Poverty has many lines

It is normal for people to equate poverty with hunger. After all, the official poverty line developed by a task force I had chaired in the late seventies to demarcate the poverty line took into account the average calorie intake. Dissatisfied with it, in the nineties I had set up an expert group under Professor Lakdawala to re-examine the issue. While it made many interesting measurement changes, the poverty line was left intact.

A senior planner pointed out that poverty implied some other minimum needs and was therefore broader than hunger. There was a more basic difficulty, as the late Dr Sukhatme had shown. People could be perfectly healthy consuming fewer calories, for the body has the resilience to adapt.

In fact, Sukhatme, a member of the original task force, had insisted on the incorporation of a “modified poverty line”, which lowered the required calorie norm. He said that if it was supplemented, for example, with clean drinking water, pressing minimum needs would be met. However, the modified poerty line could not stand the pressure of competitive politics and was dropped in the eighties. For, if being below the poverty line means benefits, everybody wants to get them. It’s just a variation of P. Sainath’s famous rule, everyone loves a good drought.

Many of the experts assembled, however, argued that the poverty cut-off point was too low. In fact, work based on household surveys and nutrition studies showed that malnourished people were more numerous than the 27 per cent currently estimated as poor.

Some estimates were higher than half of the population. When micro-nutrients were taken into account, some sections of the population, particularly children and women, were at considerable nutritional risk. A senior civil servant pointed out that when poverty was enumerated administratively, the numbers were higher and so the poverty norm should be raised. In any case, aspirations were rising and so one suspects the rich of today could be the poor of tomorrow. So now we had three norms, the very poor, the poor and the malnourished.

I have been pointing out for some time that Gandhiji had an interesting formula. When Gandhians go to a village, they locate the houses where the chullah doesn’t burn twice a day. In other words, people who don’t cook two meals a day would get from them a sack of grain.

The National Sample Survey had tried to find out the number of households who in their own perception don’t get two meals a day. This was higher earlier and is now 7 per cent of the population.

So I was very happy when the finance minister said in his budget speech that grain would be provided to a quarter of the poor families. This makes it a national consensus because at the Mt Abu conclave, the Congress president had made grain to the poorest part of her agenda. We have the grain and the political will, so now let’s solve the problem of the poorest of the poor.

As a learned colleague correctly pointed out, this will not solve the problems of the poor or of those who eat two meals yet are malnourished. In fact, with globalisation rendering agricultural diversification at risk, widespread growth and poverty removal are becoming more difficult in India and in the rest of Asia. In east Asia diversified rural growth reversed in the second half of the last decade, as FAO data shows, and this will take its toll.

These are problems that demand long-term programmes. In this regard, the hunger meeting came up with very good suggestions. Health, drinking water and local work programmes need to be reinforced. Technology will be a major part of the solution. A practical nutrition education agenda is important. But the strengthening of local institutions, for resolving the problem of stark hunger, need not wait till 2007. It can be solved this year.

Write to ykalagh@expressindia.com