Slowly but steadily India is winning the battle against extreme poverty. Theories and data arguing otherwise seem biased
Traveling is often fun, thanks to the training one received, as a journalist and a research scholar at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, most often, professional trips turn into an exercise in real-life and academic explorations. On a pleasant early morning drive from Sundargarh, Odisha to Ranchi, Jharkhand early last week, I requested my driver to pull up at two places. The first halt was on the picturesque Kutra road. While clicking some pictures, we also got an opportunity to spend a few minutes with a group of women who claimed to be from Bhogra village and were out on daily errands. Always curious to explore, we asked them if they knew Prime Minister Narendra Modi and their faces lit with a smile. They blurted out their praise for the Pradhan Mantri, who they said was doing “baro baro kaam” (big work).
A little further in Simdega, Jharkhand, we halted at a roadside dhaba for our morning tea. During a casual conversation with the owner of the shop, we enquired about the pace of vikas and changes witnessed since Prime Minister Modi took over. A socially conscious Balram Singh acknowledged a distinct “change in the mood and approach” and said some of the programmes like Ujjwala and Mudra were truly remarkable and that he knew of women who have benefited from the Ujjwala scheme.
Everywhere we went, from Rourkela to Sundargarh and then to Ranchi, we never came across pot-holed roads. There we no snake-charmers either. A slew of roadside eateries, many with flashy boards, honking trucks, speeding Innovas and over-crowded Boleros conveyed a picture of India that was changing. I truly wish James Crabtree of the lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore travelled with us to see how his idea of India “becoming the most unequal society” was pregnant with flaws and may have been a victim of tyranny of scepticism perpetuated by a few in the country. Or who knows this could be influenced by narratives of India’s ‘poverty industry’, to borrow a phrase from one of India’s most competent, charming and articulate economists, Surjit S Bhalla.
Crabtree must have heard a recent address by Prime Minister Modi to a group of youngsters where he gave hard data for sceptics like him: Three crore children vaccinated; 1.75 lakh kilometres of rural roads built in the last four years; electricity reaching every single village; 85 lakh homes electrified since October 2017; 4.65 crore gas connections reaching the poor; and more than one crore homes built for the poor in the last four years. If Crabtree doesn’t believe these data, he should perhaps take a leaf out of recent credible reports to review his hypothesis. A Brookings report said, every minute an estimated 44 Indians are being pulled out of poverty, this being one of the fastest rates of poverty reduction — even though Bhalla terms it “overly pessimistic” and estimates that the real number could be 100 per minute. The 44 figure, claims Bhalla, is based on National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data of 2011-12 and is, therefore, problematic.
Crabtree should meet Homi Kharas, Kristofer Hamel and Martin Hofer of Brookings who published a well-articulated study, ‘The start of a new poverty narrative’ last month. Referring to a fascinating World Poverty Clock (worldpoverty.io) data, they say that there are “two new storylines about what is happening to global poverty.” The first is that extreme poverty in today’s world is largely about Africa. Fourteen of the 18 African nations are seeing a rise in poverty. The second is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve SDG 1 goal of ending poverty.
It will require little imagination to derive the fact that impressive reductions in poverty, socially conscious and informed communities, and rapid spread of welfare programmes cannot be concomitant with rise in inequality, unless of, course, some adamant economist comes out with a bizarre model for the same. Crabtree can also refer to a June edition of the World Bank’s report, ‘Global Economic Prospects: Turning of the TideIJ’ which said that India is one among the emerging economies in South Asia where strong per capita growth rates are expected to bring down poverty (read inequality). Bhalla, who is a master in data and analytics, opined that when the findings of the NSSO Consumer Expenditure (NSSO-CE) survey for July 2017 to June 2018 will be released, most likely it will see India from an absolutely poverty obsessed “poor” country towards a middle-class, middle-income country. He was confident that this analysis would reveal that “absolute poverty in India, according to the official Tendulkar poverty line, is in the low single digits.”
Data and facts on the ground do seem to suggest the flaws in arguments of those who continue to paint a grim picture about India’s poverty records. Across the length and breadth of the country, irrespective of which party governs, India has made steady progress and the theory of the country being the most unequal is biased and distorted at best.
(The writer is a strategic communications professional)
