Mystery of India's Poverty: Can the State Break Its Grip?
By AMY WALDMAN in BARADPUR, India The New York Times | 29 April 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/international/asia/29letter.html In torn clothes, the boys, mostly low-caste children of laborers, held out their plates to be served from a steaming vat of gruel. The image was Dickensian, but it represented not 19th-century England's abdication of responsibility toward the poor but 21st-century India's seeming embrace of it. The children are beneficiaries of an acclaimed program mandated in 2001 by India's Supreme Court to provide cooked lunches to all primary schoolchildren. The program is the signature success of a movement in India that is working to create for the poor an entitlements-based social welfare system much like Europe's. But this is India, home to the world's largest concentration of poor, where some 350 million people still live on less than a dollar a day. So the effort has inevitably raised questions as enormous as the challenge: not least, can poor nations have a social safety net, too? Such questions have divided economists, policymakers and advocates here in recent months, reflecting the uncertain science of poverty reduction, the political and financial pressures tugging at this democracy of more than a billion people, and an India conflicted about the face it wants to present to the world. Welfare and workfare programs are today taken for granted to assist the needy in otherwise prosperous Western industrialized societies. But they took centuries of effort and upheaval to take shape. How much more staggering the task, then, for India. The country ranks 127th out of 177 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures life span, education and living standard. Nearly half its children are undernourished, a level worse than sub-Saharan Africa. As the social welfare movement expands its goals, debate is expanding, too, over the obligations of the state toward the poor, what India's government can do, and whether betterment can or should be left to economic growth alone. For example, the movement's latest effort - to get a law guaranteeing the rural poor jobs on public works projects - has proved deeply controversial. As originally envisioned, the employment law would have guaranteed one member of any rural household 100 days' minimum-wage employment a year on a public works project near home. Resisting the costs, the Congress-led coalition government has since substantially pared back the bill. Advocates for the poor say the later version would leave vulnerable most of the more than 90 percent of India's labor force that has no unemployment insurance or pension enrollment. The weaker version is close to enactment now. The competing visions for the law reflect a similarly deep divide among economists. One school of thought argues that simply unleashing the economy - by allowing more foreign investment, selling off unprofitable state-owned companies and cutting red tape - will reduce poverty more than a new government program. They point to government estimates that the proportion of people living in poverty dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent of the population in the first decade after economic reforms, which began in 1991. "Where energy and policy should go is how to accelerate the growth, and not be distracted by these old slogans that really made sense 40 years ago," said Surjit S. Bhalla, an economist who opposes the employment law. The finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, made a similar argument in an interview, saying that while an employment guarantee could "keep the pot boiling once a day," it would not end poverty. That could be done, he said, only through 7 to 8 percent annual growth and "real jobs." The counterargument is made by Jean Dreze, an economist of Belgian origin who is now an Indian citizen, and the employment guarantee's most vocal champion. Mr. Dreze says that even if the poverty-reduction figures are valid, which many economists dispute, the economy would have to grow at a much faster rate than even the most optimistic estimates if it were to truly improve the lot of the poor. "The way we're going now it is going to take forever to get people to an acceptable living standard," he said. Even 1 percent of gross domestic product - the expected price tag for the employment law - was a small price to pay for easing hunger, stemming seasonal migration and reducing child labor, he argued. A national employment guarantee would absorb and supplant much of the patchwork quilt of antipoverty programs that the government has financed over the decades. Most of them offer food for labor on public works projects. In many places, those programs have become essential buffers against drought and landlessness. But they also have been plagued by waste and corruption, a record cited by those who argue that a nationwide employment program would funnel more money not to the poor but rather to corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and local power brokers. Mr. Dreze concedes there are abuses and waste, but says remedies could be made available - a strong right to information law, for example - that could allow local communities to monitor how public funds are used. He was among those responsible for India's most significant social welfare expansion in recent years, the midday meal program, which resulted from a suit that challenged the government to use its vast stores of rice and wheat to alleviate hunger. In response, the Supreme Court ordered the government to provide cooked lunches in all of the country's schools. The program has so far reached only about 55 percent of Indian children because several large states have lagged in putting it in place. But where it has gone into effect, it has had a discernible impact. Teachers at the government primary school for boys in this town near Delhi say the lunch - usually a bolstering mix of lentils and rice - has brought to school some 50 or 60 children who were otherwise regularly absent. A study by the Center for Social Equity in New Delhi said the program had especially helped retain girls, who are often the first denied schooling in poor families; improved child nutrition; and encouraged mixing among castes. But even some advocates for the poor question adding a new entitlement, like the proposed employment law, when many current ones, notably public health, are so badly administered. Public education too is in disarray, and while any schooling is better than none, it still seems odd to ask teachers here how much the midday meal program has improved learning, given how little learning is going on. One building is crumbling so badly that it has not been used for five or six years. In the other, newly built, all but one classroom is used to lock away benches and tables that the teachers say would be stolen if left outside. So on a recent day, three classes of rambunctious boys sat on the sandy ground. The teachers, earning about $230 a month, are decently paid by Indian standards. But on the day a reporter visited, only 5 of 11 teachers were present; the rest had taken early leave for coming holidays. For some children, then, the meal has taken on more value than their education. The boys are supposed to bring their own plates, but many are too poor to do so. So they line up with their miniblackboards, notebooks or schoolbooks held out. The gruel is slopped on to their learning from the day. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/EA3HyD/3MnJAA/79vVAA/NJYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> �������������������������������������������������������� This is ZESTEconomics. Post economics-related articles and event info to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTEconomics by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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