There is something perverse in the fact that the politics of poverty always brings out the poverty in the politics of the day. So when the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, told the Supreme Court about the commission’s desire to fix Rs 32 a day as the poverty line in urban India, the ensuing debate metamorphosed into all about politics.
Number-crunching, when about an emotive issue such as poverty, is less of an exercise in economics, and more of political one-upmanship. It also brings to the fore the bitter truth of whether one sees poverty as a manifestation of bad politics. Or, stay blind.
The Planning Commission’s decision to whip up its own arbitrary yardstick for defining poverty was met with a number of earlier measures that had been arrived at. For the ordinary person this is confusing. After all, a person who wears two wristwatches can never be sure of the correct time. You cannot be sure which benchmark is accurate. All you can do is go by the level given out by the person you like. Or perhaps, his/her ideological bent of mind.
Depending on whom you want to believe, the number of people living below the poverty line (BPL) in India can vary between 400 million and 800 million. The critics of the first figure argue that this is done to underplay the real state of poverty in the country. Those who mince no words about the second contend that empirical evidence in Shining India suggests otherwise.
Complex econometric calculations make little sense to an ordinary person. It would be a better idea to look at the politics that drive such financial gerrymandering. The answer will invariably lie in the “why” of the game. The “what” part of it, in this case, is secondary.
So why does one need a BPL level? The answer is simple – it implicitly suggests that this figure provides the benchmark to assess how many citizens qualify as eligible for state subsidies or support. It is always in a ruling dispensation’s political interest to keep the figure as low as possible. You cannot afford to say that you have 800 million poor people in a country whose Prime Minister is obsessed with achieving a double digit growth mark.
There is another compelling reason for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to keep the figure low. The government is desperately short of cash; it cannot afford to give out doles, even if they were justified. The intention is nothing about eradication of poverty.
As of now, the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Rural Development have agreed that data collected by the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), 2011 will be the basis for identifying those deemed eligible for entitlements under various central government programmes. What this unwittingly admits is that the so-called success of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) schemes that were said to have been instrumental in the UPA-II returning to power in 2009 was not as successful as it was made out to be.
The joint communiqué issued by Ahluwalia and Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh had said, “The present state-wise poverty estimates using the Planning Commission methodology will not be used to impose any ceiling on the number of households to be included in different government programmes and schemes.”Irrespective of what comes out of the SECC results, you can already see the “scheme” of things here.
What this means is that the poverty line, which will be estimated later this year by the Planning Commission, will not be considered for determining entitlements under various government programmes. Be that so, why would you need a poverty line at all?
The current poverty line used in the country was defined way back in 1973-1974 as the expenditure needed to consume 2,400 calories a day in rural areas and 2,100 calories a day in urban India. Since then, the government has just updated the monetary value based on price indices. The update doesn’t account for food habit changes. What comes through is that poverty line estimates are essentially starvation line estimates. If you earn less, you will die of hunger.
The intricacies and pitfalls of methodologies about poverty are one thing, but when you look at it through a hunger prism, the issue becomes one of politics, probably one that is fraught with dangerous consequences. The India Chronic Poverty Report, that was released recently, argues that those who are chronically poor may pass on poverty to their next generation. Moreover, people residing in tribal and forested areas are likely to remain poor forever, fomenting violent conflicts in future. You cannot afford to miss the Maoist angle here.
This study had drawn its conclusions from a three-decade tracking of poor households in rural India. It also pointed out why poverty becomes chronic – there is inequality in efforts made to prevent people from sinking into poverty and also getting them out of it. Of the 29 poverty alleviation programmes studied, only nine were deemed adequate.
Now look at this again in the backdrop of the prediction that people in tribal and forested or degraded forest regions are more likely to remain poor forever. These are precisely the areas that are today being denuded and ravaged in the name of development – that of the manufacturing sector. The poor are incessantly being robbed to feed the rich. And then, experts have the gall to wonder why the regions inhabited by the poor are turning violent.
The answer may lie in Aristotle’s assertion: The mother of revolution and crime is poverty.
