How long to extirpate penury in India? 300 years to end poverty?

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Moin Ansari

Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | новости рупии | 卢比新闻 | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ルピーニュース | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | پاکستاني کھاتا | Moin Ansari | معین آنصآرّی | DefensebriefsIntellibriefs Translate to: Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape Bookmark and Share Add to Technorati RSS feed: | RUPEE NEWS | March 24th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | معین آنصآرّی | اخبار روپیہ | Moin Ansari | March 24th, 2007 | معین آنصآرّی | اخبار روپیہ | Hard information on India is hard to come by. Most of it is Indian foreign office frothy fluff, Bollywood balderdash, panaglossian gloss, and slick slithery marketing spin by India Inc. The rest is lipstick on a pig.

Around six out of 10 Indians live in the countryside, where abject poverty is widespread. 34.7 % of the Indian population lives with an income below $ 1 a day and 79.9 % below $ 2 a day. According to the India’s planning commission report 26.1 % of the population live below the poverty line. [World Bank's poverty line of $1 a day, but the Indian poverty line of Rs 360 a month, or 30 cents a day]

  • India as a world power? Part 1
  • World power India? Part 2
  • India as a World Power: Part 3

    • The Dalit Network, the Naxalites and some reporting out of India gives a more balanced picture.

    India needs 300 years to lift all its people out of extreme levels of poverty, February 11, 2008 by CyberGandhi

    The dark reality, By Siddharth Dube and Mohan Guruswamy, IHT

    The mood among affluent and middle-class Indians as the country marks its 58th year as a republic is unabashedly celebratory. Everywhere they look there is evidence that India is finally being taken seriously as an economic and political powerhouse.

      How long to extirpate penury in India? 300 years to end poverty?

    President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has called for India to be part of an expanded “Group of 8.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain has expressed support for India’s place as a permanent member of a refashioned UN Security Council. The World Bank and financial leaders at the World Economic Forum are looking to India to help power the world out of its economic downturn. India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, has predicted another year of over 9 percent economic growth, record foreign investment, and low inflation.

    So it is little wonder that prosperous Indians increasingly think of their country as “Incredible India!,” the tag line of the government’s global advertising campaign.
    While there is some welcome truth to these new images, the defining reality of India is that it remains the land of mass poverty, scarcely less so than before its economy began to take off 15 years ago.

    The government’s latest survey of living standards reports that the number of extremely poor Indians, those chronically unable to consume even the minimum calories needed for full functioning, is an astonishing 301 million, just 19 million less than in 1983. At this rate, it would take India 300 years to lift all its people out of even the most extreme levels of poverty. The survey’s results suggest that extreme poverty has fallen no faster, and possibly more slowly, in the past 15 years of spectacular economic growth than in earlier periods, challenging the popular notion that money “trickles down” to all.

    Moreover, the true scale of poverty and deprivation is far greater than that suggested by even the huge ranks of the extremely poor. A recent report by the prominent economist Arjun Sengupta, chairman of a key government commission on labor conditions, emphasized that another 50 percent of India’s people, over 500 million in all, live on less than 20 rupees a day, which puts them above the official poverty line but still leaves them “in abject poverty and excluded from all the glory of a shining India.” Twenty rupees is about 50 U.S. cents, but adjusted for purchasing power falls somewhat below the $2 a day international poverty line. While the proportion of Indians living in such poverty has being falling slowly, their absolute numbers have risen by 100 million in the past 15 years alone.

    Poverty has never been high on India’s political agendas. The interests of India’s business elite and growing middle classes dominate media attention. Celebrations of prosperity, typified by the “Incredible India!” campaign, drown out the ubiquitous evidence that the vast majority of Indians lead desperate lives. The view from middle-class India today is that theirs is a land of wealthy and middle-class people, with a small and shrinking minority of impoverished people. No wonder: In a interview with the BBC earlier this year Chidambaram, a key architect of narrow business-friendly reforms, asserted, “I’m confident we can wipe out poverty by 2040.”
    What will it take to transform India’s newfound dynamism and prosperity into a meaningful reduction in poverty?
    The first step is government recognition of the true scale of poverty. For decades, successive Indian governments have played down the scale of the poverty challenge by insisting that the cut-off line marking poverty be set extraordinarily low, at a level that most experts would consider not poverty but outright destitution. (India’s poverty line is significantly lower than even the widely used $1 per day extreme poverty line.) A report by the Center for Policy Alternatives estimates that a poverty line adequate to cover the costs of meeting such basic human needs as education, nutrition, health care, clothing, safe water and sanitation, would be roughly twice as high as the poverty line in use today. Nearly 80 percent of India’s population would be considered impoverished were the government to adopt this poverty line.
    Faced with a true recognition of the massive extent of poverty, the Indian state’s response must certainly include further efforts to sustain the rapid economic growth of recent years. It is this performance that has moved some 90 million Indians into the middle-and upper-class. But with hundreds of millions remaining impoverished, and millions more added to the work force every year, India needs a pattern of economic growth that rapidly creates many decently paid jobs. This requires far more success in expanding manufacturing and industry, following China’s example, rather than just the services sector. And, even more critically, it requires rural prosperity through ending the disastrous neglect of agriculture, rural infrastructure (particularly state-provided irrigation), and rural industries. The lobbyists from trade, finance and business – who have been embraced too closely by almost all of India’s political parties – have little interest in these areas.
    Economic growth and jobs will create avenues for the educated and the healthy among the poor to begin to rise out of poverty. But hundreds of millions of Indians are poorly educated or outright illiterate, malnourished, vulnerable to illness, and often oppressed – with the lowest castes, Muslims, and women of the populous northern states worst off.

    Setting right these inequities requires not just more money – though far higher government investments are needed on some fronts, such as public health and providing social security benefits to every one of the poor. Much of the billions spent on India’s panoply of poverty programs ends up in the pockets of the country’s legion of corrupt officials, politicians and business people; another large share is never spent because of bureaucratic inefficiency. There are no quick-fix solutions to such problems. Without the mobilization of the poor in rural and urban areas alike, and agrarian reform, neither the government nor the private sector will ever deliver education, health or other vital programs to the poor in a manner that will remedy the backlog of the past. India’s peninsular states have a far better track record on basic services and, increasingly, on poverty, precisely because of decades of political and social movements committed to equity. Such social mobilization is the foundation for eventually making India’s democracy responsive to the country’s impoverished majority.

    Incredible India! is still very far from a reality on the ground. It will take nothing less than several decades of commitment to pro-poor economic growth, government reform and mobilization in favor of the poor to realize this vision of India.

    Siddharth Dube is the author of “In the Land of Poverty.” Mohan Guruswamy is the chairman of the Center for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi. Courtsey: Dalitnation.wordpress.com and Dalit Network.

      The South Asia Subcontinent is sometimes incorrectly called \\'India is no more a country than the Equator\'.Winston Churchill The South Asia Subcontinent is sometimes incorrectly called \

    We have tried to analyze this question in depth and tried to divorce the myth from the Bollywood reality. Is India a failed state? Yes. India is not a state. If India is poor. How long to end poverty in “Bharat” Affluence in Bharat. The status of India has to be looked at. India as world power! Part 1. We broke this article into two parts. World power India: Part 2. The real problem of India is the strange and with amazing that is repulsive to the planet. Chilled Urine drinking hot in India. From Gandhi to Prime Minister Desai to common man. Bigotry runs wild and is sanctioned against the 250 million Dalits. Hindu India: A gift from the Hindu Gods:Cows Urine: UK Telegraph reports by Julian West. More on Urine drinking in India. A fit from the Gods to Hindus. Bottled Cow Urine. Story reported by Daily Telegraph of UK. The situation may have arisen becuase the father of the nation Mr. Gandhi had very strange antics. Sex life of Mohandas Gandhi, his failures and sexual perversion. His life is like an open book. Sex life of Indira Gandhi. It wans’t just Gandhi it was Mr. Nehru also. Nehru was Gay! Affair with Edwina also

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    « World power India? Part 2 Victims of Brahminic tyranny in India: The forgotten Dalits, Muslims, Women »

    2 Responses

    1. Moin Ansari, on September 9th, 2008 at 9:46 pm Said:

      This is the article on “India as World Power Part III”. The first two parts were written by Cyber Gandhi of Dalit Network..

      http://rupeenews.com/2008/08/05/india-as-a-world-power-part-3/

      CAN SINGH OVERCOME HIS “AKHAND BHARAT” PROGRAMMING?

    2. Vijay, on September 8th, 2008 at 11:17 pm Said:

      India needs 300 years to lift all its people out of extreme levels of poverty, February 11, 2008 by CyberGandhi
      rather than encouraging the Indian effort to uplift the indian masses from poverty, suckling anti Indian writeup by tons has no meaning. I ask simple question How long it takes o turn 100% terrorists and declare a terriorist state… guess less than decade may be 25 yesrs to disintegrate… look internal before blaming India.. this is the effort of yours for last 60 years, come on now chnage you mind set for better of India and join hands with india to uplift the ppor, how long Pakistan play chamcha ( spoon) to saudi’s and Chini’s.. now it is time stan on its feet and walk, run and grow, anti Indain ritterik does not help but only poison the innocent, uneducated Pakistani youth mind and in tern produce more terorists.
      Moin please write sensible and some thing constructive, you can use you knowldge ( which is always in wrong direction) for betterment of Pkaistan, USA (the country you live), neighbours like India and general public.
      Best example of how talent is wasted.
      Good Luck and I want to see a article how India, palkstan be best of world in next 25 years.

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