India draws poverty battle lines

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India draws poverty battle lines

By Raja Murthy

MUMBAI - India's top governmental economic advisory body is backing away from a new official poverty cut-off rate of 32 rupees (US$0.64) per day after it caused a major furor.

On September 20, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia filed an affidavit to the Supreme Court essentially claiming that those able to spend over 32 rupees in urban areas, and 25 rupees a day in villages, cannot be considered as living below the poverty line.

The Below Poverty Line (BPL) decides how many people are entitled to food subsidies and other governmental aid. An inaccurate demarcation on the lower side would give a rosier than factual picture of national "growth" and poverty reduction.

Official government estimates already place the number of poverty-stricken people in India at a staggering 407 million. It could be much more, if the BPL was set at more realistic levels.

Even those supposedly "out" of poverty are not having a good time of it. Ahluwalia himself admitted in May that many families above the poverty line in terms of per capita consumption, "may lack access to basic services such as education, health, clean drinking water and sanitation".

But with its 32 rupees cut-off for daily urban survival, the Planning Commission [1] turned itself a target for outrage and accusations of being out of touch with reality. The amount does not include other costs of living such as education, housing and health care.

Even the 32 rupees for daily food costs is a bit unrealistic, unless one lives on a bare survival diet or is an ascetic. A thali lunch bought off the humblest street vendor in Mumbai costs at least 30 rupees, fetching a plate (thali) of two small paper-thin chapatis (leavened bread), a little helping of rice, a ladle of watery dal (lentils), a dash of the cheapest vegetable in the market, and, as a sinful luxury, a pinch of lime pickle.

For a daily expenditure of 32 rupees, as Ahluwalia budgeted, a family of four in Mumbai can each live off two bananas and half a glass of tea daily - if they have to indulge in other occasional necessities as clothes and a bar of soap. With such a budget they live in the street, sometimes in bus-stop shelters and outside railway stations, and the children live as illiterates.

"One needs at least 50 rupees daily for a working person not to go hungry throughout the day," says Bheem Sher, a cobbler plying his skills in a street corner near Eros Theater in Churchgate, one of the wealthier localities in Mumbai. "To use the public toilet costs 3 rupees, to have a bath there costs 5 rupees, 'cutting' chai [Mumbai's famous half glass of tea] costs 4 rupees. With costs of everything increasing, our lives have become miserable."

An itinerant tea vendor was passing by, and Bheem Sher promptly insisted I have a tea on his account - nearly 10% of his daily food budget gone in hospitality to a stranger.

When framing their economic policies, one wonders if economic pundits are even aware of the quiet dignity with which the working poor in urban and rural India approach their daily struggle for survival, leave alone those with no income at all.

Among those demanding more humane governance was the National Advisory Council (NAC) that has as its chairperson Sonia Gandhi, also the chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The 13-member NAC interfaces as a policy consultant between the government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work with disadvantaged groups.

NAC members, such as the increasingly high-profile social activist Aruna Roy, joined forces with the Right to Food campaign, an umbrella-group of representatives of 17 NGOs. These include Colin Gonsalves of the Human Rights Law Network and Binayak Sen, Kavita Srivastava of the People's Union for Civil Liberties. They said the new Planning Commission estimate defines destitution, not poverty.

In an open letter to Ahluwalia, Roy and co requested that he start living on 32 rupees a day, and then kindly explain - in simple, non-mumbo-jumbo language - how one can accomplish this feat. Do this or quit the commission, they urged him.

"If 25 rupees for rural areas and 32 rupees for urban areas per capita expenditure was 'adequate' then it is not clear to us why Planning Commission members are paid up to 115 times the amount (not counting the perks of free housing and health care and numerous other benefits)," said the open letter, also published on the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission website.

The Planning Commission estimate had dodged the two major issues the Supreme Court had raised, said the Right to Food campaigners: reasons for the ceiling on what determines the BPL, and a request by the Supreme Court to the Planning Commission to reconsider the poverty line.

"That the affidavit chose to repeat the stand taken by the Planning Commission in its last affidavit in May 2011 is, we believe, an affront to the poor of this country and also the Supreme Court," said the statement, which was widely reported in Indian media.

Ahluwalia went into damage control, and called a Planning Commission meeting on October 3 to perhaps fit a bit more of reality and compassion into planning his policies. He said on Monday that a new committee would be set up to come up with a fresh method to identify India's poor.

The poverty definition "was clearly a rock bottom level of existence" and not an acceptable standard of living for the "common man," he told a news conference, reported Agence France-Presse.

"We know that very well everybody at that level of existence are under significant stress and even above that level households are vulnerable," he added.

A close confidante of Manmohan and said to have been his first choice as India's finance minister, Ahluwalia has often been accused of not being sensitive enough to weaker sections of society.

The Right to Food campaigners have taken him to task. "After years of terming the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank as the sources of all knowledge for how this country's economy is to be run, you have misinterpreted the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] to suggest that the poor need less food than what government norms state."

Activists say millions of people suffer malnutrition across India, even as the central government keeps 60 million tonnes of food grain stored as buffer stock. Other factors blamed for rising inflation include speculative trading in commodities and an increasing corporate presence in agriculture-related business.

During his visit to China in the last week of September, for the inaugural Strategic Economic Dialogue between China and India in Beijing, Ahluwalia backed his poverty limit of less than a dollar a day.

But NGOs have reminded him that India is home to the most hungry people in the world and is ranked 67th out of 88 countries by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute in the Global Hunger Index.

Nearly half of India's children remain under-nourished - twice as many as in sub-Saharan Africa - indicating just how much more work and replanning Manmohan's government has to do, before celebrating running the world's second fastest growing economy.

Note
1. Constituted in 1950 as India's apex economic think-tank, the Planning Commission has as its chairman the prime minister of India, a deputy chairman, a minister of state and eight full-time members (currently B K Chaturvedi, Saumitra Chaudhuri , Syeda Hameed, Narendra Jadhav, Prof Abhijit Sen, Mihir Shah, Dr K Kasturirangan and Arun Maira).

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