Opinion A state of mind
Nothing is true until it is officially denied as Bismarck said
Nothing is true until it is officially denied as Bismarck said. When you hear a politician complain that he was quoted out of context,you know that for once he was accurately reported. So we can trust the report that Rahul Gandhi has broken his silence after many months and said that poverty is a state of mind. To give the full,out of context quotation,Poverty is a state of mind (and) has nothing to do with the shortage of food,money or material things.
This is one of the best things Rahul Gandhi has said about poverty. There has been,after all,much confusion about poverty. Politicians have made fools of themselves when faced with the most recent figures that poverty in India had come down from 407.1 million people or 37.2% of the population in 2004-05 to 269.7 million or 21.9% in 2011-12. This could have been good news,but it was trashed as rubbish by one wing of the Congress,which claimed that this was a shocking underestimate as the poverty threshold was too low at just Rs 5,000 per month per family. Others claimed that the poverty threshold at Rs 27.2 per person per day in rural areas or Rs 33.3 in urban areas was far too generous as one could get a lunch at a dhaba for Rs 12 (obviously the view of some abstemious politician who survives on only pav-bhaaji).
For over a century,poverty level has been defined in terms of minimum calories required to subsistaround 2,200per person per day. You calculate how much it would cost to buy food that would get you that many calories and that was the poverty level of income. If you did not have even that much,you were poor. In India,after 30-odd years of looking at just food,we added a few more itemshealth,education,energy,transport (the Tendulkar line),and have arrived at the current numbers.
The World Bank line at $1.25 gets you 33% or 40 crores as below poverty line. Raise the threshold and you get more people under the poverty line. The fashion on the Left is to believe that poverty is far greater than these estimates. The Food Security Bill covers 67% or 80 crores as deserving subsidised foodgrains.
So tell me what your politics is and you get a suitable poverty level. Poverty is a function of your state of mind,i.e. your political beliefs. But even so,all this is about eating plus a bit in the present tense. All our measures do not address the question of not how many are poor but why,and how we can help them out of poverty. This is about aspirations that the poor have,the opportunities that are open to them for education,skill development or a better job. Poverty is not going to be reduced by throwing food at the poor at subsidised prices,satisfying though it may be for politicians and do-gooders.
Consider the fact that the Food Security Bill,which will cost
Rs 1.25 lakh crore,offers a subsidy of Rs 1,500 for each of the 80 crores or Rs 7,500 for a family of five. If we restrict the definition to the World Bank line,this could mean twice as much per capita Rs 3,000. At the Tendulkar level,the handout could be Rs 4,800 per capita. How much more we could do to remove poverty if we could transfer the money directly to the families themselves via Aadhaar rather than through PDS,which will waste at least 40% around Rs 50,000 crore?
So Rahul Gandhi is right. Poverty is a state of mind but not of the poor but of the politicians who only seek to measure poverty to locate how much money they can spend feeding the poor but not giving them hope. This is because the idea is to keep the people confined to their electoral constituency grateful and ready to vote for the mai-baap Congress. Rahul could persuade his party to scrap the Food Security Bill and spend the Rs 1.25 lakh crore on job creation. But is that his state of mind?
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