How long to extirpate penury in India? 300 years to end poverty?
Posted on March 24, 2008 by Moin Ansari
India needs 300 years to lift all its people out of extreme levels of
poverty, February 11, 2008 by CyberGandhi
The dark reality, By Siddharth Dube and Mohan Guruswamy, IHT
The mood among affluent and middle-class Indians as the country marks
its 58th year as a republic is unabashedly celebratory. Everywhere
they look there is evidence that India is finally being taken
seriously as an economic and political powerhouse.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has called for India to be part of
an expanded =93Group of 8.=94 Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain has
expressed sup****t for India=92s place as a permanent member of a
refa****oned UN Security Council. The World Bank and financial leaders
at the World Economic Forum are looking to India to help power the
world out of its economic downturn. India=92s finance minister,
Palaniappan Chidambaram, has predicted another year of over 9 percent
economic growth, record foreign investment, and low inflation.
So it is little wonder that prosperous Indians increasingly think of
their country as =93Incredible India!,=94 the tag line of the
government=92=
s
global advertising campaign.
While there is some welcome truth to these new images, the defining
reality of India is that it remains the land of mass poverty, scarcely
less so than before its economy began to take off 15 years ago.
The government=92s latest survey of living standards re****ts that the
number of extremely poor Indians, those chronically unable to consume
even the minimum calories needed for full functioning, is an
astoni****ng 301 million, just 19 million less than in 1983. At this
rate, it would take India 300 years to lift all its people out of even
the most extreme levels of poverty. The survey=92s results suggest that
extreme poverty has fallen no faster, and possibly more slowly, in the
past 15 years of spectacular economic growth than in earlier periods,
challenging the popular notion that money =93trickles down=94 to all.
Moreover, the true scale of poverty and deprivation is far greater
than that suggested by even the huge ranks of the extremely poor. A
recent re****t by the prominent economist Arjun Sengupta, chairman of a
key government commission on labor conditions, emphasized that another
50 percent of India=92s people, over 500 million in all, live on less
than 20 rupees a day, which puts them above the official poverty line
but still leaves them =93in abject poverty and excluded from all the
glory of a ****ning India.=94 Twenty rupees is about 50 U.S. cents, but
adjusted for purchasing power falls somewhat below the $2 a day
international poverty line. While the pro****tion of Indians living in
such poverty has being falling slowly, their absolute numbers have
risen by 100 million in the past 15 years alone.
Poverty has never been high on India=92s political agendas. The
interests of India=92s business elite and growing middle cl*****
dominate media attention. Celebrations of prosperity, typified by the
=93Incredible India!=94 campaign, drown out the ubiquitous evidence that
the vast majority of Indians lead desperate lives. The view from
middle-class India today is that theirs is a land of wealthy and
middle-class people, with a small and shrinking minority of
impoverished people. No wonder: In a interview with the BBC earlier
this year Chidambaram, a key architect of narrow business-friendly
reforms, asserted, =93I=92m confident we can wipe out poverty by 2040.=94
What will it take to transform India=92s newfound dynamism and
prosperity into a meaningful reduction in poverty?
The first step is government recognition of the true scale of poverty.
For decades, successive Indian governments have played down the scale
of the poverty challenge by insisting that the cut-off line marking
poverty be set extraordinarily low, at a level that most experts would
consider not poverty but outright destitution. (India=92s poverty line
is significantly lower than even the widely used $1 per day extreme
poverty line.) A re****t by the Center for Policy Alternatives
estimates that a poverty line adequate to cover the costs of meeting
such basic human needs as education, nutrition, health care, clothing,
safe water and sanitation, would be roughly twice as high as the
poverty line in use today. Nearly 80 percent of India=92s population
would be considered impoverished were the government to adopt this
poverty line.
Faced with a true recognition of the massive extent of poverty, the
Indian state=92s response must certainly include further efforts to
sustain the rapid economic growth of recent years. It is this
performance that has moved some 90 million Indians into the middle-and
upper-class. But with hundreds of millions remaining impoverished, and
millions more added to the work force every year, India needs a
pattern of economic growth that rapidly creates many decently paid
jobs. This requires far more success in expanding manufacturing and
industry, following China=92s example, rather than just the services
sector. And, even more critically, it requires rural prosperity
through ending the disastrous neglect of agriculture, rural
infrastructure (particularly state-provided irrigation), and rural
industries. The lobbyists from trade, finance and business - who have
been embraced too closely by almost all of India=92s political parties -
have little interest in these areas.
Economic growth and jobs will create avenues for the educated and the
healthy among the poor to begin to rise out of poverty. But hundreds
of millions of Indians are poorly educated or outright illiterate,
malnourished, vulnerable to illness, and often oppressed - with the
lowest castes, Muslims, and women of the populous northern states
worst off.
Setting right these inequities requires not just more money - though
far higher government investments are needed on some fronts, such as
public health and providing social security benefits to every one of
the poor. Much of the billions spent on India=92s panoply of poverty
programs ends up in the pockets of the country=92s legion of corrupt
officials, politicians and business people; another large share is
never spent because of bureaucratic inefficiency. There are no quick-
fix solutions to such problems. Without the mobilization of the poor
in rural and urban areas alike, and agrarian reform, neither the
government nor the private sector will ever deliver education, health
or other vital programs to the poor in a manner that will remedy the
backlog of the past. India=92s peninsular states have a far better track
record on basic services and, increasingly, on poverty, precisely
because of decades of political and social movements committed to
equity. Such social mobilization is the foundation for eventually
making India=92s democracy responsive to the country=92s impoverished
majority.
Incredible India! is still very far from a reality on the ground. It
will take nothing less than several decades of commitment to pro-poor
economic growth, government reform and mobilization in favor of the
poor to realize this vision of India.
Siddharth Dube is the author of =93In the Land of Poverty.=94 Mohan
Guruswamy is the chairman of the Center for Policy Alternatives, New
Delhi.
Courtsey: Dalitnation.wordpress.com and Dalit Network
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