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Shift The Target DIPANKAR GUPTA, Jun 7, 2010, 12.00am IST The best way to fight poverty is not to plan for the poor. The moment one singles them out for special services, absurdities, and worse, begin to abound. This is especially true when their numbers are large. Targeted policies work best when they are aimed at a small minority. It is not possible to have special programmes that affect anything between 50 and 70 per cent of the population. In which case, one might as well have a revolution! If that is a death wish no functioning republic would like to entertain, it should think differently about poverty. As poor-seeking programmes leave the better off untouched, they are always subnormal in their performance. The famished have neither voice nor energy to protest. Their bodies are just about stitched together. This lesson should have been apparent from the fact that schools, hospitals and food for the poor are always way below standard. Also, poor-oriented services are a natural magnet for graft and corruption. A study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research shows that though ration shops are strictly for Below Poverty Line families, not all their provisions go to the right address. A chunk regularly finds its way to more affluent homes, year after year. In fact, N C Saxena figures that 17.4 per cent of the richest quintile possesses ration cards. Yet, as the emphasis is always the targeted poor, we end up playing with numbers. If poverty estimates were like batting averages, it would roughly stand at 50 per cent. When Arjun Sengupta's committee is at the crease the poverty figure touches 77 per cent, but when the Planning Commission takes over it drops to roughly 29 per cent. Suresh Tendulkar took the score up to 41 per cent and that seemed very impressive till Saxena hit the average at 50 per cent. This would mean half the country's population cannot purchase the minimum recommended caloric requirements. Current consensus is around Saxena's finding for it is believed Tendulkar probably doctored the pitch. He pegged the minimum calorie intake at a level well below that posted by the Indian Council of Medical Research. But do we really need poverty statistics to tell us that India is poor? How does it help if Sengupta is a bigger hitter than Tendulkar or the Planning Commission? No matter which way you look at it, between 10 and 15 crore families can barely feed themselves. If Abhijit Sen is to be believed, about 80 per cent of rural India faces chronic starvation. With numbers as large as this, can there be special programmes for a targeted group? As these initiatives for the poor do not affect the well-to-do, the resources needed for them balk administrators. When the Tendulkar committee announced the poverty figure at 41.9 per cent, the Planning Commission and the ministries of finance and social welfare choked on their tables. So much money would now have to be put away for those other people who are not like us. The food subsidy would now cost Rs 47,917.62 crore and not 28,890.4 crore, as estimated earlier. That was still high, but the government could probably live with it. Naturally, when Saxena came up with 50 per cent, nobody in the administration wanted to hear about it. Such exercises with numbers don't really help when the targeted group is almost the entire society. In such conditions, there are only two options. Either we let revolutions step out of history books or we get real about poverty eradication through democratic means. If it is to be the latter, we can and should learn from prosperous states. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, even Spain and Singapore, did not begin rich, but became rich because they did not devise programmes for the poor. Their emphasis was to frame policies that affected the entire society, and not this or that section of it. One could object to this suggestion by hiding behind our awesome population figures. With a billion-plus on the census rolls, how could we possibly look like Europe? Are we then destined to remain poor? >From Antyodaya to NREGA, our poverty rates keep spiking year after year. Isn't it time we changed tack and started to think the way prosperous societies do? All across the western hemisphere, one finds more things in common than differences. From public transportation to garbage disposal, health to piped water or electricity, the similarities between rich countries are striking. Children don't die of malnutrition, people don't turn up late for work. Banks may crash in Iceland, even volcanoes can go up in smoke, but babies will be born healthy and hospitals will still be clean. To look the way rich countries do, we must pay attention to their processes and systems: the results come later. Where there are no short cuts or package deals, poverty figures don't count. Affluent societies have become what they are because they did not succumb to pretend altruism and design services for the poor. As this put policymakers and policy receivers, the rich and the indigent, in the same boat they all made it to the other end together. This is why all rich countries look alike but poor countries look different in their own ways!