In the week that we learned that four of the ten richest men in the world are Indian and that we have more billionaires than China and Brazil, I have to, alas, play spoilsport. It happens that just before Forbes magazine came out with its annual list, I was in rural Rajasthan amid the marginal farmers this prime minister seems so keen to help. While our billionaires regularly make it to front pages across the country, our marginal people live such bleak lives that we prefer to forget about them. This is one reason why governments get away with expensive, elaborate anti-poverty measures that make marginal difference if any. It is my view that the Rs 60,000 crore that the finance minister just wrote off in the Budget to exempt marginal farmers from paying back their loans falls into this category. But, first let me give you a glimpse of life on the margins. To get to the village of Ushaan, 40 km from Udaipur, we drove along a narrow, bumpy road that got narrower and bumpier as we climbed through a wasteland of barren hills. The village consisted of windowless huts made of stone and bereft of belongings of any kind. The people were all malnourished, illiterate and mired in hopeless, grinding poverty. They subsist on the one crop they grow in a year and their children rarely get a meal that includes anything more than dry makki-ki-roti (cornbread). Children grow up not just without food but without a childhood. Their parents have no choice but to send children as young as ten off with contractors who take them as virtual slave labour to the factories of Gujarat. The Rs 500 a child earns in a month is more important than the childhood he loses working 12 hours a day. The only hope I saw in this desolate place was a school run by the NGO, Sewa Mandir, where a group of small children were being taught to read and write by a village girl who had managed to go to college in Udaipur. Kesar was proud of teaching the children, she said, because if they learned to read and write, their lives would change. There were little girls in her class as well as boys and she said that village elders were so aware now of the importance of education that they urged her parents not to marry her off too soon so she could continue teaching. The problem is that educational standards cannot improve through non-governmental intervention, no matter how good it is, and government schools in most of rural India are in terrible shape. Teachers rarely come, and when they do, they rarely teach. Inevitably children drop out at an early age, but officials insist that there is 100 per cent enrolment and 70 per cent literacy. Lies only solve the problem on paper. So, is there any hope that life for India’s marginal farmers will change? No. We can continue to waive loans, guarantee employment and run elaborate schemes to help women and children, but they will make no difference because marginal farming can never do more than keep people in poverty. My brother is a farmer with a large (by Indian standards) farm in supposedly rich and prosperous Haryana. He makes an average of Rs 12,000 per acre a year, so imagine what a marginal farmer in a poorer state like Bihar or Orissa makes. For India to become a rich country, we need to begin by accepting that marginal and small farms cannot do more than keep people in poverty. Only then will we start making policies that work. Instead of spending thousands and thousands of crores every year on schemes that work marginally at best, what we need to do is invest that money on skills training programmes, better schools and better public services in general. In rural parts, it is not just schools that exist mostly on paper, but hospitals, public transport, electricity, drinking water and almost everything else. There is another problem. Those of our politicians who are of leftist bent have a vested interest in keeping people poor and illiterate, because they believe they constitute a vote bank that can be fooled most of the time. This is the fundamental principle of the feudal socialism that has been our ideology since Independence. It has worked so far, but cannot any more because the contrasts are ugly and unacceptable. No matter how many billionaires we add to the billionaire lists of the world, India will continue to be a poor country until we find a way to make the average, rural Indian escape dreadful poverty. The ways we have found so far have not worked and we must begin by accepting this.
