The poverty quibble

Government claims a huge drop in poverty numbers but critical indicators—health, malnutrition and wages—continue to be grim. So how did the poor fare better?

After a long, long time there was good news to splash as media led with the report of a record 21.9 per cent drop in poverty levels. The July 24 newspaper headlines were celebratory as they reported the Planning Commission’s findings that poverty rates had declined from 37.2 per cent for the country as a whole in 2004-05. Even better was the sharp decline in rural poverty from 41.8 per cent to 25.7 per cent, while urban dipped from 25.7 per cent to 13.7 per cent. In sum, 137 million Indians were lifted out of poverty over the seven-year period.

So shouldn’t we all be cheering? Everyone likes good news but at the risk of being labelled a Gloomy Gus one cannot help but ask what it is that we are celebrating. That people are somehow keeping body and soul together is supposed to make us feel better? Poverty may well be down but how are we to ignore other figures, and facts, that cast such dark shadows over the sunny scenario on poverty levels?

Here is the squalour of numbers we are dealing with: every year 1.7 million children under five years die and many of them from preventable diseases such as diarrhoea; around 45 per cent are malnourished and around 43 are stunted or underweight because of lack of nutrients—it’s just 25 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa—and less than half are immunised.

There are other problems common to both children and adults: lack of education (a quarter of Indians are illiterate), they live in squalid conditions (nearly half our homes have no toilet), most have no access to clean drinking water. This is the familiar litany of misery in which the wretched of this country exist with a government that is unable to cut maternal or infant mortality rates unlike its poorer neighbours. A World Bank study released in 2011 showed that health spending is one of the leading causes of poverty in India, pushing as many as 63 million people or 11.9 million households to below the poverty line (BPL) by healthcare expenditure.

And yet, here we are celebrating the slimmest of incremental change in the lives of the poor as a great achievement.