To highlight the problem of extreme poverty in modern India by drawing attention to the fact of children dying of hunger this "Opinion Piece" by Bhartendu Kumar Singh reminds us that:
The recent death of a Jharkhand girl due to hunger may have jolted the public conscience, but this is not an isolated incident. Indeed, this is part of the series of untold stories where many children die of hunger even before they are able to walk on their feet.Many of those who survive are condemned to a life of hunger, malnutrition and stunted growth. If we are not able to tackle these issues at a systemic level, it is because of our obsession with the militaristic concept of security. National security, in the Indian context, is essentially being defined in narrow terms of ‘defence of national borders, skies and coastlines’. Internal security gets a secondary treatment in the national security discourse. Even within the realm of internal security, our entire focus is on law and order. The notion of ‘development’ as another aspect of security is simply missing. That, perhaps, explains why lack of ‘development’ leads to recurrent deaths, including those of children. The hunger death comes at a time when India is pushing its great power claims by positioning itself as a front ranking economic and military power. But, we are laggards on some key human development indices.
Poverty alleviation record poor
For example, the Global Human Index (GHI) 2017 published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in October this year puts India at a lowly rank of 100 amongst 119 developing countries measured for GHI with a score of 31.4 and is placed in the ‘serious’ category. Even North Korea fares better than us. Further, India has not made much progress in poverty alleviation in last 25 years despite a series of programmes, indicting in effect, our past poverty alleviation efforts! India fares equally badly in other aspects of human development such as education, infanticide, women empowerment, unequal distribution of wealth etc. One finds children, often under five, begging on roads of our cities.
In the Global Research article Poverty and Rising Social Inequality in India Colin Todhunter says:
The issue of poverty keeps rearing its inconvenient head in India. The Planning Commission tends to keep on shifting the poverty line, but it is always at a ludicrously low level, which underestimates the numbers actually living in poverty. But playing fast and loose with India’s poverty line has almost become a trendy pastime.
The truth is that poverty is an embarrassment. It is an embarrassment to many of India’s rich and to a good number of politicians, who like to portray the country as an emerging superpower, with its space programme, sophisticated weaponry, sports towns, growth figures, Formula 1 race track and gleaming malls.Apart from such headline-grabbing trappings, India also houses the second largest number of affluent people in the world, with three million households having over $100,000 of investable funds. While this represents just 1.25 per cent of households, it is again the kind of phenomenon that some love to promote as part the myth of India sitting at the top table of nations.
Reality check. One in four people in India is hungry and every second child is underweight and stunted. In 2011, India was 73rd out of 88 countries listed in the annual Global Hunger Index, six places down from the previous year. The 2010 Multidimensional Poverty Index indicated that eight Indian states account for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African countries combined. According to this measure, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal have 421 million poor people. This is more than the 410 million poor in the poorest African countries.
Instead of concentrating on GDP growth figures, how about we focus on the annual poverty alleviation figure? The former fluctuates between eight and nine per cent, while the latter is 0.8 per cent, virtually the same as it was 20 years ago. The sacred scripture of free market ‘trickle-down’ dogma has not delivered.
But, hold on a minute. The eight or nine per cent GDP economic growth figures tell us that India is thriving. Right? Wrong. The rich in India are thriving, but the poor, and these days given the inflationary pressures, many of the middle classes too, are struggling to get by. If the growth figures tell us anything, it is that they – the poor and large sections of the middle class – can be said to be paying for the lifestyles of India’s rich.
The logic of ‘development’
Step inside the gated communities or a plush 27-storey one billion dollar plus Mumbai house and arrive in a Forbes nightmare world of privilege and wealth. Step inside the brand spanking new shopping malls, and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in London or New York, with the plastic food joints, bland international chains and an air-conditioned macburger world of cola dens and coffee bars. These swish temples of modernity are a statement of perhaps where India wanted to be, of where part of India thinks it now is.
But India is capitalism’s success story, isn’t it?Or so the media like to tell us. Despite the logic of capitalism being to drive down costs and increase profits, politicians in the West are trying to change perceptions of India among their own populations. They are attempting to eradicate the notion of it being a land of call centres and back offices that takes jobs from the West and replace it with the idea that trade between India and the West is a two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth and higher living standards for all concerned.
The reality is somewhat different. For example, a deal struck between India and the US for Harley-Davidsons a couple of years ago will not benefit plants in the US because a new assembly unit in India is to be built. Setting up shop in India not only often leads to the use of cheap exploited labour that works long hours with few if any rights, but also puts downward pressure on existing labour costs in the West. This is the whole logic behind ‘outsourcing’. It’s a win-win situation for CEOs and shareholders alike.
Servicing the well-to-do by providing them with Harleys, overpriced coffee and i-phones is what ‘development’ is all about for those who will financially profit. On his visit to India in 2010, it was noticeable that Barak Obama and his entourage had little to say about the 75 per cent of the population that lives on less than two dollars a day. Not much was said about India’s warped development that creates rich-list billionaires while maintaining so many in poverty or merely hovering above it. There seems to be no invite, no reservation at the top table, no impending arrival at destination corporate-driven-nirvana for those people and others like them.
In the West, workers’ jobs and wages are heading one way – downwards. In large parts of India, especially with increasing food, worklessness and petrol costs, things are just as tough. Listening to political leaders you’d be hard pressed to notice though. They and the media are adept in twisting the truth and passing off such things to their respective populations as necessary blips in the journey towards to some cheap con-trick notion of the promised-land.
There is a shift in power occurring across the world – from the poor and less well off to the rich, boosted by an economic system that ensures the flow of wealth goes upwards via what academic David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and these days reflected in massive handouts to bankers, public services cutbacks or wages that continue to fall in real terms. When politicians speak of ‘inclusive growth’, it is nice talk. But that’s all it is. How could it be anything else, especially in India as the government continues to sell the country to western financial and corporate interests?
The new colonial masters
India has been moving increasingly closer to the US in recent years and, by implication, complying with its geo-political and economic hegemony. In return for the US sanctioning, supplying and facilitating the development of India’s nuclear industry (despite India not being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and having developed a nuclear bomb – contrast its treatment to that of Iran, which is a signatory and cannot be proved to be pursing a nuclear weapons programme), the Indian economy is being prized open on behalf of western retail, agribusiness, pharmaceutical and various other concerns.
On August 15, India celebrated Independence Day. Some 65 years earlier, Nehru stood in Delhi and spoke about a tryst with destiny. Free from the shackles of British colonialism, India was on course for a bright new future.
But appealing to base instincts, greed and narcissism has become the priority value of ‘modern’ India. Shopping and consumerism have become the concerns and priorities of India’s misinformed and misled creamy layer. Misinformed by news outlets that pass off infotainment for news. Misinformed by a government that cosies up to western multi-nationals with secretive ‘Memorandums of Understanding’ and then proceeds to target some of the poorest people in the country as ‘the enemy within’.
Part of India’s own self proclaimed ‘war on terror’ is taking place in the highly mineral rich mountains and jungles of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh. State governments have already signed hundreds of agreements with companies to begin mining and build steel and aluminum plants and other industries. How easy it was for the Indian government to discredit any legitimate protestor in those regions as a Maoist or Naxalite insurgent. How easy it was for it to then attempt to secure those areas for rich foreign companies by killing thousands and forcing nearly 50,000 adivasis (tribal people) into camps in order to control dissent.
Some 300,000 people have been forcibly displaced. Hundreds of thousands of security personnel have poured into the region with sophisticated military hardware.
Despite Nehru’s misty eyed views, the Indian and western elites are now the new colonial masters in India. Is this the bright new future he had in mind?
But imagine for a moment a world where India pursued a more independent path that would be strident in its rejection of predatory capitalism and US-led militarism increasingly aimed at China, India’s neighbour.
Imagine a model of development that would in fact be inspired by particular policies adopted by the likes of Cuba, Bhutan, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Bolivia, which place strong emphasis on health, ‘happiness’, education or bio-diverse agriculture and not least on the rights of indigenous peoples, sustainability, respect for the environment and/or common ownership
Unfortunately, imagination does not match the reality.
For many foreigners who visit India, it is the land of the great philosophies. It is the land of spirituality, morality and enlightenment. Many view India through this distorted prism. It is this rose-tinted perception that brings them here. For other foreigners, however, it is a land ripe for the taking. And Washington knows it.
India threw off the shackles of colonialism in 1947. And long ago it threw off the shackles of any moral philosophy. There’s a new game in town. And it’s based on selling anything you can get your hands on to the highest bidder, even the soul of the country. Now there is a new colonial master on the block.Whether it’s the waging of war on its poorest people or the collusion with foreign governments and corporations to loot the economy for profit, successive Indian administrations have conspired to deceive their own people as they work hand in glove with Wall Street and proponents of ‘free trade’ and neo-liberalism to sell the lie of freedom and independence to an affluent section of the population eager to believe it and willing to regard the oppression of the country’s poorest folk as ‘collateral damage’ in the drive to secure ‘necessary economic infrastructure’.
With 75 per cent of the population living on less than two dollars a day, the influence of western agribusiness leading to well over 200,000 farmers’ suicides and large parts of the country under military law, politicians and the media abroad still talk of India as capitalism’s miracle, as democracy’s great success story. The old clichés and convenient lies are often trotted out about a land of enterprise and growth, Bollywood and glitz, millionaires and cyber parks.
But there’s always Bollywood novacaine, the infotainment obsessed media or the latest Forbes rich list to distract or dull the pain, isn’t there? Better still – the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen in drawing a new poverty line will do just fine.The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Colin Todhunter, Global Research, 2012
This article for The Hindu provides a global and local context for the "wealth gap":
How does inequality in India really look? How much share does the country’s poorest 10 per cent have in its total wealth, how much does the richest, and are the rich getting richer?
For one, the difference in the wealth share held by India’s poorest 10 per cent and the richest 10 per cent is enormous; India’s richest 10 per cent holds 370 times the share of wealth that it’s poorest hold.
Poverty in India
There is a Wikipedia page on Poverty in India that considers the problem of poverty over an historical period that includes the colonial era under the British:
The 19th century and early 20th century saw increasing poverty in India during the colonial era. Over this period, the colonial government de-industrialized India by reducing garments and other finished products manufacturing by artisans in India, importing these from Britain's expanding industry with 19th century industrial innovations, while simultaneously encouraging conversion of more land into farms, and of agricultural exports from India.Eastern regions of India along the Ganges river plains, such as those now known as eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, were dedicated to producing poppy and opium, which were then exported to southeast and east Asia particularly China, with the trade an exclusive monopoly first of the East India Company, and later the colonial British institutions.
The economic importance of this shift from industry to agriculture in India was large; by 1850, it created nearly 1,000 square kilometres of poppy farms in India in its fertile Ganges plains, led to two opium wars in Asia, with the second opium war fought between 1856 and 1860.After China accepted opium trade, the colonial government dedicated more land exclusively to poppy, the opium agriculture in India rose from 1850 through 1900, when over 500,000 acres of the most fertile Ganges basin farms were devoted to poppy cultivation, opium processing factories owned by colonial officials were expanded in Benares and Patna, and shipping expanded from Bengal to the ports of East Asia such as Hong Kong, all under exclusive monopoly of the British. By early 20th century, 3 out of 4 Indians were employed in agriculture, famines were common, and food consumption per capita declined in every decade. In London, the late 19th century British parliament debated the repeated incidence of famines in India, and the impoverishment of Indians due to this diversion of agriculture land from growing food staples to growing poppy for opium export under orders of the colonial British empire.
These colonial policies moved unemployed artisans into farming, and transformed India as a region increasingly abundant in land, unskilled labour and low productivity, and scarce in skilled labour, capital and knowledge. On an inflation adjusted 1973 Rupee basis, the average income of Indian agrarian labourer was Rs. 7.20 per year in 1885, against an inflation adjusted poverty line of Rs. 23.90 per year. Thus, not only was the average income below poverty line, the intensity of poverty was severe. The intensity of poverty increased from 1885 to 1921, then began a reversal. However, the absolute poverty rates continued to be very high through the 1930s. The colonial policies on taxation and its recognition of land ownership claims of zamindars and mansabdars, or Mughal era nobility, made a minority of families wealthy, while it weakened the ability of poorer peasants to command land and credit. The resulting rising landlessness and stagnant real wages intensified poverty.
The National Planning Committee of 1936 noted the appalling poverty of undivided India.
(...) there was lack of food, of clothing, of housing and of every other essential requirement of human existence... the development policy objective should be to get rid of the appalling poverty of the people.The National Planning Committee, notes Suryanarayana, then defined goals in 1936 to alleviate poverty by setting targets in terms of nutrition (2400 to 2800 calories per adult worker), clothing (30 yards per capita per annum) and housing (100 sq. ft per capita). This method of linking poverty as a function of nutrition, clothing and housing continued in India after it became independent from British colonial empire.
— Nehru, The Discovery of India, (1946)
These poverty alleviation goals were theoretical, with administrative powers resident in the British Empire. Poverty ravaged India. In 1943, for example, despite rising agricultural output in undivided South Asia, the Bengal famine killed millions of Indians from starvation, disease and destitution.Destitution was so intense in Bengal, Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Orissa, that entire families and villages were "wiped out" of existence. Village artisans, along with sustenance farming families, died from lack of food, malnutrition and a wave of diseases. The 1943 famine was not an isolated tragedy. Devastating famines impoverished India every 5 to 8 years in late 19th century and the first half of 20th century. Between 6.1 and 10.3 million people starved to death in British India during the 1876-1879 famine, while another 6.1 to 8.4 million people died during 1896-1898 famine.
The Lancet reported 19 million died from starvation and consequences of extreme poverty in British India, between 1896 and 1900.Sir MacDonnell observed the suffering and poverty in 1900, and noted "people died like flies" in Bombay.
Update
Delivering the inaugural lecture at the three-day Sam Moyo Memorial Conference on “Land and Labour Questions in the Global South”, Utsa Patnaik said that the estimated drain from India to Britain over the period from 1765 to 1938 was a whopping 9.184 trillion pounds, several times the size of the UK’s GDP today.
Patnaik, who is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP), JNU, said that the policies followed by Britain during its colonial rule in India were so disastrous that per capita food grains availability in India declined drastically from 197.3 kg per year in 1909-14 to 136.8 kg per year in 1946.
This was because the system was strongly income-deflating (reducing the purchasing power of the people), which enabled the squeezing out of export goods from a poor population. The result was a fall in per capita food availability and declining nutritional intake.
In India, just as also happened in many countries in the Caribbean, local producers were set to work to produce commodities – particularly primary commodities which the colonial powers could never produce themselves in their home countries. The colonial powers then proceeded to appropriate these commodities.
In the Indian case, this appropriation took the form of getting Indian peasants and labourers to produce an enormous global export surplus which earned gold and foreign exchange.
“But the whole of this global export surplus earnings disappeared into the account of the Secretary of State for India in London. Not a penny of it, of sterling or financial gold, was allowed to flow back to the colonised country. Then how did the producers get paid? Very clever. They got paid out of their own taxes!” said Patnaik.
Surplus budgets were being operated systematically in British-ruled India for the best part of 200 years.
“When you tax a population and you do not spend all the taxation within the country, but you set aside a third or more for purchasing export goods, the operation of such surplus budgets deflates mass incomes. It puts a tremendous squeeze on the peasantry.”
“No country in the world today in the Global South has a per capita food availability as low as the level India had reached by the year 1946.”
The amount of wealth drained out of India by Britain can be calculated by estimating the present value of the commodity export surplus – the estimate of 9.184 trillion pounds has been arrived at by calculating the present value at a relatively low 5 percent interest rate.
“He says Britain should return the money it drained from India. But the fact is that this is impossible. Britain would collapse; it does not have the capacity to pay even a fraction of what it drained over 200 years.”
Income deflating policies have resulted in food availability in India declining.
The main form that the neo-imperialist policies of income deflation which are current today are taking is contractionary fiscal policy supported by a whole range of other measures to attack small and middle scale agricultural production.
For example, the share of rural expenditure in capital expenditure by the centre and states combined has declined sharply since mid-1990s, as Praveen Jha has shown.
The growth rates of public development expenditure by the centre and the states saw a very sharp contraction in the first half of the 1990s. That was when the structural adjustment and income-deflating programmes were coming in, in a very strong way under Dr. Manmohan Singh. It subsequently went up, but even as late as 2000-05, the growth rate was lower than it was during the 1980s. Then it shoots up from 2005-06 to 2010-11, because of the impact of the global economic crisis and the enormous rise in food prices. Again, in 2010-11 to 2014-15, when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister, he pulled back very sharply, and the growth rate of central expenditure again declined sharply. When you have this kind of income deflating policy, the people will be forced to cut back on their food expenditure and their nutritional standards will come down.
In the pre-reform period, the food grain availability was rising, with fluctuations – it increased from about 452 grams per capita per day in 1972 to 494 grams per capita per day in 1990. But with the onset of neoliberal reforms, more land was diverted to grow export-oriented crops, and trade was liberalised, while fiscal compression reduced employment and incomes of the mass of the population. There was a withdrawal of government support for procurement at minimum prices. As a result of all these, there has been a steep decline in food availability in the recent decades – it stood at 447 grams per head per day in 2013.
This has occurred in spite of production increasing.
When income deflation is very severe, even when output is going up, demand will not go up in proportion because there is income deflation and purchasing power is being compressed. So stocks will build up, and there will be huge exports, with correspondingly lower food availability for the domestic population.
“The per capita supply of cereals in India as of 2011 was 176.5 kg per year, which is the level we had before World War II. And this is the lowest in the world, taking large regions,” Patnaik said.
The three-day conference is being held in memory of Sam Moyo, leading African scholar who passed away in a car accident in Delhi on 21 November 2015. He was the founder and executive director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies. An authority on agrarian issues, Moyo was a progressive activist and a powerful voice in support of the land reform process in Zimbabwe.
India may join the top economic actors at the global level, but on the home ground it has a long way to go
MAHENDRA P LAMA
Though most of the estimates do indicate that there has been a steady decline in urban and rural poverty ratio at both the national and provincial levels, the variations in these estimates have been remarkable
Jul 11, 2018 - Poverty in all forms is alarmingly massive in India. The removal of poverty with a distinct slant on progressive reduction of inequalities in income and wealth distribution remained the quintessential slogans right since the First Five Year Plan (1951-56). India’s Economic Survey 2014-15 stated that “Sixty eight years after Independence, poverty remains one of India’s largest and most pressing problems. No nation can become great when the life chances of so many of its citizens are benighted by poor nutrition, limited by poor learning opportunities, and shrivelled by gender discrimination”. Despite the economic growth rate of 6-7 percent in the last few years, nearly half of India’s children under three are malnourished—the largest number in the world. This is a situation where the rate of malnutrition is worse than that in Africa on average.
The nature of poverty is protractedly characterised by symptoms of socio-economic deprivation, politico-cultural alienation, and inaccessibility to state resources and technology and particular type of spatial distribution. Globalisation led economic reforms have triggered a change in the very profile of poverty.
The broad methodological questions like criteria for identifying the people below poverty line, the samples, their geographical coverage and the periodicity have always dominated the poverty studies and their controversial findings. Several expert committees have been appointed, the last being led by Suresh Tendulkar in 2009.
Though most of the estimates do indicate that there has been a steady decline in urban and rural poverty ratio at both the national and provincial levels, the variations in these estimates have been remarkable. A significant decline in the number of people below poverty line from 45.3 percent in 1993-94 to 21.9 percent by 2011-12 has been recorded.
Despite this, over 270 million people are still living in abject poverty. Similarly, the Gini Coefficient based inequality in India was estimated to be 36.8 in 2010-11—much lower than China (41.5), South Africa (57.8), Brazil (53.9) and Sri Lanka (40.3). The quintile income ratio for India was 5.6 in 2010-11, showing the inequality on the top and the bottom quintiles to be lower than a large number of countries.
Macro Intervention
The government has mostly used four broad instruments in addressing poverty and food security. Public distribution system (PDS)—a guardian of food security, has been most widely used. It has largely helped in addressing transient food insecurity. Along with the procurement policy of food, it translates macro-level self-sufficiency in food grains to the micro-level availability by ensuring access to food and other essential items to poor families. The other three are related to wage employment schemes, often linked to food for work programmes, credit based self-employment programmes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and more specific nutrition-oriented programmes like Integrated Child Development Services. Government also has been providing subsidies in electricity, fertiliser, water, and also in procuring food like wheat and rice from the farmers by giving them minimum support prices.
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), 2006, popularly known as the “100 days programme” is now a household name in India. It has been an innovative and a largely successful programme. It has reached the lowest echelon and has been taken advantage by poor households in plain lands, coastal areas, deserts, hills and Himalayan regions. There have been huge leakages, mismanagement and high transaction costs and lack of skill among the employment seekers. However, the scope of this essentially rural asset creating and livelihood project has been expanded. Some convergences of this programme with project like total sanitation campaign has been done.
The National Food Security Act, 2013 is another initiative that provides subsidised food grains to approximately two thirds of the population. Launched with a lot of political conviction, it attracted a range of sustainability questions. Under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana, this Act provides beneficiaries 5 kilograms of food like rice at Rs3 per kg; wheat at Rs2 per kg and coarse grains at Rs1 per kg.
The three direct benefit transfers (JAM) schemes—Jan Dhan (bank deposits), Aadhaar Cards (unique identity number given to individuals) and mobile phones have been launched to take these subsidies to the individual level and also to cut down the heavy leakages. These saved resources could even generate public investment. India’s Economic Survey forthrightly stated that the kerosene subsidy extended through PDS was Rs204.15 billion in 2011-12 out of which 41 percent was lost as leakage. Similarly out of the subsidies allocated under different heads in the PDS system, 15 percent of rice, 54 percent of wheat and 48 percent of sugar were lost as leakages. Most water subsidies are allocated to private taps, whereas 60 percent of poor households get their water from public taps. In other words, subsidies have been usurped by those who are relatively powerful and have access to political authority.
The JAM-trinity tries to make seamless transfer to individual bank accounts and opens up potential for expanding the set of welfare and anti-poverty measures and ‘could boost household consumption and asset ownership and reduce food security problems’.
Delivery Mechanism
The biggest challenge that beset the entire operation has been delivery mechanism and instrument. The question is how to reach the poor households directly and accurately. It’s formidable because there are huge topographical variation, unparalleled patterns of demographic settlements and more seriously, diverse social and cultural practices. Varying political dispensations across the states add further complexity. Traditional mechanisms mainly through the top down administrative hierarchy—the block development officer being the lowest in the district administration framework—has now been gradually replaced by the constitutional provisions of village Panchayats, the middle rung being the Panchayat Samity and the highest being the Zilla Parishad at the district level.
There are states like Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, which have done fairly well in this mission to empower the people at the grass root. Some of these states have already given the responsibilities of running primary schools and primary health centres, developing and implementing local projects and also monitoring some of the major governmental projects in their localities. There is a lot of resistance on the devolution of power as it is definitely going to reduce bureaucratic hold over development process. At the same time, it is directly going to affect the interest of those stakeholders that survived on cuts and leakages of the funds.
Over the years, several grass root actions have been undertaken to ensure alternate routes and sustainable means. These initiatives have mostly come from non-governmental organisations with strong voluntary instincts and commitment. Ralegaon Sidhi in Maharashtra led by Gandhian community leader Anna Hazare; Pani Panchayats of Village Mahur in Maharastra; Bio-Village in Pondicherry; Samridha Krishak Yojana of Assam; TANWA Woman Agriculture Project of Tamil Nadu are some of the examples of these micro level interventions. Their operational features are critically driven by i) their own community and geography centric orientations; ii) strong and reliable local leadership; iii) use of local resources and knowledge; iv) application of appropriate yet friendly technology and v) regular and visible impact assessment by the communities themselves. All these grass root actions brought forward high degree of human security practices.
Despite the onslaught of second generation reforms and India joining the club of top economic actors at the global level, there is a long way to go for this nation before it can boast of substantive achievements in these critical areas. In other experimentations, it is actually not just the pace of economic growth, but the orientation and quality of growth that has made the difference in poverty alleviation ventures.
Lama teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was the Chief Economic Adviser in the Government of Sikkim from 2000-2007
Published: 11-07-2018 08:44
The view from Washington . . .
An Indian woman carries her baby at a traffic signal as she asks for alms from motorists in New Delhi in 2012. A new report says Nigeria has surpassed India as the country with the largest number of people living in extreme poverty.
by Joanna Slater July 10 2018
It is a distinction that no country wants: the place with the most people living in extreme poverty.
For decades, India remained stubbornly in the top spot, a reflection of its huge population and its enduring struggle against poverty.
Now, new estimates indicate that Nigeria has knocked India out of that position, part of a profound shift taking place in the geography of the world’s poorest people.
According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, Nigeria overtook India in May to become the country with the world’s highest number of people living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day. The threshold captures those who struggle to obtain even basic necessities such as food, shelter and clothing, and takes into account differences in purchasing power between countries.
The Brookings report was based on estimates generated by the World Poverty Clock, a model created to track progress against poverty in real time. As of Monday, its figures showed that India had 70.6 million people living in extreme poverty, while Nigeria had 87 million.
What’s more, the gap is widening: The number of people living in extreme poverty in India is falling while the opposite is true in Nigeria, where the population is growing faster than its economy. Extreme poverty rises in Nigeria by six people each minute, according to calculations by the World Poverty Clock.
Meanwhile, the number of extreme poor in India drops by 44 people a minute.
“It’s a good news story for India, coupled with some caveats, and it’s a real wake-up call for the African continent,” said Homi Kharas, director of the global economy and development program at the Brookings Institution.
Extreme poverty is increasingly an African phenomenon, the Brookings report noted. Africans make up about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor, it said. By 2030, that figure could rise to nine-tenths if current trends continue.
Africa’s central place in the battle against poverty comes amid dramatic progress worldwide. Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen more than 60 percent, according to the World Bank. Much of the reduction has come in Asia, first in places such as China, Indonesia and Vietnam, and more recently in India, which appears to have made striking achievements in recent years.
India, with its population of 1.3 billion people, now has 5 percent of its population living in extreme poverty, according to the World Poverty Clock (in Nigeria, where the overall population is about 191 million, the rate of extreme poverty is much higher: 44 percent are extremely poor).
In a post Monday, World Poverty Clock researchers raised the tantalizing prospect that by 2021, fewer than 3 percent of India’s population will live in extreme poverty, a benchmark viewed by some development economists as “a watershed moment.”
For many in India, such talk is sure to provoke sharp debate. Tens of millions of people remain destitute and thousands of farmers commit suicide each year. Nearly 40 percent of Indian children under 5 are short for their age, a sign of chronic undernutrition.
“The claims that India is on the verge of winning the battle against extreme poverty sit uneasily with the current concerns about job creation or rural distress,” said an editorial last week in Mint, a financial newspaper in India.
Part of the disconnect may be the result of how poverty is defined. The extreme poverty threshold is an absolute measure used for international comparison. Last year, however, the World Bank added another benchmark that aims to capture a sense of relative poverty. For “lower middle income” countries like India, it set the line at people who live on $3.20 day. By that measure, a third of Indians are poor, economist Surjit Bhalla estimated in a recent article.
More clarity could be only months away. In June, the Indian government completed a national survey which is conducted once every five years and provides the best available data on poverty. In the past, the results have been released anywhere from several months to a year after finishing the survey. Bhalla, an economist who also serves as a part-time adviser to the Indian government, believes that the country’s own data could show it made even more progress reducing poverty than the estimates produced by Brookings and the World Poverty Clock.
Joanna Slater is the incoming India bureau chief for The Washington Post. Prior to joining The Post, she was a foreign correspondent for the Globe & Mail in the United States and Europe and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Her previous postings include assignments in Mumbai, Hong Kong and Berlin.
'poverty porn'
No comments:
Post a Comment