Poverty: India’s biggest curse

Has poverty really declined in India? Economists like Jean Dreze, Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin have their share of differences which is perfectly understandable considering that they are dealing with staggering numbers involving a huge nation with more than a billion people. While it would be better to leave such debates on poverty figures to those best equipped to deal with them, the scenario which greets anyone travelling through India’s countryside is grim making one wonder if anything has changed for decades.

Any positive impact created by development programmes launched by the government, have been pushed back by at least a decade by the Covid pandemic which sliced through the heart of rural India pushing thousands of labourers into penury. A report on poverty says that the country, despite having seen freedom for a full seven decades, has as high as 23 crores of the poor and what is worrisome is that as high as 10 crore are children.

Ninety percent of the poor live in rural India explaining why there is a massive push of people from villages to cities and towns every year in search of employment. Any programme to tackle poverty will have to be rural-focused for these are the people who are perpetually at the mercy of natural factors like the weather and also price fluctuations including fuel and food inflation. Wealth is something unknown to this huge chunk of the population; a report says that just 10 per cent of the richest in India control 90 percent of the wealth with little of it trickling down as some economists had predicted.

It’s a daily struggle for survival for these people, holed up in huts which offer little shelter from the hot sun or the pounding rain. Most of them do not know how to read or write-and literacy programmes mean nothing to them for the kids will have to be sent to the fields to add their little share to the family’s earnings rather than spend hours in classrooms. Life in the hinterland is marred by social evils of the worst kind-child marriages are rampant and so are infanticide, gender inequality and child labour.

Campaigns to erase them have hardly had any impact and get blurred in the race to earn a livelihood. Many an election has come and gone and there are many more waiting to happen when the voter is in much demand to make sure legislators are elected and governments are formed. This is the only ‘magic tool’ which the Indian citizen-poor or rich- has to make sure that leaders who care for him and are genuinely concerned about bettering his lot, are elected to power.

There have been incidents of voters hitting back at their elected representatives who have conveniently forgotten them after getting elected-like the incident in a village in Karnataka where a BJP MLA suffered the ignominy of having his shirt torn by furious villagers protesting his delay in visiting a spot where a woman had been trampled by an elephant.

A proactive and enlightened electorate is maybe the only way by which the lot of rural Indians can be improved by taking on their leaders on promised facilities which have not been provided and by asking whether they really deserve votes when social development remains a mirage. And why poverty figures continue to remain unchanged sucking them into a bottomless pit despite thousands of crores being ‘devoted’ to their welfare and development in every Budget.