Figuring the other half

Economists, of course, never having to suffer from the diffidence of philosophers, have banished poverty several times over — unfortunately, only on paper. Meanwhile, despite a global economy of $ 25 trillion, a quarter of humanity remains severely impoverished, as UNDP’s Human Development Report 1997 states.

In this document, the UNDP has bravely advanced a composite index to measure human deprivation for the first time. Called the Human Poverty Index (HPI), it presents the flip side as it were of the Human Development Index which it had introduced in its first report of 1990. Three broad signposts are used to navigate this terrain of impoverishment: longevity, represented by the percentage of people expected to die before 40; education, measured by the percentage of adults who are illiterate; and access to basic services, or the percentage of people who are without health facilities, safe drinking water and the percentage of children who are malnourished.

This is not the first time that a composite index of this kind has been attempted. In 1996, the International Fund for Agricultural Development even came up with one based on three separate indices. The Food Security Index (FSI), dealing with food availability and distribution in a country; the Basic Needs Index (BNI), using the education and health status of the population; and the Integrated Poverty Index, based on per capita GNP, the gap between the maximum and minimum incomes in a country and the percentage of people living below the poverty line. Using all three of these indices, it evolved a Relative Welfare Index.

The attempt is really to present a slightly more nuanced portrait of human disabilities than what a reliance on mere income levels would yield. For years, Indian administrators have measured levels of poverty in terms of the income required to provide people in rural and urban areas with a calorie intake of 2,400 and 2,100 respectively. Those who don’t have access to this minimum are considered to be living below the poverty line.

The correlation between income and food, while important, is not a sufficient indicator because it is not broad or dynamic enough to capture the capacity of people to sustain themselves and their communities in the circumstances they live in. For instance, while income could rise with work that results in the severe depletion of a local forest in a particular area, there is no guarantee that once the trees disappear, the community could continue to feed itself.

Similarly, the wealth of a particular state does not necessarily mean that its people have adequate welfare. In terms of income Haryana, with a per capita State Domestic Product of Rs 9037, is the third richest state in India after Punjab and Maharashtra. Yet for every 1,000 live births in the state, 68 infants die. This is over four times higher than Kerala’s infant mortality rate (IMR), although the latter state has a per capita State Domestic Product of only Rs 5,768.

Using just the IMR figures one can gain quite a useful picture of social and economic development in the country. Kerala’s IMR of 16 per 1,000 is comparable with those prevailing in the most advanced countries of the world, even as Orissa, with an IMR of 103 per 1,000, performs worse than sub-Saharan Africa.

India has managed to halve its IMR level from 146 per thousand in 1951 to 74 in 1995. But before we congratulate ourselves on this achievement it is worth taking another look at the figures. For one, there is an unsightly gap between the situation prevailing in urban India and that in rural areas. In 1992-93, the IMR in cities and towns stood at 59.4 per 1,000, while for the countryside it was 94.3, pointing to sharp disparities in access to healthcare. If we were to look at specific communities, there are more telling reminders. The IMR level in tribal communities is even higher than Orissa’s at 107 per 1,000.

These are the mortality tales that human development indices tell us if we are only prepared to listen to them. Tales of inequalities, where some prosper to the detriment of others; of greed, where some corner the resources which rightly belong to all; of waste and sloth, where delivery systems that sound good are really only paper bridges.

The mid-day meal programme in schools is an illustration of this. Presented as an innovative and invaluable scheme to help retain children in classrooms and to provide an important nutritional input, today it flounders thanks to bureaucratic indifference. Of the Rs 14,000 million earmarked by the Centre for mid-day meals in the 1996-97 budget, only Rs 8,000 million was utilised by the various state governments.

There are regions and communities in this country that have, for all practical purposes, fallen off the map. Locating them with the sextant of statistical indices is a useful exercise, but only if it helps governments target the areas that need attention and encourage people to fight the causes of their poverty. If this does not happen, statistics and indices remain mere numbers, numbers and more numbers.

The writer participated in UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Workshop on Human Development Report 1997 at Hanoi.