CB BureauTwo days ago, a CauseBecause contributor from Toronto flashed a
news story saying: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a bilateral meeting, told
US President Barack Obama that New Delhi is working towards getting rid of
chronic poverty, ignorance and disease, which still afflict millions of people,
and that it looks forward to US support in this regard.
?
Does seeking foreign support on basic domestic issues show
our inability to overcome a problem that after over six decades of independence
should not have existed in a democratic country? Will it be right to say that
post-Independence India engaged itself a bit too much in space missions,
nuclear programmes and strengthening military might to the extent that the basic
idea of providing food and shelter to the poorest suffered? All of us may have
any nature of opinion on these queries, but this fact remains: The country’s
poor are getting poorer, and in what is quite the travesty of their
circumstance, they are being counted several times over in the hope that the
number lessens in the next count.
How many poor?
Last week, United Nations released a report revealing that
all efforts that India made to alleviate poverty in the first half of the
decade have been undone in the second half due to rising food prices and the
economic crisis.
?
The Millennium Development Goals, 2010, report said: ‘Newly
updated estimates from the World Bank suggest the crisis will have some 64
million into extreme poverty by end of 2010, principally in sub-Saharan Africa
and South Asia.’ In South Asia, including India, 21 per cent of the population
was poor in 2008, one percentage point less than 2000-02 and the same as in
1990.
?
The report indicates that India’s quota-based poverty
eradication policies have failed. Well, why wouldn’t they? The implementers of
these policies, till date, are not sure who to reach out to, as neither the
definition nor the number of ‘poor’ in the country is clear. While the Arjun
Sengupta committee says nearly 77 per cent of India’s population was poor,
Planning Commission says it is roughly 29 per cent. Then there is the Suresh
Tendulkar committee that took the score up to 41 per cent, and that seemed very
impressive until the NC Saxena committee put the average at 50 per cent.
?
Current consensus is around Saxena’s finding, for it is
believed that Tendulkar probably doctored the pitch as he considered the
minimum calorie intake at a level well below that recommended by the Indian
Council of Medical Research (ICMR). (The council has fixed the minimum calorie
intake level at 2,400 calories per head per day in rural areas, and 2,100
calories in urban areas. It may not be obvious at first glance why there should
be this discrepancy. ICMR reasons that city dwellers have access to resources
like water and transport, which reduce their need for energy.)
Hence, officially, half of the country’s population cannot afford food that
gives them enough calories to remain above the line of poverty — in blunt
language, that means half of India is extremely poor and hungry. Looking at
these numbers, how can the administration work out a special policy to
eradicate hunger and then sit back to see its results? Which country in the
world formulates special policies for half of its population? Targeted policies
work when they are aimed at a small minority.
?
What happens in the offices run by the brighter halves (or
haves) is something to be noted. The Tendulkar committee’s poverty figure of
41.9 per cent meant the Planning Commission and the ministries of finance would
have to shell out nearly Rs 48,000 crore as food subsidy and not Rs 29,000
crore, as estimated earlier. Although high, the government could probably live
with the figure, but then Saxena came up with the 50 per cent poverty figure,
which nobody wanted to believe in.
?
?
Poor identity crises
A new trial to identify the poor is being run. The economist
Jean Dreze and his colleague Reetika Khera have suggested a simple method of
identifying them. It is based on five indicators of poverty, which are being
tried out as a pilot programme. Earlier, the NC Saxena committee had suggested
that certain vulnerable households should be automatically included, such as
those led by scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST), landless and single
women, in addition to ‘below poverty line’ (BPL) families.
?
Dreze further simplifies this categorization of the rural
poor. Apart from SC and ST families, he advocates including landless households
with no adults educated beyond class 5, households led by single women, and
families with one adult working as an agricultural labourer. Interestingly
enough, he also suggests how certain criteria should disqualify families. Thus,
among the ‘not poor’ should be any family that owns a car, a scooter, a refrigerator,
a colour TV, or a landline phone; any family with piped water, power and a
flush toilet; and any family that owns a multi-room house or multi-storeyed
house.
?
However, The Right to Information activist Aruna Roy, who
served on the Saxena committee, believes that any new identification system
will not work for the real poor since more influential families will corner the
BPL cards. She, instead, advocates universal public distribution of grain.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, on the other hand, advocates cash transfers
to BPL households by opening their bank accounts or giving them food coupons.
?
Poor numbers
Whenever there is a particular research number, especially
one related to the weaker sections of the society, there is always another one contradicting
the same. There are lots of ‘other’ numbers, some even in the government’s
data, to show that the officially accepted figures are a gross underestimate.
?
For instance, the National Rural Employment Guarantee
Programme (NREGP) website boasts of having provided employment to 5.24 crore
rural households. Averaging five people in a single household, the figure
suggests some 26 crore people are registered with NREGP. These people are
obviously poor because no individual with alternative income will do manual
work on daily wages.
?
Then there is Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) saying
that India is home to29 per cent of the world’s malnourished people. If this
figure is accepted, then they are the real poor. More so, United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) claims that 50 per cent of Indian children are
malnourished. Why not take their data as well to see who they are and where do
they live?
?
As per National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3), 78 per cent
of children in the age group of 6 months to 35 months are anaemic; the
situation is worse in rural India, with 80.9 per cent children suffering from
anaemia. NFHS-3 also says that 56.2 per cent of married women in the age group
of 15-49 years are anaemic. Aren’t these people poor? Are the committees
referring to these figures?
?
As per National Sample Survey (NSS), 64th round, about 77
per cent of rural households use firewood and chips for cooking, and only 50
per cent of the people are living in pucca
structures, while 19 per cent are in kuccha
and 31 per cent in semi-pucca houses.
To be precise, most of the pucca
houses are not like the urban pucca
houses and are certainly not as comfortable, with most without a toilet
facility. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says 55 per cent of
Indians do not have access to toilet facility. Is the administration counting
these people as rich?
?
The NSS data suggests that only seven per cent of the
workforce is in the organized sector. So, an overwhelming number of people
either have poor-quality employment, or are unemployed or underemployed, but
somehow they qualify as ‘rich’, as they are not counted as poor officially.?
As an interesting aside, it may be noted that the
government, which is anxious about reducing the social spending, recently ordered
several hundred Sukhoi fighter jets and T90 tanks, and also test-fired several
Agni missiles. It is perhaps logical to believe that the government needs to
first change its approach towards the very basic problem, which, in fact, is
the root of several thousands of problems the country is facing.
?
The gist is that we have to get ‘real’ about eradication of
poverty and the efforts should be on a war footing because the real war is
never that far. We all know from where the greatest threat to India’s national
security is coming, and what provoked the once tribal innocents to turn into
extreme Maoists. The one with nothing to lose can do just anything; a hungry
stomach can kill, and the evidence is all around us.