Trivialising Poverty

Listening to the debate on poverty in the Indian parliament, I was reminded of my visit to the slums of New Delhi while covering elections in India. India aspires to be a superpower in the 21st century. I wonder whether this national aspiration has anything to do with the people who live all their lives in the squalor and filth right at the heart of the national capital.

Listening to the lawmakers shedding crocodile tears for the poor, I was reminded of the people I met in Bengal's Murshidabad district, who lost their homes, schools and livelihood to the river and the government didn't do enough to stop the land erosion.

I was reminded of the people who lost their limbs as a result of arsenic contamination of drinking water and yet didn't know where to go to seek help.

Do these people aspire to be part of a nation which wants to see itself as a superpower in the post-US  world order?

For a change the Indian lawmakers, went beyond discussing scandals and the triviality of blame game and political upmanship to discuss poverty. However, to my mind, all the parties - the lawmakers, the national planning commission, the intellectuals and the media - who were engaged in the debate on redefining the poverty line in the country were busy in a trivial exercise of futility.

I am not an economist but as any ordinary person would say, the objective of studying poverty is to improve the standard of living of the poor people so that they can lead a healthy life and aspire to fulfil their lifetime ambitions. One should not be too occupied with the academic discourses so as to lose sight of the final destination, which is to free India from abject poverty. 

Those who know the Deputy Chairman of the Indian Planning Commission Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia well will possibly agree with me that, ideologically he is a firm believer of the 'Trickle Down Hypotheis', i.e. if the economy grows then its positive effects percolate from the top to the people who are at the lower levels of the economy. Since India is on a growth path ranging from seven to nine per cent annually, there is an ideological obligation on the part of people like Dr Ahluwalia to claim that poverty level is coming down, which is probably true but  not enough in a country which houses almost two-third of the world's poor people and with such stark economic disparity.

There are empirical studies to justify and negate the trickle down effect, but as an ordinary man I think that the social, economic and political architecture of our society has become so complex now that it is almost Utopian to assume that the hypothesis works in its entirety.

Rather than assuming that the trickle down hypothesis works, both the central and state governments should make targeted efforts to bring people out of poverty. Large scale poverty alleviation programmes may lead to leakage by way of corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement. Targeted programmes may also suffer from such menace, yet it may be proportionately less as the number of people involved will be less.

In the final analysis though, whatever the path, poverty alleviation will be possible only if there is good governance, the system is transparent and the responsible and the powerful have impeccable integrity. The country may debate in a million voices, there may be thousands of legislation and hundreds of anti-poverty programmes, yet the poor may find themselves caught in the poverty trap for generations to come.

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