Poor rich country
The United Nations has unveiled a new measure of poverty which will look beyond the traditional money-per-day methods used so far. This Multidimensional Poverty Index will include the human development index, gender and other inequalities as well as the concept of well-being to provide a wider spectrum of understanding of how poverty affects lives. Yet, while the experience of poverty is something that India understands all too well, alleviation is another matter altogether. The latest figures show that eight Indian states contain more poor people than 26 African countries. This is testament not just to our massive population but also to our complete failure at coping with the problem. The states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal have 421 million people living in acute poverty while 26 of the poorest African countries have a combined population of 420 million.
It is not, however, only about mind-boggling figures. It is about a consistent failure to take poverty seriously. While it is true that independent India faced a number of daunting challenges since its birth as a nation in 1947 and that success has been achieved in a number of instances, the problem of poverty has only grown. The failure is not just of our political classes or of government and governance although the major chunk of blame must be attributed there. It is also of a collective inability to grapple with what poverty means and how it cripples us. Where we as a people should have demanded governance that worked from the bottom up, we allowed ourselves to get sidetracked into other issues and non-issues.
It is nothing but a matter of shame, for instance, that it took over 60 years to realise that universal, free and compulsory education for children was a must. Had we done it even 20 years ago, imagine how far we would have travelled by now. Similarly, we have not comprehended the significance of social security schemes. They exist throughout the developed world as a way of giving people a leg up when they are down. The NREGA idea came in very late and even now it works by Indian standards at about half-cock.
The British government has decided to cut back on aid to India, given that we have such a large contingent of exported millionaires and billionaires. Perhaps there is one of the biggest riddles of the contemporary Indian situation we contain both the world’s richest and poorest people.