The goal of poverty eradication is getting increasingly subdued in the euphoria of economic buoyancy. India has been growing fast but growth has been concentrated in particular sectors, segments and regions. The stock market is surging towards 18,000 but that does not mean that India as a nation is surging to a middle-class comfortable status. The per capita income remains low on average and even lower in some areas like Bihar and Orissa. International comparisons make this look worse. Other development indices are equally embarrassing, particularly the human development indicators on health, literacy, infant mortality, nutrition for the young and newborn babies. But this is more than mere embarrassment. This is a central challenge for our policy makers. The implicit assumption of merely concentrating on growth and implicitly believing in a trickle down effect has proved fallacious. There are moral reasons for alleviating poverty as well as strategic ones — poverty feeds extremism and desperation. The growing influence of the Maoist and Naxalite groups in large parts of India, whatever be the ideological yearnings, is primarily fed by deprivation that leads to desperation. So there are at least three questions: How to define poverty? What is the current strategy? What do we need to do about it? These three related questions were visited in depth in a recent international seminar on ‘Revisiting the Poverty Issue: Measurement, Identification and Eradication’, held in Patna, July 20-22. The academic community included both old and new “poverty practitioners” ranging from A. Vaidyanathan, Arjun Sengupta, T.N. Srinivasan, S.R. Hashim, V.S.Vyas, G.S. Bhalla, G.K. Chadha, Kaushik Basu, Pranab Bardhan, Y.K. Alagh, Abhijit Sen, Jean Dreze, and Rohini Nayyar to name a few. Richard Palmer-Jones of University of East Angila, UK, the lead economist of Word Bank Peter Lanjouw, Vegard Iverson, Shenggen Fan of International Food Policy & Research Institute, and many others reflected international participation. Ashwani Saith not only made a valuable contribution in the dialogue but was greatly instrumental in putting together a resolution adopted at the end called ‘The Patna Consensus.’ The ‘Patna Consensus’ grappled with all the major issues mentioned above. For instance it says: “The prevalent central, Planning Commission methods for estimating the incidence of poverty using the ‘inherited’ poverty lines are deeply flawed on various grounds. This effectively makes much poverty invisible, thereby leading to serious distortions in analytical deductions and policy prescriptions based on the estimates. This approach, which should be used essentially at a monitoring level, should be holistically reviewed in order to restore its credibility and relevance in the current context of the country. In doing so, there should be a full acknowledgement of the new contexts, constraints and patterns of consumption — especially needs in the dimensions of health, education, travel, fuel etc. The implications for the households of the withdrawal of the state from public provisioning should be factored in fully.” Empirical findings indicated that such revisions could generate substantially higher estimates of poverty using the income/expenditure method. We are obviously not doing a good enough job. The clear consensus of the conference was a recognition that the BPL Census 13-Criteria Procedure has inherently serious methodological flaws which have led to extensive errors in the identification of poor households — those left out are not statistical errors but human beings. What to do: • Err on the side of inclusion as long as we have imperfect estimates. This is for moral and ethical reasons • Recognise new patterns of consumption, and include these in definitions of what is “enough” • Develop better mechanisms for listening to the experiences of the poor and of NGOs and practitioners dealing with the poor. One way is by strengthening local governance • Another way is to move towards more demand-driven programmes, accompanied by some capacity-building to make sure that those who are less able to articulate their demands are not left out • A third way is to credibly tackle the context of poverty by providing the social and physical infrastructure to enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty. Sustained and credible attention to primary education, for example, would enable those with the knowledge about the obstacles to moving out of poverty to tackle those challenges The conference was productive in understanding the complexities of what constitutes poverty, the need to look beyond hunger to the ingredients of a decent life as defined by the original framers of our development strategy. Given technology and growing international prosperity, we need new and innovative approaches for poverty eradication. The Patna Consensus does not necessarily articulate a coherent or better way forward. The next piece will address strategies for alleviating poverty . For the present, it is important to accept that Poverty still Matters. Prosperity may be less infectious than we actually believe. Poverty is both debilitating and appalling to our moral fibre.
