Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  A third danger of a focus by visiting tourists or the global media on India’s poor is a distraction from what is happening in the rich countries’ own back yard. The charity organisation Oxfam announced in 2014 that it was now opening UK programmes to tackle poverty. Its report “A Tale of Two Britains” in the same year detailed how five of the richest families in Britain now own more wealth and financial assets than 12.6 million Britons put together. The ‘austerity’ drive by the Conservative governments has resulted for the first time of more working families in poverty than non-working ones. As in other late capitalist economies, the most vulnerable and poorest section of the population is bearing the brunt and costs of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009. Obviously this poverty is of a different character and nature to that in India but the ‘poor’ are not only to be found in poor countries. Poverty and inequality seem to follow neoliberal policies everywhere as the riots and looting in London and Athens in 2013 indicated.

  However, poverty in the case of India has taken a bit of a back seat over the last decade or so. It is being replaced by stories of its booming economy in recent years and is being widely documented. Expanding at an average of 6% per year since 1991 India today is seen as a ‘global economic power’. Nevertheless, poverty remains very much a part of modern India. Despite the numerous debates about the definition of ‘poverty’, there is a broad consensus that around one-quarter of India’s population or 350 million people live in poverty. More shocking is the statistic that about one-third of the global poor live in India. These desperate figures are based on an official poverty line of 32 rupees (around 30 pence in Sterling) per person per day in urban areas and 26 rupees in rural areas. Beyond the bland figures, though, is the pain, powerlessness, despair and resignation that often accompany destitution and poverty. And nowhere in India has this ‘qualitative’ aspect of poverty been more clearly outlined and detailed than in Katherine Boo’s remarkable study of life in a Mumbai slum in Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Together with Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, Katherine Boo’s study joins a growing list of non-fiction writing that helps illuminate aspects of daily life so difficult for ‘us tourists’ to grasp. The detailed, painfully moving account of the life and dreams of the slum dwellers of Annawadi is a remarkable study. Situated beside the luxury hotels surrounding the new Mumbai international airport, Annawadi is ‘home’ to a collection of rag pickers and migrant wanderers in search of work, safety and security. Devoid of sentimentality and condescension, Boo has managed to convey the drama, pain and brutality that characterises the most marginalised of the poor in the city. It’s a very difficult read.

  Most tourists walking around any city in India or spending some nights in the city will have witnessed the homeless and poor. As in London, New York or Paris, there seem to be areas which are safer or more attractive to the homeless than other areas of the city. Close to rail stations or alongside waterways or near to public parks are favourite spots. In the small areas of Bombay that I am familiar with I know a number of these ‘addresses’. Bed rolls are kept neatly rolled and placed behind tree trunks or atop pavement walls. A sack of cooking utensils is usually close to hand and small children play on ‘their’ pavement. Quieter streets have blankets spread out permanently on the roadside where a number of families seem to live. It’s not uncommon to see some form of paid work being performed on the blankets such as vegetable peeling or plucking chickens for, I assume, some local restaurant or hotel. Pedestrians politely move on to the road in order to circumvent the blankets or plastic sheets. In addition to the pavements, the large cavernous halls in city rail stations are usually home at night to many hundreds of people. A walk around the city late at night – and outside the monsoon season – reveals a completely different perspective from that available during the day. Largely hidden in the shadowy minor roads are sleeping the millions of homeless city ‘dwellers’. Any space and shelter will do. Given that each city has millions of homeless there seems to be a relaxed attitude by the authorities towards the sleepers. On the other hand most buildings and residences in downtown areas have the ubiquitous security guards ensuring perhaps that their premises are not on the list of hospitable night stops. For the tuc-tuc taxi drivers, home is more assured, i.e. sleeping in their cabs as an early morning walk in the city indicates.

  The plight of the poor in India is not the result of an absence of policy formulation. Every government since Independence has placed poverty more or less centre stage. The succession of Five Year Development Plans have all shown a concern with the poor. The problem remains one of implementation and, more importantly, of the structural and political characteristics of the Indian state. Important features of the problem – such as agrarian reform and land distribution – have never really been followed through apart, to some extent, in Kerala and West Bengal. These rural areas incidentally remain more invisible to us tourists than urban centres. The vast majority of India’s poor are landless, exploited people. Today the situation in the rural areas is possibly worse than it has ever been. Roughly 750,000 million people continue to live in the country’s 680,000 villages. Anti-poverty policies targeted at the urban and rural poor is not the problem. As Mari Marcel Thekaekara argues on the website, infochange, “We have the most brilliant legislation in the world; we have pro-poor policies spelt out in the most moving rhetoric. Yet, implementation of these plans and strategies was ignored, circumvented and in many cases deliberately prevented. There has to be a will to eradicate poverty.”

  This ‘problem’ of poverty and this “will to eradicate poverty” has been a dominant theme in the work and writings of India’s most celebrated philosopher and economist Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. In a number of publications, often in collaboration with Jean Dréze, he has inquired, analysed and advocated a variety of measures aimed at confronting and tackling poverty. Dréze and Sen’s recent publication An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2013) is a wonderful detailed, critical and authoritative analysis of contemporary India. Much of the analysis in this chapter heavily relies on their empirical data and arguments.

  In a public lecture in London in 2014, Sen discussed a question that has bewildered overseas tourists and also those with a passing interest in India – namely, how can such levels of suffering linked to poverty seemingly be tolerated. Sen reminded the audience that “no country in the world is free from poverty” and that “‘blaming the victims’ is as common today as it was in the era of Britain’s Poor Law” (1800s). Certainly, ‘blaming the poor’ is the dominant perspective in Britain and elsewhere in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 Great Recession. However, tolerance of mass destitution “demands explanation,” argued Sen and Dréze. Two common explanations – of ignorance and of inevitability – are unsatisfactory. In the case of India it was more a case of “skewed priorities,” argued Sen. India’s growing middle class is an infatuation of the national media. Poverty and deprivation has been “crowded out of discussion,” he suggested. Great progress in alleviating and reducing poverty has been achieved in other countries, most noticeably in China. There is nothing inevitable about poverty. In order to break the prevailing character of the Indian poor, Sen and Dréze focus on the importance of ‘human capabilities’ and ‘democratic participation’ – not dissimilar to notions of democratic citizenship. By ‘capability’, the authors mean the capability to have a healthy life, to have an educated life, to have a secure and safe life, having the capability to read and write for both girls and boys. Economic growth is important but a sole concern with growth is part of the problem. Expanding and safeguarding human capabilities is not only a route pursued by other Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan; it is a pathway that in India is linked to the quality and extent of its democratic system. As Dréze and Sen argue, “Development is not… merely the rise in the GDP (or in personal incomes); nor is it
some general transformation of the world around us, such as industrialisation, or technological advance, or social modernisation. Development is ultimately the progress of human freedom and capability to lead the kind of lives that people have reason to value.”

  “Tolerance of the intolerable”

  All countries have poor people, as Dréze and Sen point out. But as mentioned above, poverty and India are synonymous for many people throughout the world. This is perhaps less so today with a growing story about economic success but it retains its strong association. However, and perhaps surprisingly, it remains difficult to gauge the extent of poverty in the country. There have been in India over the last few decades numerous debates about its nature and extent. As mentioned above, from mid-2011 the official poverty line was seen as 32 rupees a day in urban areas and 26 rupees in rural areas. Commentators pointed out angrily that it is simply not possible to live on such low rates. As an article in The Hindu daily newspaper in September 2011 pointed out, these “paltry sums” are meant to cover not only food costs but also clothing, footwear, cooking fuel, lighting, transport, education, medical costs and house rent. It continued to say that the poor do not ‘live’ in any true sense. Instead they are underweight, stunted, subject to high levels of sickness and without the means to obtain adequate food or medical treatment. If the 2009–10 figures are used, the article continues, then at least 75% of the total population is in poverty i.e. around 975 million people. As Dréze and Sen argue, “What is really startling is not so much that the official poverty line is so low, but even with this low benchmark, so many people are below it – a full 30% of the population in 2009–10, or more than 350 million people.” Historically, a more shocking picture emerges. Gross Domestic Product per person indicated that per capita income (in real terms) was about one-third lower in 1895–1900 than in 1794 – a staggering, absolute decline. Yet another measure of the cost of British occupation.

  For many of those in the rural areas, conditions appear to be desperate. And we are talking about 600–700 million people still making their living from agriculture. One story above others which has highlighted this desperation and which is reported upon regularly in the Indian newspapers, but has now attracted global attention, is the issue of farmer suicides. Almost every 30 minutes, a farmer (invariably male) commits suicide. Since 1995 – the first year the government started keeping figures – some 300,000 farmers have taken their lives. In 2011 alone, government figures indicate that 14,000 farmers took their own lives. Academic articles suggest these terrible figures are a gross underestimation of the numbers due to official figures relying on police records. These suicide rates amongst farmers are around 50% higher than the national average. A number of states are of particular concern, namely Maharashtra, the new state of Telangana, Karnataka and Punjab. The reasons behind these appalling tragedies are varied – failure of crops, mounting debts, economic problems, personal shame and humiliation, failure to fund a dowry and so on. Hanging, drowning or drinking pesticides are the most common methods of suicide.

  However, and perhaps of greater concern, is that these rural suicides when compared to other employment sectors are not unusual. Although media attention and government reports in India have focused on farmer suicides, the rates are higher in other jobs. The main concern, reports a recent study, should be suicide rates among young adults joining the workforce or getting married. Social pressures is the main driver of high suicide rates not farming, states the report.

  Whatever the real figures are, the numbers of those living in poverty are huge. A United Nations report of 2006 calculated that 80% of the Indian population was living on less than $2 per day. Claims by the government in 2014 (with a general election around the corner) that it had presided over the largest percentage fall of poverty ever – down to 270 million – were treated with disdain. What does seem to be acknowledged is that one in three children of the world’s malnourished children live in India – a truly shocking figure.

  Harrowing statistics could be multiplied many times over. When doing so, the individual and collective human struggles and stories of mere survival behind the figures become less and less apparent. The key concern is, as Amartya Sen puts it, the persistence of the poor. It is, he argues, “the tolerance of the intolerable.” The poor rarely are the focus of media attention. There is, Dréze and Sen argue, “a powerful bias in public discussions towards focussing on the lives and concerns of the relatively privileged.” And later when reflecting on the last decade or so, they suggest that, “The history of world development offers few other examples, if any, of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations.”

  Something is going wrong big time in India – something “defective” as Dréze and Sen put it. Using a range of various social indicators from the health, education, nutrition and the economic sectors, they demonstrate that India is falling behind every other Southeast Asian country apart from Pakistan. Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka are all doing better than India in these important areas. This is shocking. Even though India has a 60% higher per capita income than Bangladesh, Bangladesh has overtaken India in areas such as life expectancy, child survival, immunisation rates, reduced fertility rates and even some educational indicators. Comparisons with troubled Nepal are even more damaging to India.

  Tolerating the intolerable in India though doesn’t mean that policy initiatives are absent. As agreed by all political actors and parties, health and education policies that work would have a transformative effect on India’s poor. Similarly, providing income support for those in poverty has long been the subject of discussion and policy initiatives.

  Abolishing hunger?

  On my various visits to India, I began slowly to realise that there had been, or are currently, a number of national, state and regional policies focussing on addressing poverty concerns. The daily newspapers mentioned their acronyms frequently, and subsequent discussions with local people helped me understand these initiatives in a little more detail. Potentially more powerful and beneficial than individual charitable efforts, I felt that knowing more about these developments should be part of the ‘tourist experience’. It was another interesting and surprising journey!

  I came across for example a ‘targeting scheme’ called the 2005 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, renamed MGNREGA). This act provides for every rural resident above the age of 18 years the ‘right to work’ by guaranteeing 100 days of work, minimum wage rates, payment within 15 days and essential worksite facilities. Moreover, the legislation was seen as building on social objectives such empowering women – working outside of the house, earning their own income, opening up a bank account, learning to defend their rights. As Dréze and Sen conclude, despite the shortfalls and weaknesses of the NREGA, the enactment was a very significant development in many ways, especially in the areas of poverty reduction and social equity. As well as its social ambitions, it was an attempt to introduce new principles and practices in rural governance, significantly expand rural public works programmes, introduce changes in wage relationships in the countryside and provide an opportunity for the marginalised to ‘get a foot in the door’. Official figures indicate that around 50 million households have been participating in NREGA every year since 2008 with an average employment level of around 40 person-days per household. Half of the participants are women and half belong to the poorest section of the population, the scheduled-castes. It was only after the introduction of NREGA in 2006 that rural wages began to rise especially for women, from a point of about zero growth in the early 2000s. The peak period for the programme was 2009–2010, when more than 2.8 billion days of employment were provided to members of 54 million rural households. Even at its peak, the programme amounted to only 0.8% of GDP, but nevertheless still making it probably the most efficient employment programme ever.

  Since 2010, however, the NREGA has been in decline as a result of cuts in funding to the
states by central government. Even though the scheme was available to all those who requested it, today it is financially capped. Payment to workers has been delayed with large and growing arrears in payments and days are rationed. In short, states Jayati Ghosh, “central government has been slowly trying to kill this programme by starving it of essential funds.” This was begun by the Congress-led government that introduced the scheme but has gathered pace by the current Modi BJP government. As Ghosh puts it, “the NREGA came into being not because of a benevolent government, but because of pressure from social movements and rural workers. Much more pressure will now be needed to save it.”

  The debates and performance of NREGA laid bare the ideological divisions that continue to consume India today. However, from the evaluation studies that are regularly undertaken, it seems clear that corruption within the scheme is not as widespread as feared and is decreasing, and secondly, that the value of the completed projects is not as wasteful as some have argued. Despite the need for more evidence, Dréze and Sen conclude that the available evidence does suggest that, “NREGA has a great deal of productive potential, provided that adequate structures, including technical support, are in place.”

  Apart from NREGA, the other large programme of economic support for those in most need that is mentioned frequently in the media is the Public Distribution System (PDS). The PDS is a food security programme which distributes subsidised food (such as wheat, sugar and rice) and non-food (such as kerosene) to India’s poor through a network of public distribution shops. There are some 478,000 ‘ration shops’ across the country. Under this scheme, each family below the poverty line who has a ration card is entitled to 35 kilograms of rice or wheat every month. The equivalent figure for the poor just above the poverty line is 25kg. Widespread stories and examples of corruption, erratic distribution of food and the narrow coverage with the early scheme seem to have been addressed in newer versions of the PDS in the mid-2000s, although quality will vary from state to state. Corruption and a lack of transparency continues to be a problem in what is a very expensive scheme – about 1% of India’s gross domestic product or $14 billion dollars a year.