What is poverty? In India, poverty is not having even three basic meals a day. It is living in the streets; it is being ill and not having medical care; it is sending your children to beg instead of sending them to school. Poverty is living one day at a time; it is watching your child die from malnutrition. It is powerlessness, lack of representation and lack of freedom.
In the game of figures and percentages, someone has been left out: the faceless person at the bottom of economy – the starving Adivasi, the suicidal weaver’s widow, the desperate ‘untouchable’.
Planners bypass the fact that almost three fourths of Indian population depends on farming. That multi national corporations employ fewer people than they displace is also disregarded. Displacement causes endless problems; it leaves rural populations unemployed and forces them to migrate to cities where the street side dwellings and slums they live in are considered a flaw on the urban landscape.
When they cannot migrate along with their husbands, village women stay behind to look after the children and old people, while their husbands often take to drinking and gambling, and sometimes end up abandoning their families. The case of families migrating together is not much better: their children grow up illiterate and devoid of basic services such as schooling and healthcare.
Despite the economic growth of the last decades, there has been no consistent drop in poverty. The reason is that efforts have gone into building up heavy industry and public enterprises rather than micro industry, which constitutes the main source of work for the poor. MNCs promised growth and work opportunities, but they make profits by downsizing labor force in a country where a large labor force needs employment.
There are enormous gaps between the theory and practice. For example, the Green Revolution did not benefit the poor because abundance did not imply equitable distribution of foodstuffs. Farmer suicides in many states have mounted to proportions than can no longer be ignored. India is a rural-based country, highly dependent on agriculture, yet successive governments neglect the rural sector while they regard foreign investment and the corporate sector as the only way forward.
India has pro-poor policies spelt out in the most moving rhetoric. Yet, implementation of these strategies has been circumvented over and over. There has to be the will to eradicate poverty. India needs to address the enormous exploitation of the poor that takes place aided by caste and class, as well as the problems of vast numbers of landless, exploited people without means of subsistence.
Source: infochangeindia.org
