In short, Supriya and her fellow Gurgaon residents procured privately what the state did not provide. They were among a new class of upwardly mobile professionals who had risen up the ranks of India’s booming services sector. Their success reflected not only the government’s failure to provide basic services but also the widening inequality that came to define India at noonday. This too aspiration had wrought.
India is home to one in three poor people worldwide. This means that any effort to reduce global poverty has to start with India. And it has. Indian poverty rates have declined measurably since independence in 1947, though the question of whether it has gone down fast enough since economic reforms began in 1991, especially for the poorest of the poor, remains a matter of fierce dispute.2
The decline in poverty is in part because of the sheer expansion of the economy; steady growth has driven down poverty in India, as it has in many countries, including in China a generation ago.3 But this is only part of the story. For one thing, living standards have improved far more slowly in the countryside than in the cities, which explains why women and men like Mani pack up and leave home. In addition, despite the promising reductions on paper, poverty continues to deprive millions of Indians of the very basic provisions, including enough to eat. Less apparent, even as millions of Indians have climbed above the official poverty line, the vast majority is nowhere near a middle-class existence. In 2011, even after twenty years of steady macroeconomic growth, 59 percent of Indians lived on under $2 a day.4
Then there’s the gap between the rich and poor. In the last twenty-odd years since the economy opened up, inequality has risen sharply. Economists who have plotted the gap between what the richest and poorest segments of the population consume—from the money they spend on food and school fees to motorcycles and mobile phones—have found a clear trend line: Inequality in India went down slowly and steadily between 1951 and 1991, only to spike upward after 1992, both in urban and rural India.5
Living standards between the bottom 40 percent of the population and the rest of their compatriots have also widened. And even though consumption levels have grown overall, they have not grown as fast for those at the bottom as they have for the rest.
As for the poorest of Indian citizens, the bottom 10 percent saw barely any improvement in the first ten years of economic reforms, according to an analysis by the World Bank. (They have fared better in the later years.)6
Strictly by the numbers, inequality in India doesn’t look as bad as the imbalance between the rich and poor in the United States—or even China; in both countries, the Gini coefficient, the conventional measure of economic inequality, is higher than in India.7 But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Inequality in India presents an acute challenge to the idea that democracy can offer even a semblance of equal opportunity. An Indian child born to a poor mother is far less likely to be immunized against childhood diseases, for instance. Also, a poor child is twice as likely to be clinically stunted.
In a democracy of the poor, rising inequality is a recurring challenge for politicians. It explains why at election time over the years, they propose a variety of government initiatives for the poor: cheap rice in some states, free blenders in others, free school uniforms elsewhere. In 2005, the Congress-led coalition government put into motion one of the world’s most ambitious programs to employ millions of those who teetered on the starvation line: a massive public works program that promised a hundred days of employment to men and women in the countryside.
Some of these government programs leaked like old faucets. Barely half of the subsidized food grains that were supposed to feed the poor actually reached their intended beneficiaries, according to one official audit. This was not insignificant; nearly half of all Indians buy grains from these ration shops, often paying bribes to get a ration card. Nor was graft limited to ration shops. About 60 percent of the food meant for an early-childhood feeding program was found to have been siphoned off, according to another audit.8 Widows’ pensions sometimes vanished into the pockets of local bureaucrats—including, for many years, the payment that Mani’s mother was entitled to. Dead people collected scholarships. The mounting evidence of corruption finally prompted the government to try, in 2012, an ambitious biometric identification project designed to funnel benefits to the right people. By 2015, India went a step further. It rolled out the world’s largest cash-transfer program for the poor.
If Gurgaon represents India’s glossy new riches, Mani’s village, Birhu-Patratoli, in the state of Jharkhand, represents its vast distress. I have asked her many times, in many ways if she was coerced to leave home. No, she says each time. She chose to leave. She chose to be someone.
Mani’s Jharkhand spreads out next to Anupam’s Bihar. Parts of the state are jungle; other parts are rocky and arid. Jharkhand is among the most destitute states in the entire country, but it is rich in minerals, especially coal. Day and night, trucks clatter along the highway that abuts Mani’s village, ferrying black gold from the coal mines to power plants across the land.
Despite its abundance of coal, there is no electricity in Birhu-Patratoli, nor in many adivasi villages like it. Evenings are illuminated by flashlights and kerosene lamps—and in the last few years, by the blue glow of cell phones. Nearly every home has a cell phone, but to charge the battery, you must walk over to a shop that sits on the highway and is connected to the power grid. Once the phones are charged, they bring Bollywood songs, cricket scores, and the election-time promises of politicians by SMS. When they are dead, there is only the stirring of trees and the trucks clattering down the highway.
The village where Mani’s niece, Phoolo, grew up is not as blessed as Mani’s. It is deep in the woods, up in the dry, red, hardscrabble hills. There is no highway nearby, nor a paved road for miles. No place to charge a cell phone easily.
It was there that Phoolo was walking home from school one afternoon, in early 2011, when a local ne’er-do-well by the name of Harko followed her. Harko had been stalking her for a while. He belonged to what Phoolo called the mama-log, literally the uncles, but which here meant that he was affiliated with Maoist insurgents who roamed freely in those parts. According to Phoolo, Harko came that afternoon with two friends, a pistol, and a less than charming pick-up line: Marry me or I’ll kill you. It was the second time he had proposed to her. The first time, her mother heard about it and chewed him out. But on this day Phoolo’s mother was not home. She was attending a wedding in a neighboring village. Phoolo’s brother was out drinking with the mama-log. Phoolo’s home was empty.
According to Phoolo, Harko and his friend told her to come with them. Was she forced? It’s hard to say. No doubt she was afraid. These were men with guns. She did as she was told. She boarded a car that waited on a dirt road outside the village. Two other girls got in the car at another village farther down, and they were taken to the train station in Ranchi, a couple of hours away. They were told to get into a train so packed that they all had to sit on the floor. This was the Sampark Kranti Express, the train used by thousands of Jharkhandi migrant workers to travel to Delhi and back. Phoolo put her head on her knees and fell asleep. She was still wearing her school uniform: a white button-down shirt, a blue skirt, and a belt.
The train to Delhi took a full day. There, she says, she was first detained in a two-room flat with dozens of other women and men. They were all adivasis from Jharkhand villages close to hers. One by one, they were dispatched across Delhi to work as domestics. Phoolo landed with a clan of six in a neighborhood on the northern frontier of the city. She swept floors, washed dishes, laundered and pressed clothes, and rolled chapatis at whatever hour her employers felt like eating, which was generally late. She was told to sleep on a straw mat on the kitchen floor. She was not allowed to step out of the house.
I could not corroborate Phoolo’s version of events. She had no address for her employer. There was no police record. What I do know is that Phoolo told this same story to members of her family. I also kno
w that her predicament is not uncommon.
Advocates say trafficking has been rising steadily in the 2000s, as urban Indians prosper, move out of extended family homes and into their own apartments, fueling the demand for more maids.
Many of them are children. By the government’s own estimates, nearly 4.5 million children work for a living in India; the United Nations Children’s Fund says the numbers are far higher.9
Like Phoolo, an estimated 20 percent of all child laborers between age five and fourteen—both boys and girls—work as domestic servants. Their parents may or may not be fully aware; or they may not want to know. (Children work in brick kilns, carpet factories, and brothels too.)
A United Nations report published in 2013 found that parents were sometimes offered cash up front for their children, plus promises of a better life.10 The U.N. investigation went on to say that adivasi villages were among the most fertile places for employment agents to recruit—and the recruiters, as in Phoolo’s case, were adivasis themselves. Family members, the report concluded, rarely lodged complaints with the authorities if their children were missing.
Jharkhand is believed to be among the worst affected states—except there are no precise figures, because state officials have not bothered to submit missing children’s data for the national crime statistics database since 2009. A state plan was drawn up to combat trafficking, but it wasn’t implemented.
To be clear, the law prohibits child labor. The law prohibits trafficking. The law is often disregarded.11
I am roundly discouraged from visiting Phoolo’s village, which is called Sokoy. People say it will be hard to find. They say it will be a waste of my time. No one there will talk to a stranger. They tell me it is full of mama-log, jungle ka-mama-log, and bhai-log, as if just uttering the word “Maoist” might invite danger from one side or another.12
Of course, all this naysaying makes me all the more determined. Luckily, my driver is game, and so is a Ranchi-based journalist whom I have persuaded to help me on this reporting trip. And so we set off from Ranchi early one morning, picking up a case of bottled water and a guide who speaks the local language from the nearest district headquarters town, and try to find Sokoy. It is nowhere near a highway, nor on a map. The directions from locals go something like this: drive up that red dirt road, veer left at a banyan tree, turn right at a tombstone, drive past a Shiv temple, go deeper into the bush until the road ends at a giant tamarind tree.
Sure enough, the road ends at a giant tamarind tree, which is full of bats—screeching, argumentative bats. In its shade stands a row of crooked gravestones and a toothless woman of imprecise age, sitting on her haunches, dismembering a jackfruit. Scrawny chickens peck at the ground. The bats keep screeching. The village otherwise is a hush.
The warnings are accurate. Sokoy does not reveal its secrets. No one wants to talk to a stranger. Who knows who they think I am. A cop? a do-gooder? a ghost, shaped like a woman, skin like an Indian’s, a notebook in hand, asking questions in an odd language.
Eventually, I confirm that Phoolo and another girl were forcibly taken away the year before. I learn also that two boys, suspected of having abducted them, were subsequently stoned to death. Public stonings are apparently not so rare. Police rarely show up here. The villagers don’t want to tell me the names of the boys.
Deeper inside the village, I find a work gang prospecting for water, part of the national public works program designed for the very poor. Two years of drought have sucked the wells dry. The village is short of even drinking water. Also, two years of drought have meant no one is able to sow rice in their fields. The villagers have had to borrow money to buy rice that comes from far away. They have sold their animals, if they had any. They have sent out their able-bodied children to find work elsewhere.
Digging the new well this morning are four men, armed with sledgehammers, their bare chests glistening with sweat. It has taken them four months to dig down to thirty-two feet. They are now close to the reward: a small pool of brown water sloshes around their feet.
Nearly seventy years of freedom, I discover, has not brought Sokoy electricity, irrigation canals, or even a reliable source of drinking water.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the leaders of newly sovereign India debated the language of its constitution, one of the sole adivasi members of the Constituent Assembly, Jaipal Singh Munda, gave a haunting speech. He introduced himself as the original Indian, the jungli, the man of the jungle. Everyone else, he said, correctly, was a newcomer to the land. He said he trusted the newcomers. He cited the prime minister by name.
“I take Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at his word,” Munda said. “I take you all at your word that now we are going to start a new chapter, a new chapter of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected.”
His faith was misplaced.
If the Constitution promised equality of opportunity—indeed, if it promised to uplift those who had been neglected for generations—free India has failed on this promise very badly.
Today, two generations later, there are an estimated 84 million adivasis, around 8 percent of the population of India. They are technically outside the Hindu caste system—literally, outcastes—and their social, economic, and political status is the lowest of any other social group in India, lower than Dalits, who sit at the bottom of the caste ladder.
The adivasis’ greatest curse is to live on India’s richest lands, which are full of coal and iron ore, bauxite and uranium. Those commodities have been coveted since the early days of independence, when Nehru’s government sought to industrialize the nation. The demand for those riches has sharply grown as India has prospered. Adivasis have paid a high price. Dams have flooded their lands. Mines have gutted their hills, including blatantly illegal ones. Among the millions of Indians displaced for industrial and infrastructure projects, adivasis are disproportionately represented.13
Rich as their land is, adivasis on average are India’s most destitute. According to 2012 figures, 44 percent of them live below the official poverty line, compared with 27.5 percent of Indians as a whole. And poverty among adivasis has fallen more slowly than for any other social group—including for Dalits.
Child deaths are disproportionately high among adivasi children. Adivasi mothers are significantly less likely to get prenatal care. Adivasi children are less likely to have access to care for basic childhood ailments like diarrhea and respiratory disease. Hunger hits adivasi children the hardest too.14
Being underweight means more than being scrawny and short. It means being far more vulnerable to everyday childhood illnesses—and to be destined to be intellectually stunted for life.
I should point out here that while the figures are particularly bad in the adivasi belt, childhood hunger remains inexplicably high in India, even after two decades of galloping economic growth. According to 2014 government figures, 30 percent of Indian children under the age of five are clinically underweight. Nevertheless, this percentage is a vast improvement from the last figure, released in 2006, which found a child malnutrition rate of nearly 43 percent. On a global index, produced by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India’s improved numbers place it somewhere near Angola and only slightly better than Bangladesh, which is far poorer.15
This is entirely a man-made problem. Hunger in India is not like hunger in barren countries where nothing grows, like Yemen or Niger. India as a whole produces more than enough food to feed its people. But the food doesn’t reach the people it should.
That is to say, there are vast parts of my daughter’s India where the aspiration story is hard to swallow, where hunger is such an everyday curse that the promise of freedom seems not so much undelivered as grotesque.
Children no longer die of hunger as much as they did in Jaipal Singh Munda’s day. They live with it. They grow up short, frail, disease-prone, less capable. Cursed in India’s most prosperous era.
* * *
It’s not that the government doesn’t try to address the problem. It’s just that many of its programs—even ambitious, well-meaning ones—are poorly designed and destined to do very little.
On the drive back from Sokoy, I stop to speak to Dr. Anjulan Aind, a government doctor who runs a clinic for the sunken-eyed and skinny-boned children of the adivasi belt. Her Malnutrition Treatment Centre is housed in the main government hospital that serves this wide swath of adivasi hamlets. This district, which contains both Mani’s and Phoolo’s villages, is among the one hundred worst districts in the country for childhood hunger.
The kids who come into Dr. Aind’s care are in some ways the luckiest. They have been identified by a village health worker. (India has a vast network of village health workers, but their job descriptions are so pyrrhic that to really fulfill their responsibilities properly, you would have to have a master’s in public health and work twenty-eight hours a day.) Their mothers have been persuaded to bring them to the clinic. They have escaped death, for now.
The clinic itself is no more than a room with five metal beds. There, Dr. Aind weighs the children, measures them from head to toe, and records the circumference of their arms. She squeezes peanut butter into their mouths if their guts are strong enough to digest it; rice porridge, if they are not. She tests them for anemia and tuberculosis. She has never seen a child who is not anemic.
Much depends, as always, on a mother’s fate. A 2011 study of the hundred worst districts, conducted by an Indian advocacy group called the Naandi Foundation, found that malnutrition was significantly higher among mothers who cannot read, which is the case for nearly every woman who comes to Dr. Aind’s ward.16
Mothers are paid a hundred rupees a day to bring their children here. It’s meant to be an incentive, as much for them as their families, who otherwise may not let them come to the treatment center at all.
The End of Karma Page 8