Opinion Were all poor now
You cannot both expand entitlements and the number of the poor....
We are not only poor but will be poor in many different ways,in a rainbow cafeteria of poverty measures. So we will be poor if our monthly income is less than Rs 6000,if the urban development ministry has its way. All the goodies which coalition-hampered governments visualise before elections will be delivered at our doorsteps. This figure,we are told as an aside,is the average expenditure per household in urban areas,according to the National Sample Survey in 2004-05. Mind you,since expenditure distributions are skewed,more than half the households will be below this point. I am disappointed; I once chaired a process (lifetime training) that was supposed to help the higher civil service keep learning and obviously the civil servant who thought this up did not attend Phase Three,in which rudimentary statistics is taught.
Kaushik Basu is a spoilsport. In the Economic Survey he adds a chapter the gods never designed. He looks heavenward and says capital formation has to rise if we want a 9 per cent growth rate. He then goes on to point out that a little bit of intelligence will show you that we need coupons which can be used or traded in the market for the poor,because he is worried about leakages,bless him. In urban areas his prescriptions are eminently practical even today,although for rural areas he wants to wait until Nandan Nilekani has his UID in place a point we will come to later. But Kaushik,stop worrying. If more than half of us are poor in the cities why waste the money on coupons? Give us the goodies anyway. For the few who are not poor maybe the UID could beep if the goodies come near them.
More seriously,there is another way to think about it. Consider a project at CEPT University (with which I am associated) that works out ways in which communities can restore the walled cities and plan new townships. In states like Gujarat and Maharashtra,town planning has an old tradition. Communities in the walled cities have the skills to redo mohallas that are turning into slums. A former chief secretary of Gujarat was credited with the statement that the bureaucracy only demolishes poor peoples slums and does not touch the rich who also break laws. So unlike Delhi-based dispensations we need to involve people in local plans and now Vijay Kelkars dispensation will also fund them. But in this worldview those who help themselves will be helped by grants,borrowing from the market for city renewal without sovereign guarantees.
More creatively,the towns will be a part of district plans,so that we can plan for a rural-urban continuum of markets and communications linking villages to towns. It is here that I want Kaushik to think through his UID a little more. In a way the UID is a peg to get over a real problem. In a country where 60 per cent of cultivators cant access formal credit because they dont have title to land they cultivate,the UID is passing on a real issue to Nilekani and he will face the same problem. If you look at the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan surveys,they show that the adivasi or Dalit couple who migrate get a transfer certificate and then cant send their daughter back to school because they are no longer beings in the eyes of the state. Kaushik wants fertiliser to be distributed by his coupons or direct subsidies. I wanted this to start in five districts where farmers fertiliser co-ops are strong,to give community backup to a good idea. But Delhi-based think tanks asked for the whole country,the then-FM made some statements,and so of course we got nothing. So maybe we could ask community-based organisations to back up Kaushiks dreams in the transition and that may help Nilekani also.
We CEPTwallahs like this. For Indias first non-sovereign guaranteed loan was in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. Now there are many more. All this and public-private partnerships will get a death blow if there is the delusion that it all comes free.
Getting back to counting the poor,it is honestly great fun now for absolutely no one knows whats going on. I liked the Tendulkar Committee,and have said so on these pages. But it did make the mistake of taking the Alagh Committees urban poverty line (the official line) and making it the nations poverty line. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Their urban poverty line was a little less than Rs 600 per person or Rs 3000 per household. The urbanists want Rs 6000. Kaushik has added some more lines and N.C. Saxena and the urbanists are close to the World Bank two and a half dollars in PPP terms which makes 90 per cent of us poor. The less there is to give,the more the lines will be and good ideas like the food security act for the really hungry will be lost.
The writer,a former Union minister,is chairman,Institute of Rural Management,Anand
express@expressindia.com
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