Thinking about the poor

I took a train last weekend to a coastal town for a family function. I was alone and observing the scenes inside and outside the train.

As the train moved through towns and cities and along the tracks there ghettos and mud houses, many of them, it is a typical sight across India. Within the train there are hawkers, beggars and all sorts of vendors selling their vares. This is India living on the margins. It is hand to mount existence for these families. As far as my memory goes this scene has not changed in the last twenty years including the train compartments design.

Are the benefits of economic liberalization reaching these families? Are the children raised in these families having access to higher education? How about access to decent healthcare. When will these families move into decent housing, there are millions of them to be taken care. These are some of the questions bother many of us. Are our planners and bureaucrats up to the challenge of providing reasonable housing to the BPL families? Where is all the govt spend on improving public infrastructure going?

All the noise about GDP growth, all sorts of schemes for employment generation, health care programs – is it making a real difference to the lower middle class and below stratum of the country. Visibly it doesn’t seem to. Estimates of poor in the country vary by who is giving the data, obviously planning commission and other government sources give better date, however one can safely estimate 60-70% of the population earning less than <2 USD/day. A study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative using a Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) found that there are 421 million poor living under the MPI in 8 north India states of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal and this number is higher than the 410 million poor living in the 26 poorest African nations. India’s poverty elimination/alleviation strategy is heading towards a total failure.

We need to have a serious look at the china story and how it managed to reduce poverty levels from a whopping 64% to the current 10-15% levels in flat 4 decades. Our common refrain about progress in a democracy will naturally be slow due to debate, accommodation of views etc is a poor consolation to the fact that we are having the largest number of poor and deprived in this land.

There is surely a need for a coordinated assault on this issue by the entire Indian state, human resource development, retraining, economic inclusivity, industrialization, modernization of agriculture, healthcare, driving rural youth to industrial work, infrastructure development and related investments are all the aspects in the puzzle of poverty elimination, but who will execute these plans, I think that is what we are still trying to figure out. For once let us ask the Chinese and Brazilians.