(Vijay Times, March 22, 2006)
P.N.BENJAMIN
"India still has 26% of the population living below poverty line. Another 40% just somehow sustains itself. Figures vary from 20 to 40% about the middle classes. Rich people in cities and villages account for the rest" (Dina Nath Mishra, VT, March 19, page 11)
"During the last five to six years, nearly 20 million undernourished Indians were added on to the already unenviable figure of more than 220 million of starving Indians, that is, about one-third of the world's total."(Tarun Vijay, quoting agro-scientist K.P.Prabhakaran Nair – VT, 20 March).
The two articles referred above, I hope, will be the beginning of a national debate on poverty. They have partly touched upon the two questions that I have been asking myself: "Why there is no serious debate or action about poverty these days? Should it not be on the conscience of us all?"
The face of poverty in India is grotesque and dismal; it is repulsive and revolting to anyone who has a little human sympathy left in him. Poverty in India is not relative deprivation. It is absolute deprivation. The vicious circle of poverty, illiteracy and unemployment has nullified all efforts to wake up a population that has become insensitive to environmental degradation.
There is a vested interest in poverty and nowhere is it as rampant as in India with its special emphasis on a life of very few wants. Only the poor know what it is to be poor. Some religions teach the masses that poverty is not a crime and that the poor shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. The Hindu doctrine of Karma advises that there is no point in fighting poverty, because the people are poor by virtue of their deeds in a past birth, while here and now, those who amass fortunes indulge in every form of malpractice.
The continuing poverty, illustrated by the persistent begging, must disturb us most. Emaciated men, women and children are lying hungry in the streets of large cities. Filth, insanitation and squalor reign in the villages and towns. They underline the atmosphere of poverty that bears down heavily everywhere. Worst of all, the people seem to lack all initiative to better themselves or their environment: they seem to accept their degrading conditions of life as inevitable.
This country won its political independence not without a commitment, and that commitment was to emancipate its millions from grinding poverty imposed by the social and economic structure built under colonial rule. Yes, it was a commitment to wipe out the shame of poverty, the gnawing pangs of hunger and the denial of basic amenities.
This is the pledge that successive generations of the nation's leadership have taken but have made only marginal advance towards its fulfillment. Instead there has come about, over the years, a startlingly widening gulf between the rich and the poor.
There was a time when millions of our people were eagerly looking forward to the end of grinding poverty. They were made to live on promises, platitudes, shiboleths and resolutions. Promises have come the way of the poor in impressive array at periodic intervals during the past fifty-odd years. Nobody can but be overwhelmed by the impressive record of sweeping promises. And, yet with all this majestic cascade of words tumbling upon words, the discomforting question still persists: what about the elimination of poverty?
We have created an oasis of prosperity in the vast desert land of misery and shame. And all this has been happening when the heavens have been rent asunder by the cries of socialism until the 1990s and since then globalisation and privatisation. The result: 240 million undernourished people in a country with over a billion people!
In a complex and highly interdependent society like ours, policies based on freedom of economic choice are almost bound to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak. To tell them that they have the freedom to choose a way of life for themselves is meaningless. The right to choose is meaningless without the power to choose; and in a society as riven by unfairness any approach to a real ability to choose requires constant intervention by the State. In the real world communal action is not the enemy of individual freedom, but a guarantor. The pursuit of individual economic freedom to the exclusion of all else may increase freedom for a few, but only by restricting the real freedom of the many.
Gross and stubborn inequality is incompatible with a just society and we cannot hope to bring it into being until we launch a major attack on the unjustified disparities that still divide us from one another. Some levelling down will be required, but levelling up is far more important. We cannot be content with nothing less than the elimination of poverty as a social problem. It is a formidable task but not an insurmountable objective.
We have to break the mould of custom, selfishness and apathy, which condemns so many of our fellow-countrymen to avoidable indignity and deprivation; to do that we have to recast the mould of politics. In place of envy we must place the politics of compassion; in place of the politics of cupidity, the politics of justice; in place of the politics of opportunism, the politics of principle. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so, will success be worth having.
What India needs today is a new leadership and a new national party which will offer to the Indian people not hackneyed manifestos but practical propositions offering at first nothing but hard work and sacrifice. A new party is needed which will seek not to capture votes by attracting the minority factions but will pledge itself to mould them into Indians first, idealists later. A party is needed which will offer to the nation a strong government, which will unite the country and wipe every tear from every eye.
"Leaders and individuals may come and go; they may compromise and betray; they may get tired and slacken off; but the exploited and suffering masses must carry on the struggle, for their drill-sergeant is hunger"- Jawaharlal Nehru.
P.N.BENJAMIN
benjaminpn@hotmail.com
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To:
From: national-forum-of-india@ozg.in
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:27:03 +0530
Subject: The street children of India
On a hot midsummer afternoon in May, I joined an unusual protest outside India's Planning Commission in New Delhi. The protesters displayed placards, raised slogans, but also brought boxes as 'gifts' for members of the apex planning body. The gifts were refused and the protesters dispersed by the
police after a mild altercation.
According to the report of the expert group appointed by the plan panel, chaired by Suresh Tendulkar, to estimate levels of poverty in India, a person is poor if she spends, at 2004-05 prices, less than Rs 20 a day in cities, or Rs 16 in rural India. At today's prices, this means that a person is not poor if she is able to pay out more than Rs 23 in a village or Rs 29 rupees a day in a city.
The 'gifts' that the protestors from the Right to Food Campaign carried were cardboard boxes filled with what could be bought for R29 a day in Delhi, the ceiling to qualify in the government's definition of poverty. One box had two bus tickets of Rs 15 each, the cost of travel to and from work. This would leave nothing for food or any other essentials. Another box contained half a pencil, 25 grams of rajma beans, four pieces of okra, 25 grams of flour and one arm of a shirt. In another were stuffed 50 grams of masoor dal, half a shirt for a child, beans for one meal and 50 grams of washing powder. One more box had half a soap bar, half a banana, five pieces of okra, half a notebook and half a toothbrush.
The placards were more stark: 'Poor person allowed to eat only half a katori of dal everyday'; 'Fruits poor people can eat every month — two bananas; two shirts and two pants — all that a poor person can buy every year — what about warm clothes?'; 'Poor family allowed to spend on conveyance — Rs 50 per month. If commuting by bus, minimum daily fare — Rs 10'.
This creative protest illuminated the absurd assumptions on which official poverty lines are fixed. Tendulkar's report claims its poverty line is derived from official household expenditure surveys "validated by checking the adequacy of actual private expenditure per capita near the poverty lines on food, education and health and by comparing them with normative expenditures consistent with nutritional, educational and health outcomes". But I find it hard to comprehend what kind of validation would arrive at a poverty threshold which normatively allows the poor so little.
I work with streetchildren in Delhi. A young boy recycling plastic and other waste earns an average of Rs 120 a day. This is four times higher than the official poverty line. In the eyes of our learned planners, the homeless child is positively wealthy. But he sleeps under the open sky or on the railway platform, he is routinely thrashed by policemen and sexually abused by older men, he often scrounges for food in rubbish heaps, he has to pay each time he bathes or defecates in a public toilet, he is barred from health care in public hospitals and no school will open its doors for him.
Poverty has many dimensions. Its economic aspects include low income, poor consumption including of food, few assets such as land and household goods and low-paid, uncertain and casual livelihoods. But it also manifests in poor access to public services like clean drinking water, sanitation, healthcare and education. It involves social discrimination and devaluation, such as of gender, caste and religious identity and political powerlessness. But planners estimating poverty include only those elements which can be counted — economic dimensions such as consumption and household expenditure. Even estimating these involves many unrealistic assumptions, normatively condemning the poor to bleak deprived lives, on standards which would be inconceivable for the middle classes. It is as though the rich and poor live on different planets.
What is deeply worrying is that applying even these absolutely rock-bottom indicators of poverty — more starvation line than poverty line — the expert group estimates that more than a third of our people are poor. If the government adopts more humane poverty line thresholds, such as the internationally accepted $2 a day (adjusted for purchasing power parity), it is likely that the numbers would be closer to 74%, as estimated by the World Bank.
If official estimates of poverty were just of academic interest, their vision of what life is acceptable for India's poor would be troubling enough. But the government in recent decades has used these highly depressed estimates of poverty to limit access to social services — such as subsidised food, free medical care, social security pensions for the aged, and cheap housing — to people the government identifies as poor. The problem is compounded by the government's inability to identify not just how many people are poor but who actually is poor, and official studies indicate that 60% of the impoverished are left out of government lists of the 'poor'.
An enormous chasm separates planners and economists, and indeed the middle classes, from the lived realities of impoverished people in India. Unless this is bridged, they will continue to assume that poor people can live with dignity at the price of two bus tickets each day.
Harsh Mander is director, Centre for Equity Studies. The views expressed by the author are personal.
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