The debates rage on, development vs growth, poverty estimates. In all the din, can the poor get in a word edge-wise? In a vast country like India, poor people appear to be everywhere. To find the new, officially-not-poor citizen one has to trek to a small colony, four metro stations away from Delhi University. After a harrowing, 15-minute ride in the rain on a cycle rickshaw through knee-deep water, you reach CD Park jhuggi colony in Jahangirpuri. It is iftar time, when the largely Muslim residents break their Ramzan fast. The main vegetable market comes to life in the evening. It’s immediately evident that there are few takers for the pricey fresh vegetables; most of the women are buying potatoes and sorting through discarded small onions.
These then are the people who have emerged out of poverty. According to the latest Planning Commission figures released last week, a dramatic fall in poverty levels from 37 per cent to 22 per cent between 2004-11 has lifted 137 million people out of poverty. Most residents of Jahangirpuri would be earning between Rs 100-300 per day. This would be much, much more than the poverty line estimates of Rs 33 per day. But theirs is a story of meagre, subsistence living.
Perched on the steps of her tiny dark house, Johara Bibi, 43, has a matter-of-fact tone: “Going to bed hungry is not unusual in our colony. Most days we can’t afford even vegetables. How can we think of buying meat, egg or fish? At Rs 40/kg, we can’t even afford onions to eat with rotis. Why doesn’t the government peer into our homes to see how we live?” Between the husband and her, they earn over Rs 5,000 a month. The story is depressingly familiar across the colony. “Almost everybody here is poor. Many-a-times they go hungry or manage with half a meal,” says Jaitur, who works with the Lok Shakti Manch.
Residents here have no idea they have been lifted out of the poverty line, and that the UPA government is highlighting them as statistics within sniffing distance of general elections. They are, after all, no longer the poor, over whom pitched battles are being fought by policymakers. As the political rhetoric takes over, you get to see more and more unseemly sights, like that of Congress spokesperson Raj Babbar insisting that it’s possible to get a good meal in Mumbai for Rs 12. Adding to the heat and noise are eminent economists like Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, slugging it out in TV studios—the rarest-of-rare moments where an economic debate makes headlines.
Now the timing of the out-of-turn poverty data release—which has also put the focus on development claims of states like Narendra Modi’s Gujarat—is being seen as part of a “perception game”, ahead of many state polls and general elections. Everyone recognises this. After all, apart from the obvious political strategy, what other motivations could the UPA have? “These figures of the government have been, are, and will remain suspect as long as they are based on fraudulent, dubious methodology,” says CPI(M) MP Brinda Karat. “The way this government now considers some part of the population as BPL and some of it above that line is very arbitrary.”
Coming as it did, a few days after the ordinance on the Food Security Bill was promulgated—with the provision for subsidised rice and wheat to 67 per cent of the population—the move set off speculation on whether the UPA-II would benefit from the good tidings on reduced poverty levels and the promise the food security held. Food policy analyst Devinder Sharma questions the “provocation for saying the poverty line is declining when policymakers have not even reworked the poverty line norm. Moreover, if you are saying the poverty is only 22 per cent, then why is the government planning to give subsidised foodgrains to 67 per cent of the population?”
At the same time, the figures set off a furious debate on the absurdly low levels of poverty in a country where malnutrition affects 46 per cent of the children. There’s also the now-familiar concern about whether the poor would be excluded from social welfare programmes of the state by virtue of becoming not-poor overnight. The same reduction in poverty figures were used by critics of the government’s policies (thereby bringing in Sen and Bhagwati) to question the wisdom of ringing in a Food Security Act with a Rs 1.23 lakh crore price tag.
Actually, there’s no quibble that poverty has really come down. There are also explanations for the fact that poverty reduction has been at an unprecedented rate of about 4 percentage points a year between 2009-10 and 2011-12. (Typically, the norm for poverty reduction history in India has been a maximum of 2 percentage points a year.)
“What evidence do we have that growth has not gone to the poor?” counters economist Surjit S. Bhalla, a critic of the UPA’s policies. He contends that when the official numbers have not been questioned for so many decades, why should they be put to the test now? The only exception to massive poverty reduction during the seven years (2004-05 to 2011-12) was the 2009 drought year, which was also the peak of the global financial crisis. Dr Pronab Sen, chairman of the National Statistical Commission, adds that even if we double the norm from Rs 33 for urban poor and Rs 28 for rural poor, the percentage of people below poverty line may double but the percentage of decline in poverty will remain roughly the same. “If you say the poverty line is too low now, then you should revise the percentage in 2004-05 also,” says Sen.
So there seems to be a near-agreement about poverty levels coming down. The real issue is in examining how. Economist Himanshu, in a working paper along with Abhijit Sen, have found the poverty-reducing impact of food transfers over a period of time. “Only 1.3 per cent of the population was lifted above the poverty line as a result of such transfers in 1993-94. But this proportion increased to 2.6 in 2004-05 and to 4.6 per cent in 2009-10,” they write. The authors attribute this to a near-universalisation of the public distribution system and the mid-day meal scheme for school children.
While upholding that the nsso data is not “manufactured by the government of India or the Planning Commission”, former secretary at the commission N.C. Saxena states that “unless you change the poverty line norm, which is too low, it does not make any difference”. Close on the heel of the news on poverty reduction comes the government’s admission that 64 per cent of the country’s population is poor. From here to extending the Food security net to 67 per cent of the population, the UPA would like to show its almost-human face.
“We do see a decline in poverty across the country. The opposition is wrong to question that. The people’s lot has improved significantly,” says Congress MP from Agra, Raj Babbar. Clearly, an ‘India Shining’ campaign of sorts seems to be at work even as the UPA seeks to justify its attempt to trim the subsidy bill—be it petroleum products or food bill—though it is well couched in the ‘targeted subsidy’ lingo. So far there is nothing to prove whether this will work or not (given the gaps in infrastructure, there are justifiable fears of leakages).
Unfortunately, while the politics of poverty reduction helps the UPA government’s ‘aam aadmi’ campaign and counter claims of development by the opposition—be it in Gujarat, Bihar or Orissa—the reduced number could work to the disadvantage of the poor in the future as the budgetary allocation for socioeconomic programmes may also come down. So there’s a potential danger—while millions of the poor will get left out of the scheme of things, the government can showcase fiscal discipline and in the process earn a better rating from global agencies which have expressed concerns about India’s ballooning subsidy bill.
For instance, a common complaint of people in the CD Park colony mentioned earlier is that many households did not get their BPL card back after it was submitted for renewal in 2007-08. Minus the BPL card and the long-awaited PDS (ration) card, they have no access to subsidised foodgrains and have thus been forced to sign up to receive the Rs 600 per month under the direct cash transfer scheme being implemented soon in Delhi.
Clearly, the Food Security Bill is not without its pitfalls. Already some states like Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu have stated that entitlements proposed by the Centre (and promised in the Act) will be halved. “By increasing the coverage, and by linking the entitlements to a family of five, the average share of a ration card family of 3 would be down to 15 kg and not 25 kg as promised,” says a bureaucrat. Some states are already giving 35 kg of foodgrains per family. Also, many states feel by lowering the entitlements and widening the coverage, the Centre wants to keep a tight hold on its budgetary spend.
At a broader level, the Sen vs Bhagwati debate is ironical as it is peaking at a time when India’s growth is slowing despite bending rules for private investments (both domestic and overseas), and when social development schemes, be it NREGA or universal education or public healthcare, seem to be floundering (going by recent evaluation reports by CAG and other reputed agencies).
So, as this ‘heated debate’ on development versus growth continues, the lot of the poor struggling to survive seems to be overlooked. Their right to nutrition, education, healthcare, employment is fixed by schemes that hardly ever deliver the desired results. For politicians, the numbers game is a convenient tool to fix the opponent. But for the poor it is important to be counted, to get at least some chance to emerge out of poverty and not be fence-sitters in some numbers game. That’s the least we owe them.
