no possibility of believing that tap water can be drinkable or that school education can be sufficient at a mass level. Citizens who can afford it are building a private version of modernity, which absorbs the system’s inefficiency without any attempt to change things. For the others, perhaps there is no inefficiency economy at all. Just reality.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
