The debate on Indian poverty
For the past six decades, millions have been looking forward to the end of grinding poverty.
Why has there been little debate for several years about Indian poverty in the media, among political parties and even in Parliament until the Planning Commission in September fixed India’s poverty line at just 32 rupees a person per day?
To talk of the poor and their poverty is unfashionable when Indian teenagers spend $3 billion a year on fashion accessories and at a time Indian middle class numbers 300 million. No fewer than 550 million Indians are under the age of 25. Indian universities produce more than 1.5 million graduates each year.
The booming Indian economy is forecast to grow further and Indian industries match or surpass some of the world’s top producers. India has made amazing progress on many fronts - economic expansion, education, technology. Its scientists, academics, computer specialists, entrepreneurs and entertainers are challenging—and often surpassing—the best other countries can offer.
Still, Indian poverty makes itself felt in its social and private dimensions of hunger and destitution, homelessness and bad housing, disablement and mental disease, prostitution and illicit liquor consumption, broken- homes and delinquency, begging and vagrancy, violence and crime, educational failures and other misfortunes and disadvantages.
Poverty like its antonym prosperity is socially distributed. In a country like India an overwhelming majority has the principal share of poverty while the rest have lesser chunks of it in different measure and a very small minority has none of it.
Absolute deprivation
The face of poverty in India is grotesque and dismal; it is repulsive and revolting to anyone who has any feeling of sympathy left in him. Poverty in India is not relative deprivation. It is absolute deprivation. The poor have no citizenship in India. They have neither rights nor privileges. They do not suffer from unequal distribution of incomes but from a total lack of income. The poor are a nation within a nation and they have nothing to do with the well-to-do. Political processes to get rid of poverty means nothing to them and they continue to be pawn in the cruel game of political, social and economic development.
The poverty of the Indian masses is not poverty for the rich. John Gurley has put it so well: “When poverty is looked at from the standpoint of the ruling classes it may not be a failure of the system at all but rather a pre-requisite for the continuance of their accumulation of wealth, their privileges and their social, political and economic domination of society. This is because poverty is often the carcass left from the wealth accumulation; or at best it is the stagnant backwaters of a society not yet touched by a development process that stresses private profit making and efficiency and hence building on the best.”
In a complex and highly interdependent society, 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 tochoose a way of life for themselves is to add insult to injury. The right to choose is meaningless without the power to choose: and in a society as riven by unfairness as ours, any approach to fairness, any approach to a real ability to choose, requires constant intervention by the State.
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. Millions of people in this country have been eagerly looking forward to the end of grinding poverty for the past six decades.
They have been made to live on promises, platitudes, shibboleths and resolutions. Nobody can be overwhelmed by the impressive array of promises. The pattern has been all too familiar—condescension, benevolence and charity.
Gross and stubborn inequality is incompatible with a welfare society. 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 thepolitics of opportunism, the politics of principles. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so, will success be worth having.
