The Planning Commission and politicos, the deciders of the nation’s fate, seem singularly poor-blind. The sordid spectacle being staged in the name of the poor is at once sinister and sickening: Sinister owing to the seamless political posturings across parties; and sick because of the utter insensitivity of the numbers-oriented debate. The question is not who is on the side of the poor but the pervasive presence of poor. And it is inhuman to see the poor as just an ‘economic problem’.
Squalor will never show itself in soul-less statistics. It cannot be reduced to rupee values. And the plight of the poor cannot certainly be described or determined, by arbitary lines drawn with the help of vague and irrelevent indices which again are based on random samples. And when even these hazy lines keep shifting to suit political and economic agendas of rulers, the disconnect between reality and numbers get more glaring. Indeed if the Planning Commission is right about its latest claims of decreasing poverty, India should be the first nation in the world to show ‘Nil’ under the column ‘No of poor’ in its economic balance sheet in a very few years time. And the only one ever to eradicate povery by just erasing a digit here and a decimal there. In fact, a computer operator can easily banish poverty right now, if the planners so wish.
The divorce between rising poverty on ground and falling graphs on monitors reveals a larger truth about economic policy-making. Collecting and crunching numbers are vital for economics. But what is swallowed and, particularly, what is spat out are more important. And even those numbers have to be ingested with a pinch of salt. After all, successive censuses have always failed to calculate the correct population of the country. The category-wise sub-totals within that dubious demographic data, for quota or other social-religious purposes, have also defied reality. The GDP number merrily leaves out the bulk of the economy that is painted in black, making a mockery of monetary measures. Inflation is declared to be under control just when diesel and onion go one more notch beyond people’s grasp. In all it is such tenuous foundations on which the edifice of economic policy is built.
If decision making too is just a linear extension of data processing, what we need will be a Planning Computer, not Planning Commission. Tallying and tying up or loosening numerical knots are what even the world’s best accountants are most obsessed about. Truth is incidental and negotiable too so long as RHS equals LHS! In any case, there are the ubiquitous labels like Miscellaneous or Suspense to camouflage the gaps. Probably that is where the missing poor population of India is hiding after being rendered incognito by a sleight of statistics. The point is, it takes an analytical brain to fish out facts from behind the facade of figures. And when people are involved, it needs a humane heart too. The policy makers should have at the least bothered to shift their sights from the screens to the streets. And possibly hit the lanes on empty stomach, clad in dhoti and towel, with just Rs35/- (or sub-Rs 30/- if on a dusty rural road) rolled in to find out how many hours they can last. They would then see their much fancied but illusory poverty line literally zooming to the skies on the wings of deprivation and depravity with huge swathes of humanity underneath.
Every illiterate is poor. And anyone who has no access to essential medical help is poor too. Hungry persons with no means for a meal and those who cannot afford change of clothes personify privation, too. Absence of sanitation and electricity are sordid signs of poverty. Teeming platform dwellers, street children, alm seekers and many such lost lots are stark symbols of all pervading penury. There are the growing ghettoes housing the human discards of development. There are millions of daily earners who have no clue if they would be around the next day: A gust of wind can wind up their livelihoods. A short spell of rain can ruin their life. And the vagaries of nature apart, they are also at the mercy of so many masters, from a greasy cop to a corrupt councillor to a local shark. The rural poor and their plight is a sad saga on its own. Indeed, poverty is all about living conditions and life security and cannot be pegged on a monetary scale.
A welfare State that first pushed the poor down the hole by abdicating from basic education and healthcare is only compounding its crime by fudging numbers that determine entitlements in government schemes. Treating humans in distress as mere voters looking up for doles is like adding ignominy to injury! The have-nots have had enough already!
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