India has more poverty than any place on earth with three quarters of the population living on less than two dollars a day (about a ninth of the world's people) and it still maintains instutionalised discrimination of "lower caste" groups such as the Dalits (the 'untouchables'). To take a small random sample compare this to the development indicators of Iran ( 8%), China (35%) and the Ivory Coast (46%), countries you'd seldom imagine outstripping India so comprehensively in the basic needs category.
Sounds incredible, doesn't it? Have I plucked these figures out of a hat?
Sadly no, like most sensible people I try not to waste my time reading datasets from unreliable or questionable sources. The figures are from the 2009 United Nations "Human Development Report" and as such may be considered among the best of their kind available, being the figures that are used as reference points for development agencies, policy planners and aid donors.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2009/chapters/
Now, I'm not an "India-basher", quite the contrary I find the country intriguing; (few places on earth can boast such a fascinating (and lengthy) heritage), greatly admiring Jawaharl Nehru for instance though less impressed by Indira, the 70's Emergency Act and the seeming scuttling of the pro-poor policies of the Gandhi era. In recent times of course India's GDP has been rising exponentially; a man would have to be living in a cave not to have noticed this; every paper and magazine has been screaming the message for the past decade at least (Manmohan Singh's liberal forms as finance minister are credited with the "miracle" in many circles). In short, India's economic growth rate is by now the stuff of legend being overshadowed only by that of China.
But of course, raw GDP data tells us only about the volume and intensity of economic transactions and nothing about who is making them or who its ultimate beneficiaries are - the standard literature always has greater economic growth depicted as presaging the rising of all boats and the emergent positive trickle-down effect - but oftentimes many of the social indicators actually worsen (particularly during periods of rapid growth) if there isn't a properly co-ordinated series of government measures that focus on using the increased budgetary spending in softening "dislocations". In India's case, neoliberal reforms that followed the economy opening itself to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in 1991 allowed foreign competition to undermine peasant livelihoods via a domestic market being flooded with cheaper agricultural foodstuffs. Difficulties for smallholders are seen in the high suicide rates - 20,000 a year - appallingly high, despite the large population.
In some quarters lazy fingers are pointed at the growing population as though demographic expansion was the last word on understanding poverty figures. But very poor people always tend to reproduce more. It's a survival strategy; there are more hands available to carry out the extra work required when you have no proper sanitation; no regular fixed income; no pension, no police protection etc. There are more hands available for fetching, begging, prostituting, stealing and protecting. Sex is commonly forced upon impoverished women or else given as favour for food or money etc. coupled with the fact that contraceptives and abortions are both expensive and dangerous and in many cases interfere with the commonly held belief among poor people the world over, (irrespective of what faith they are) that a child, is in any case, "a blessing".
This idea that we should blame the poor's impoverishment on their own prolific birthrate is actually becoming quite mainstream. Irish journalist Kevin Myers for instance, invokes the Malthussian catastrophe that awaits Ethiopia and rigidly blames the poor themselves as though they are capable of acting in concert to the same extent government policies can orchestrate change. However, the poor are not at liberty to do so as they are by definition without any power. This neo-Malthussianism is a shocking creed which doesn't address the root trouble; the poverty itself. They are not poor because they keep reproducing, they are poor because there has'nt been any successful policy initiated which would give them a chance of being otherwise.
$2 a day doesn't buy you an awful lot and it certainly doesn't leave you much wriggle room for savings, clothes, fuel or other investments - no matter where you live. There is of course a variable bang to the buck and we must be wary when reading UN datasets to factor in purchasing power parity but even at local prices 110 rupees doesn't buy you much beyond a daily ration of rice, bread and lentils. We all saw how precarious this level of existence was with the recent global food riots when the rising cost of oil inputs and the switch to bio-fuels led to 50% hikes in key agro-commodities. Eking out a living in these circumstances is truly measured in pennies and cents and whilst vanishingly small these meagre earnings can be utilised effectively given the right environment as Muhammed Yunus has shown via the Grameen Bank initiative.
The corollary to the low-credit initiative was the promise of ensuring a release from the ubiquitous money lender and hereditary debt bondage is still a feature of much of the impoverished areas of rural India. This is despite early attempts by post-independence reformers within the National Congress to have government run credit systems established for the rural areas which would release many of the peasantry from their obligations to finance their landlords (often caste-based) predatory lending and rackrenting. As I understand it, this, and many other inititives focused on agrarian reform were diluted due to the overwhelming strength of large landholders and business leaders within the ranks of the Congress party - a situation which pertains to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palagummi_Sainath
Palugummi Sainath is an interesting character to google with respect to unearthing the true level of poverty in rural India. Through his work it was demonstrated that the government had fudged its figures with respect to the national poverty estimates - miraculously lifting out of poverty some 300 million persons merely by altering the requisite level of calorific intake. In the 1970's being below the poverty line meant you consumed less than 2,400 calories per day. At the time, this accounted for half the population. Two decades later under the National Congress coalition the number of poor had fallen to a third; yet unobserved behind the data the required levels of calories had been brought down to 1,970. The same trick was used during the BJP government in 1999-00 where the level of poverty was declared to be only 25% of the population - this time the marker had been set at 1,890 calories.
According to economist Utsa Paitnak who has researched the matter in detail:
"Today, when the official figure for poverty in India is around 27% a more accurate calculation based on the implied calorie norm of 2,400 per day puts three quarters of the population under the poverty line."
You can see from his profile just how many journalistic awards Sainath has received within his own country for 'doing a hatchet job' on the Indian government's seeming neglect of it's poorest citizens. His book ("Everybody loves a good drought") on the inadequacy of the government's policies in dealing with declining rural incomes, increased suicides among farmers etc. was on the non-fiction bestseller's charts for two years. Not only does this tell you the hitherto neglect which the subject had been treated and the eagerness of folk to finally read the truth of what's happening all around them but it also tells you that India like every other functioning democracy is plagued by a market-led corporate media which only occasionally allows quality investigative work to get published.
Another favourite of the "poverty deniers", or those at least who would like to minimise the harsh reality unveiled by these statistics is to claim that UN datasets don't pick up the unaccounted wealth in the parallel economy. Well, by it's nature the black market can't be accurately quantified but it's estimated that in developing countries it can account for upwards of 40-60% of actual GDP. So yes, there is a lot of extra cash swooshing about but the vast majority of participants earn less than they would ordinarily receive were they working legitimately and paying tax. In precious metals - smuggling and so on - the profits are usually monopolised by the key players and whilst the values are large the numbers of people involved are quite small. Most people working 'on the black' do so as odd-end jobs or low-paying casual labour in piece-meal operations such as in construction sites or seasonal farm work.
The black market is often defined by exploitative rates of pay - people who work in it are generally desperate for any kind of income. I did it myself in West Germany in 1989 for several months and the pay and conditions were abysmal. Working in BMW I was earning 800 marks for a forty hour week whereas with the labouring jobs in the "black market" I was getting 100 marks a day tops - and often worked 12-14 hours. They'd keep you working on site always giving you extra jobs to do and people were reluctant to say anything in case they weren't hired the following day. It's the same in developing countries only on a much larger scale. Whatever the minimum wage is in a country you can safely subtract half or a quarter for your black market rate. Raj Patel ("Stuffed and Starved") gives an example of a group of women farmers who travel to Hyderabad to work on a construction site 'on the black' for 80 rupees a day with the men earning 90-100 rupees.
Development economists have to make reference to the informal economy in some shape or form; William Easterly in the "White Man's Burden" picks up Hernando de Soto's analysis on 'overly regulated' economies swelling the black market and applies it in the context of the formalisation of property rights whereas Chang in 'Bad Samaritans' looks at it in the context of counterfeiting, generic drugs (such as anti-retrovirals produced in India for export to Africa), intellectual property rights and so on but we won't be hearing of any study which attempts to gauge the impact of the parallel economy on median household incomes - simply because the data would be impossible to verify.
To get over the inevitable uncertainty involved in a single dataset such as the dollar a day index which is compromised by uncertainties over the impact of the informal economy multiple indicators are assessed; access to proper sanitation, improved water source, mortality and literacy rates etc. Taken together a stronger picture is naturally formed of what the reality on the ground is actually like. A group of Oxford researchers whose work will be highlighted in the next UN Development Report have used this multidimensional poverty index (MPI) in analysing recent poverty trades in India;
As the Times in India reported on July 12th, 2010;
"Taken together, these factors provide a fuller portrait of acute poverty than simple income measures. The measure reveals the nature and extent of poverty at different levels: from household up to regional, national and international level. The study shows that there are more 'MPI poor' people in eight Indian states (421 million in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the 26 poorest African countries combined (410 million)."
And finally, what are we to make of Arundhati Roy's exposure of the millions who were displaced uncompensated since independence due to dam construction? Roy's work has helped put on the world stage a major set of difficulties surounding dam construction in India; particularly in the Narmada Valley. The World Bank has cancelled funding on hundreds of dam projects in the past decade mainly due to environmental and sustainability issues (soil depletion in irrigated regions) and the questionable benefits accrued from their construction (widespread lack of electricity, price gouging). Most of all, for me, her work shows the seeming total lack of regard by the authorities for the millions and millions of people who have been displaced (with desultory compensation, if at all) in the course of modernising "Shining India".
Roy's period of media coverage peaked at the Booker Award (in 1997)and she's all but disappeared from the media radar since then - especially since she started talking dams and poverty. Nothing, but nothing, sells fewer copies in the corporate press then a discourse on displaced indigenous in a far off land that the vast majority of people 'in the West' don't ever think about unless it's to book their summer holidays. She has a loyal following alright but thats confined to the "anti-globalization", "anti-neoliberalization" groupings whose preferred literature is only ever found through dedicated google searches on the internet. You will not find any of her concerns with respect to development in India been given coverage in the vast majority (ie. 99%) of Western media outlets.
To say she's 'popular' in the West is to say she's popular amongst activists, campaigners and certain academics - people who never, or very rarely, get their ideas aired in the mainstream press. The mainstream media depiction of India concentrates on its growth figures and opportunities for investment - usually through advertising supplements sponsored by some Chamber of Commerce or another. Global stock markets are all so interrelated these days that genuine threats to corporate growth effect a ripple change in stocks everywhere. If a single market is disturbed, such as India's vast economy which is indissolubly tied to corporate interests and the economies of G8 countries then this spells bad news in general for governments 'in the West' and everywhere else. In this sense, there is no 'us' versus 'them' anymore; boundaries have been erased for the benefits of an internationally mobile capital whose protection and 'friction free' existence is one of the principle goals of international policy making.
Yes, there will be haggling over protective tariffs and greater deregulation of FDI but in the main the tendency is towards greater integration. What the I.T. sectors in Europe and the States lose to Indian outsourcing their agribusiness and other TNC's picks up through further trade liberalization - the big players; the CEOs and large shareholders simply switch their stocks from one promising venture to the next while uncompetitive outfits simply fold into oblivion. Growth in India is definitely good for business; the more middle class consumers there is with a disposable income the better and whatever makes the large corporations happy will eventually be reflected in their government's policy. Focusing on rural poverty in India or displaced Adivasi indigenous doesn't correspond to any discernible market logic and market mechanisms on their own certainly aren't going to draw attention to anyone attempting to highlight these issues.
The world's small farmers are the expendable obstacles to all this progress; their vacated plots are snapped up on the cheap to be converted into sprawling multi-hectare cash crop monocultures whilst their former inhabitants are flushed into the slums and big cities to provide cheap labour for 'Export Processing Zones', construction sites and services; a largely defunct ILO seemingly powerless to intervene. Great news for consumers everywhere I suppose (isn't that the point?). I don't pretend to have any immediate solutions to any of these problems but it would be nice someday to pick up a newspaper and actually read about them!.
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