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Business News/ Opinion / Poor people are from Venus, poverty experts are from Mars
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Poor people are from Venus, poverty experts are from Mars

Poverty for experts is purely an economic problem to be resolved by economic means

An annoying thing about poverty is that it involves a lot of real, live, poor people. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint Premium
An annoying thing about poverty is that it involves a lot of real, live, poor people. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

Of India’s 1.2 billion people, approximately one-third live in poverty. That’s 400 million people. The much applauded statistical decrease in poverty figures hasn’t yet translated into a discernible decrease in the number of poor people we see around us. Maybe there is a time lag, and we will see the difference soon enough.

But in the meantime, can we not spend even 450 crore on a mission to Mars or 2,070 crore on the world’s largest statue without being made to feel guilty about it? Well, there happens to be many in India who believe we cannot. They have criticized these initiatives as misplaced priorities for a developing country with scant resources.

These commentators, in turn, have faced a backlash from others who have ridiculed them as being wet blankets who do not know how to enjoy a moment of national pride or international achievement without whining about stuff like poverty, which anyway cannot be eradicated in a day.

But then, an annoying thing about poverty is that it involves a lot of real, live, poor people. And inexplicably, the poor still appear to exercise some sort of political or moral or maybe supernatural influence on sections of the polity and the liberal intelligentsia that are still struggling to wean themselves off their quasi-utopian, pseudo-socialist nostalgia. Or maybe it’s just misplaced democracy, it’s hard to tell.

The sections of the liberal intelligentsia, who are themselves not poor, obviously have no business setting themselves up as their spokespersons. But of course, that doesn’t mean that the poor’s interests aren’t best left to the care of professional poverty experts who, since they are in no danger of slipping into poverty themselves, are in the best position to take a neutral, objective view of poverty. Besides, thanks to their doctorates in economics from prestigious foreign universities, they would surely know a thing or two about poverty that illiterate poor people cannot be expected to know.

This gifted cabal of poverty professors, poverty managers and poverty executives often likes to entertain itself with fierce debates on the so-called poverty line—its definition, exact positioning, angle of incidence, length and thickness. Broadly speaking, their approach to poverty can be characterized as intellectual-analytical. They are problem-solvers. They are programmed by their education and training to avoid the social or ethical dimension of poverty. Their mental faculties start sputtering and eventually break down when pressured to engage with the idea that poverty is not a poor person’s personal problem. Poverty, for them, is purely an economic problem to be resolved by economic means.

So they only ever have one solution to offer for the problem of poverty: the trickle-down effects of economic growth. They dismiss the other, historically more successful weapon against poverty—the entitlements-based approach involving welfare schemes—as nothing more than handouts or freebies.

But they are all for freebies provided they are channelled through philanthropy, which is the cool term for charity these days. They cannot comprehend that charity is an assault on human dignity, and that philanthropy can never be anything but a paltry apology for the deprivation of the many that often bankrolls the prosperity of the few. Unable to wrap their overabundant intelligence around the philosophically well-established truth that human life is both the source as well as the ultimate measure of all value in society, they are bewildered by its logical corollary—that being, or simply arriving in this world, makes every human the subject of certain basic entitlements. Which is why you will find them praising the charity of a philanthropist even while slamming entitlement-based welfare measures such as employment guarantee schemes.

To top it all, their overly analytical approach has eroded whatever little sense of intellectual history they may have possessed to start with. Though they are all children of modernity, for them the Enlightenment that birthed modernity may have never happened. They are blissfully ignorant of the vast gulf that separates the Enlightenment’s vision of human progress from the deformed malignancy that dominates the rhetoric of development today.

To them, modernity on the scale of the individual self signifies little more than a nebulous notion of freedom, conveniently conflated with the freedom of choice defined in consumerist terms. It’s no use telling them that to be a modern society is to consider every human being—unlike in pre-modern societies—a sovereign subject vested with certain basic entitlements simply by virtue of her individuated humanness. These entitlements are not many: dignity, food, shelter, clothing, and the opportunity for creative self-development, which typically translates, in our age, as access to education and healthcare. To not recognize this first principle of modernity and yet claim to be modern is intellectual bankruptcy of the worst kind. But who says intellectual bankruptcy cannot be bailed out by non-intellectual means?

To come back to where we began, if a state has 1.2 billion people living within its borders, and if it claims governing rights over the peoples who have existed there from a time before the state ever did, then as per the social contract that forms the basis of any modern apparatus of governance, such a state’s first responsibility, and topmost priority, must be to deliver on its side of the social contract to every one of its 1.2 billion subjects; that is, to deliver on their basic entitlements. This is exactly what the Indian Constitution—a truly modern document that every ultra-nationalist, super-patriotic, reform-minded Indian would do well to read at least once—also mandates. It is therefore completely reasonable to question any large expenditure of the state that seems to have little bearing on its, as yet, unfulfilled primary commitment.

Having said that, the fact remains that there is not a single research study which proves conclusively that building gargantuan statues does not alleviate poverty. On the other hand, there is a growing body of evidence, especially from Hollywood, which suggests that exploratory missions to other planets can, one day, solve the problem of poor people—or at least solve it to the satisfaction of the economically under-challenged. So who knows, gigantic statues and space missions may just be the ultimate weapons against poverty.

On that optimistic note, here’s an idea that could solve our poverty problem and secure our national pride once and for all—a mission to Saturn. Compared with Mangalyaan, it would have a simpler yet far more ambitious agenda: Transport all of India’s poor to Saturn, where they shall be gainfully employed in the construction of the largest statue in the galaxy. We could call it Shaniyaan.

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Published: 07 Nov 2013, 12:59 PM IST
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