Listen to the voices of the poor

They took two villages each in Bihar, UP and Karnataka. These wereBhokhila in Nalanda and Kaithi in Rohtas district of Bihar; Bahilpurwa and Hanuwa in Chitrakut district of UP; and Thodiarahalli and Purlahalli in Chitradurga district of Karnataka. They sat down with the villagers and did exercises of social mapping with them. More important they went into their perceptions of change in their status and the causes of change. What emerged was a fascinating description of India’s political economy.

The villagers didn’t find it easy to do these rankings but finally they did come to agreed conclusions on the poorest, the richest and the ones in between. The Indian is a person of self-esteem and does not want to be called poor, so it takes time to agree. The very poorest had a hunger problem and it was acute in Bihar and UP, and it was acute in some months of the year from Asarh to Aswin in the north and on the days when there’s no employment. They ate meagrely, jhors (gruel) of local cereals and sometimes even rats and frogs. Many of them were families without a breadwinner onaccount of illness or de-ath, a point I have made earlier that the hungry in many cases are in women-he-aded households or those with disabilities. To a large extent this is an identifiable and solvable problem.

It was interesting that almost everywhere the villagers felt that the situation had improved. Poor people equate well-being, the authors say, with a life led with personal dignity which implied social and political equality and the ability to make economic choices. It was in these areas that the poorer Indian sees more opportunity. Ca-ste and economic rankings is still important, particularly in the nor-th, and yet there are more opportunities, less restrictions and le- ss coercion.

While there was mi-strust of government functionaries, the employment programme mattered, not so the rural development sch-e mes. Poor people want access to ration shops and their functioning was better in Karnataka. Lower castes still do not have access to the available drinking water so-urces. School enrollment hadimproved for all and was nearly universal for the rich. Vaccination programmes were universal, but access to health facilities was not.

Women faced the brunt of problems. They were at the edge of food insecurity, faced acute health problems and were subjected both to violence and molestation. The poor in India have well identified priorities in terms of access to land, employment and social facilities and there is a politicisation of these aspirations. In fact poverty is not identified in villages by calorie cutoffs and so on but by social and economic access. It is seen as land holding, housing, access to a road, school, health facilities, the pumpset and credit. They see improvement through time, but the basic structure has not changed.

The problem of acute hunger, I believe, can be identified and attacked. It is limited to households in distress without able-bodied male workers and, given the will, can be solved through a direct approach and better information-based management systems. The problems ofaccess are more complex and on a much wider plane. This study conclusively makes the point that simplistic answers and measurements of an abstract kind don’t help. The Dutch sociologist, Jan Bremen, who has done a lifetime of field work in south Gujarat and Indonesia, recently recounted a comical story on the politics of poverty. He points out that earlier there were orders from the top to reduce poverty and it was done. Now the orders were the other way around and it was being done.

My colleagues V.M. Rao, Alakh Sha-rma, Ravi Srivastava, Gayathri, Pushpen-dra and V. Ramaswamy deserve our congratulations for walking us through our villages. Listening to the voices of the poor is the first step in India’s civilised march to its destiny in the next century. Thank you for reminding us of the dignity of the poor Indian and the clarity of his vision. We have failed him, but it is never too late. We need more of such voices.