Economic Highlights

New Delhi, 27 February 2009

Selling India’s Poor

TRULY REMAIN DOGS BEYOND SLUMS

By Shivaji Sarkar

India is shining at the Oscars but it certainly is not shining for the downtrodden. Further, official policies are ensuring a dog’s life for them. Poverty sells in foreign land and earns big bucks but the poor do not get a cent out of it.

Why does poverty sell? Simply, for its romance, relationships, camaraderie, human values, variety, deprivation, struggle, strife and depraved reality. Projection and picturisation, however, do not solve the problem. Had it been so, the teenage heroin of a prize-winning documentary of a Kolkata brothel would not have recently been forced to go back into prostitution. 

Nevertheless, Slumdog Millionaire should be praised for drawing the world’s attention once again to a malaise this country has been discussing, but not resolving, since Independence. The movie has raked up an issue, which has got lost in the Planning Commission’s agenda and to a large extent of the large political parties. Poverty was once the media’s favourite topic, but it too has forgotten all about it. Small mercy now at least it is mulling over the slums if not its “dogs”.

The poor or their slums are nowhere on the 300-odd Indian news channels, and thousands of newspapers and magazines. There is a reason - in today’s consumerist world the poor are not consuming what the rich corporate want to sell.

Tragically, slums provide shelter to the poor but actually feed the rich. No slum anywhere, in big or small cities, has come up without filling the pockets of the rich land mafia, goons, political players, moneylenders, human traffickers, quacks, smugglers, criminal gangs, arms and drug peddlers, et al. Yes, it is a billion, not just a million dollar business, which thrives when the poor remain poor. It provides easy labour for all that is legitimate and illicit. In case of death, no compensation needs to be paid. And by chance if it does then the judiciary ensures the payment matches the stature!

No urban renewal mission, garibi hatao or poverty alleviation programmes have actually helped them. Instead, these have only ensured that the middlemen pocket the allocation.  Clearly, what Rajiv Gandhi had said 25 years ago remains a stark reality. The CAG finds out for itself in the recent programmes such as the NREGA and Delhi’s bus rapid transit (BRT) schemes, meant for the poor. The obvious surmise then is it feeds the corrupt and impoverishes the people for whom the projects are targeted.

Undoubtedly, the global meltdown has hit the poor in the worst possible manner. While it may have deprived the rich of some cash, the poor have lost their livelihood everywhere – Mumbai, Surat, Baroda, Noida, Gurgaon, Delhi and dreamlands of Hyderabad and Bengaluru. They are going back to their farms, knowing well that had these been able to sustain them in the first place they wouldn’t have gone to live in slums of the big cities. So is the meltdown cleansing the slums?

The answer could well be both a yes and no. The types of Dharavi remain but the poor are evicted from their dwellings be it in Delhi, Kolkata or Mumbai. However, nobody removes the rich builder properties that come up on the flood plains of the Yamuna near Okhla in prime South Delhi. Nobody writes about “Operation Sunshine” in Kolkata, where street vendors are summarily removed to make way for the rich man’s car or about sweeping evictions and demolitions of bastis in Mumbai. All these evictions have taken place in the past four years. And, India has evicted more of the urban poor in this decade than it ever did, including in the Emergency.

Similarly, the Government claims to have created jobs. But it forgets to add that more people have been driven out of their jobs since 1991, era of liberalization. Jobs have been lost in the government sector and the euphoric private sector is unable to create an equal number. As per official estimates, since April 2008, 15 lakh jobs have been lost. It does not include the losses in either the unorganized or quasi organized sectors or the million-odd lay-offs. Worse, with the meltdown to continue lakhs of more jobs shall be lost.

The past few months have seen 71 gem polishers in Surat having committed suicide, textile workers in Tamil Nadu selling their kidneys to live, rickshaw-pullers in Delhi being driven out of congested Chandni Chowk (as against London introducing them around Westminster as these are eco-friendly). Where are the pro-poor policies? And, if there are, then aren’t these lopsided?

In Orissa, those returning from the slums to their villages are slowly turning into criminals to feed their families. In UP and Bihar, having gone back to the fields, the farm labourers find crass competition has cut down wages. No wonder rural poverty is increasing. And over 70 per cent poor are subsisting on wages of just Rs 20 a day, as per the National Sample Survey report and as against World Bank’s standard of Rs 40 or around US $ 1.

Even the latest concern of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation for the Bottom Billion excludes India’s extreme poor. The reason: there is no yardstick to include those subsisting on half a dollar. Other than jobs, the underprivileged are also being deprived of higher education opportunities, thanks to it becoming unbearably expensive. On the pretext of linking it to the market, tuition fees in universities, IITs, IIMs and other specialized institutions are being increased, whereby it is touching or crossing a princely sum of around Rs 1lakh.

What message does all this send? Sadly, that the government’s policy is to keep them poor, deprived and underpowered and it is no wonder that our political parties remain silent. Isn’t the government’s fiscal stimulus, almost over Rs 100,000 crore in three packages since December, aimed at improving company balance sheets rather than the purchasing power of the people, necessary to kick-start the economy? What is in it for the poor in the interim budget or the duty cuts announced? Nothing.  

It is a damn shame that the poor are unable to takeover the reins of power as nobody cares or takes up their cause. How can then India shine? But governments insist it does. Yes, it’s “Incredible India” for the dogs that live in and beyond the slums. –INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)