The Povertydog

Jug Suraiya writes in the TOI “Poverty, like AIDS, is not shameful. What is shameful is that more than 60 years after independence poverty continues to exist in our midst, in the midst of India Shining, and India Winning, and India Rising, like a curable, or least preventable, but chronically neglected disease. The reaction against Slumdog Millionaire and other works of its kind that have shown us the face of our disowned poverty is rooted in a misplaced sense of shame. What we are or ought to be ashamed of is not our poverty but of our attempts to wish it away, to sweep it under the carpet, to decry all depictions of it as commercial exploitation and social and cultural voyeurism”. 

State invented poverty

There is a quote in the ET article from Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize awardee: 

He said the “...poverty is an artificial creation. It doesn’t belong to human civilisation, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty (sic). The only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies.”   

Further it is more opt to remember from his Nobel lecture that the “Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (such as concept of business, credit- worthiness, entrepreneurship, employment) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (such as financial institutions, where poor are left out). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people”.

Every invention is folly for some time

Sadanand Menon writes in the Business Standard highlighting the gun of representation in new literature and art. And he says that “.creative pieces like White Tiger and Slumdog, in fact, purchase ratings and approval and awards abroad by swivelling the spotlight on the seamier side of the Indian reality; that this gore-and-grime realism is not the ‘real’ India and merely represents an opportunist re-orientation of poverty as pornography.” 

I hunch that he is not at all aware of what the meaning of political representations. Did the politician fulfill the voter’s desirers? Did the bureaucrats represent the tax payer’s desirers as they live by public taxes? 

It is these people who” represents” “merely an opportunist re-orientation of poverty as pornography.” 

Vicious cycle of politics or poverty but if it is tourism, politicians start residing as slumdog……of life

Sudheendra Kulkarni says in Indian Express few but permanent questions about poverty in India “but what can one say about his political maturity, as displayed by his decision to invite a foreign dignitary to undertake poverty tourism in his constituency? Would a British MP take Pranab Mukherjee on a tour of the poorer quarters of London and show what developmental works he has initiated? Would an Italian MP invite Rahul to take a look at poverty in his country and make it an international media event? Have we ever seen Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao (or Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who are tipped to become China’s next President and Prime Minister) escorting a foreign visitor on a tour of the backward areas of their country? Let’s not forget that there is a lot of hidden poverty in Europe. There is stark poverty in China too, in spite of the fact that China was last week adjudged the third largest economy in the world. 

Who has given Britain, one wonders, the right to advise us either on Kashmir or on development and poverty alleviation? After all, our erstwhile colonial master was one of the culprits who created the Kashmir problem in the first place. As our colonial history incontrovertibly shows, Britain was also responsible for the pillage and pauperisation of India—one of the important factors that pushed the families of Karma Devis and Shiv Kumaris into poverty. Of course, we cannot blame Britain for our own failures in poverty eradication in the post-Independence era. But who is responsible for these failures, if not those who have ruled India for the longest period since 1947?”

Poor knew how to escape from Poverty

Here is a book review by BIBEK DEBROY on “Out of Poverty” by Paul Polak.

It is worth to note that “He has written, and has been written about. But this is his first book. “I hate books about poverty that make you feel guilty, as well as dry, academic ones that put you to sleep. Working to alleviate poverty is a lively, exciting field capable of generating new hope and inspiration, not feelings of gloom and doom. Learning the truth about poverty generates disruptive innovations capable of enriching the lives of rich people even more than those of poor people.” This is not an academic and dry book. It is part autobiographical, partly about IDE and mostly about the poor and how their lives were transformed. It is anecdotal, and written in a style impossible to describe in a review. Without any qualification, this is a book everyone should read”.

And “Says Polak, “The most important poverty eradication myth is that we can donate people out of poverty. Incredibly, Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Development Goals Initiative, believes that people who live on a dollar a day are too poor to invest their own money to move out of poverty… But this type of subsidy solution is endemic in the development world... To move out of poverty, poor people have to invest their own time and money. The path out of poverty lies in releasing the energy of Third World entrepreneurs.”

See my other post here

Road to Poverty reduction by construction, education and infrastructure building!

Mr C.T.Kurien writes “In India road construction is the highest contributor to poverty reduction and in China it is government expenditure on education that makes the largest contribution in reducing rural poverty”. 

Further the “Spending on rural infrastructure is another top contributor to poverty reduction in most countries studied. Expenditures leading to increased non-farm employment are also major contributors to poverty reduction”.

In fact “in Thailand the major contribution to poverty reduction has come from investments in rural electrification”

Better the NREGS should be scraped instead the money should be spend on building infrastructure in rural and urban areas.

Poverty Survey and Mind Musings (PSMM) by Chandra

The fate of POVERTY INDIA has been number only, no matter who involved in it, is human or any other species. I wonder that how the number is big problems among the crowd of human intellectual animals whose fight is for one likeminded bone! Or number whatever it is. The below one of the article that raises several questions killing the poverty debate!
Don't ask, don't tell by Surjit S Bhalla September 04, 2004
Something I have never understood, but for which I would welcome comments and help, is why there is a large intellectual constituency in India that just cannot acknowledge the progress in the war on poverty.
Any mention of a significant drop in poverty in India is met with derision, contempt, incredulousness, and finally, and invariably, with the comment that "you just don't know what you are talking about".
And then a gentle, friendly comment: "Please travel through India, visit a village for at least once in your life, and then find out how incredibly wrong you are."
Then comes the clincher: "When I visited SEWA (headquartered in Ahmedabad) or Sewa Mandir (headquartered in Udaipur), I was told how the poverty statistics the government puts out just fail to capture the reality of the poor."
Now SEWA, like many other NGOs, has done, and continues to do, laudatory work. So much so that today, the analysis of poverty, (nee the conclusion that poverty is as rampant as ever in India) has taken on a new lease of life.
Well-endowed NGOs, located in regional metropolises, are defining the terms of the debate. These NGOs have become not only the eyes of NRIs and foreigners, but also their computers, able to spit out considerably more authoritative estimates of the magnitude of poverty among a billion people -- and the trend!
For this ingenuity, otherwise reasonable scholars genuflect, and do so regardless of the cost to their reputation. They must feel that there is no cost -- after all, nobody can dare accuse them of not having done proper research because after all, they have talked to the poor; more accurately, talked to people who have talked to the poor!
All of this would not matter if a hundred flowers were allowed to bloom; but the tragedy is that the Indian government is neurotically obsessed with the notion that economic reforms (even and perhaps especially those instituted by the present Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh) have not helped the poor; that a new NGO/Left paradigm of "development with a human face" is the need of the hour, and that those who question those with good intentions themselves have bad intentions.
Large NGOs facilitate large foreign-based researchers, making available to them their local fiefdoms for travel, interviews, field research, etc.
And then this is sold to our over-eager politically correct government as the true underlying reality. There is another aspect to worry about: NGOs cannot get more money for development if they show that their need is less!
Donors would then rather go to Africa, where there is a large demonstrable need, and the Indian NGO will relatively lose out to the African NGO.
Better therefore to paint a gloomy picture -- this way all parties in the exchange are better off. The NGO gets more money, the donor babus make their owners assuage their guilt, and who knows maybe the poor also benefit.
The dilemma of domestic NGOs is exactly the dilemma faced by international NGOs (INGOs) like the World Bank, United Nations, and their "poor" cousins like the Asian Development Bank.
These organisations, bureaucracies, are dependent on "guilt money". If you show to the rich donors that poverty is declining at only a snail's pace, then it means that whatever is going on out there (globalisation, governments, greedy multinationals, etc.) is just not working. Hence more money, for more power, for more bureaucracy to fight poverty, etc.
If instead, these INGOs were to show that large-scale poverty reduction was being made, then how will they raise money? Like everyone else in this globalised competitive world, the INGOs need to raise capital to pay salaries.
And the staff at the donors' shop need to keep their jobs as approvers of money to fight poverty. So the entire chain has a self-interest in preserving the myth that poverty has not declined by much.
Some individual countries, however, take pride in reducing poverty. China, for example, refuses to allow the World Bank, or anyone else, to mess about with her poverty data.
So poverty in China shows a large decline -- and a decline that has caused a large dent in world poverty. So how to show that world poverty remains a problem -- never mind, India is there -- and especially influential interest groups there who want to show that poverty has not declined, perhaps even increased.
If it works for INGOs, it should work for states in India. They are strapped for funds to pay salaries and replenish electoral funds.
And Indian politicians just love to honour the commitment to fight poverty -- so much so that the less a state reduces poverty, the more money it gets from the Planning Commission to fight poverty. Just the same as the domestic NGOs and the INGOs. It never got, it cannot, get better than this (Montek, take note).
I should mention that in all these organisations there is considerable heterogeneity -- and considerable disagreement with the party line.
At a World Bank seminar on India some six months ago, Mr Michael Carter, country director, remarked: "The big unsung story about India is the rapid strides it has made in poverty reduction!" Clearly no guilt money involved with Mr Carter -- but has he checked with his bosses in Washington?
If he did, he would have found that he was not acting in the interests of the World Bank. Its self-produced data show that despite 20 years of growth, Indian poverty declined by only 15 percentage points. Official data show the reduction to be 15 pp; official data corrected for statistical irregularities show the decline to be 22 pp. And in 2000, there was almost three times as much poverty in India as in neighbouring Pakistan (13.4 per cent in 1998).
Perhaps Mr Carter (and the Indian Left) needs to accept the INGOs' "virtual reality": that dictatorship, civil strife, terrorism, and extremely slow economic growth make the best environment for reducing poverty "Big Time".
Poverty figures in India, especially for 1999-2000, are hotly contested, and believed to be a gross understatement of poverty. Data for the next year, 2000-01, can serve as a useful cross-check.
Curiously, but not surprisingly, these data have not been utilised at all by those claiming that the 1999 figures were suspect. The figures for 2000-01 corroborate, in every dimension, the facts yielded by the ostensibly inaccurate 1999 data.
Unfortunately, NSS consumption surveys are problematical for interpreting poverty trends: the mean consumption growth shown by these surveys has been very low, especially in contrast to the growth revealed by national accounts data.
It is growth rates, which determine trends, and it is the trend in poverty decline that is controversial. The NSS consumption growth is at the low end of the range; national accounts consumption growth, and NSS survey growth in incomes, and wage rates, are clustered and close to each other.
In other words, the NSS understates consumption growth, and understates poverty decline. Growth in incomes of the poorest has been much larger than growth in average consumption.
Thus, it is a considerable stretch to conclude that there has been minimal poverty decline in India, as some left intellectuals continue to proclaim.
The reality is just the opposite. The World Bank believes that poverty in India is 35 per cent; official government of India data suggest it is 24 per cent; and if these official data are corrected for definition differences and accurate price data, then poverty in 2000 is only 17.5 per cent, i.e. fully half the figure reported by the World Bank.
Mr Carter is right -- poverty reduction in India is an unsung success story. But he should look within his own organisation, and its ideological associates worldwide, to find out as to why it is so unsung.
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