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You are here: Home / Archives for India

Impact Interview: Martha Chen

2014-05-19 By ASAP Global

In this article, Gabriel Neely-Streit interviews Professor Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Read more of our Impact Interviews.

Martha Chen
Martha Chen

In 1997, Chen helped found, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a “global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy.” The informal economy comprises around 300 million laborers worldwide who work without employment security, social security, or other state or employer benefits. Around 70% of informal workers are self-employed, and many live below the international poverty line.

Here, Prof. Chen discusses her organization’s multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary approach to supporting informal laborers, as well as her journey from a small NGO in former East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to Harvard’s Kennedy School, and leadership of one of the most important NGOs in informal sector development.

ASAP: You described your career as progressing, “from activist practitioner to activist academic”. Can you describe that progression? What motivated you to enter academia?

The activist practitioner part of my career, which was the first half of my career, began when my husband and I and our young son were living in Dhaka, East Pakistan in 1970. The coast of East Pakistan was hit by a very large cyclone and tidal wave, in November of 1970. At that time there were very few NGO’s in East Pakistan, unlike today. A group of us started a cyclone relief project and that got many of us into development. That was followed by activism around the recognition of Bangladesh and the civil war that was being perpetrated on East Pakistan by West Pakistan. Then, in the mid-70’s I joined what is now the world’s largest NGO but was at that time quite small: BRAC [then known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee]. The founder of BRAC [Fazle Hasan Abed] and I had worked together on the cyclone relief and some of the money we had raised for cyclone relief he spent to rehabilitate refugees returning from India after the Civil War, and that’s how BRAC was born. He invited me to join BRAC, so I did and started the women’s program in BRAC. That was the beginning of my activist practitioner career.

I worked with BRAC for 5 years. The work involved organizing village women, but also supporting their livelihoods in various ways: craft revival, poultry farms; all the inputs that were needed to make their livelihoods more viable.

The next chapter of my activist practitioner career was that I was invited by Oxfam America to set up their first field office in India, and I did that in 1970-71. I was in India for going on 7 years. I took all the lessons I’d learned from BRAC Bangladesh and supported a portfolio of grantees who were working with either village women or city-slum dweller women around their economic empowerment. I worked with about 60 NGO’s.

ASAP: I’m imagining that work informed a lot of the work you’ve done with WIEGO

Yes, both those chapters of my activist practitioner life sort of propelled me into the WIEGO work. Any of the knowledge I’d gained, the contacts I made, the commitment I gained, all of that was then channeled into WIEGO.

ASAP: How did you come to form WIEGO?

When I left Oxfam America in India, I came to Harvard and I started doing research and teaching at the Kennedy School. For about a decade I tried to stay involved in the more activist practitioner part of my life. I did consulting, and I did field research.

In the early 1990’s, three of us [at the Kennedy School] began to say, ‘we need to do something about how the informal economy is perceived in mainstream academia, and in mainstream development discourse,’ because we knew that it was stigmatized as underground, illegal, black, gray, and that the working poor that we worked with were mostly in the informal economy, and most were simply trying to earn an honest living against actually great odds. So we began circling the idea of a project on the informal economy.

In 1997 we convened a group of 10 experts on the informal economy for what was called the team residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, in Bellagio, Italy. Some of us didn’t know each other before but we knew about each other so we gathered people who we thought were had the same concerns that the informal economy was misunderstood and somehow undervalued in development circles. We had four or five days at Bellagio to spell out how we saw the problem and what we thought would address it. We had a member of that founding group that loved to do charts for us. He did a chart that had a pyramid and an inverted pyramid. The pyramid was what the labor force looked like. At the tip of it you had the formal labor force, at the base of it you had the large informal workforce. On the inverted pyramid at the top you had all the resources and support (policies, regulations) supporting the small formal workforce, and at the inverted tip of the pyramid, you had the very few resources and support going towards the broad base of the informal economy. We wanted to make a rectangle instead of the inverted pyramid where appropriate; resources and support would go to the base of the informal workforce.

ASAP: What are some of the particular challenges that face female workers in the informal economy? How does WIEGO address those challenges?

We address them in a 2-layered way. One is that we see the problems that all informal workers face, and usually those are sector specific, and then we look at the particular constraints that women within those sectors might face that the men do not. There are 2 kinds of issues that we look for. One is what are the negatives, the sort of binding constraints on informal workers as a whole, and by sector. Then we look to see what kind of support they are demanding, either legal, policy, services, resources, what kind of support would help them. So it’s partly what would reduce the negatives and also what would enhance the positives for informal workers by sector.

Then we look at what’s affecting women in particular. So if you take street trade for instance, the big constraints are the insecurity of the vending site and the daily harassment by local authorities, specifically police. Within that, the problems are particularly acute for those who sell fresh produce, one of the reasons being that if your goods are confiscated and they’re fresh, they perish before you can retrieve them from the local authorities. We also know that the majority of fresh produce vendors are women and that the majority of vendors of more durable products are men. So that’s how we address the generic constraints and then the differences between men and women within them.

ASAP: Describe a few of WIEGO’s greatest achievements.

I’ll go from the more abstract to the more specific. I think with regards to mainstream thinking mindsets, we have changed the conceptualization of the informal economy to include not just the self-employed in informal enterprises but also the wage employed in what we call informal jobs. We’ve developed with the ILO (International Labor Organization) statistics department and other international and national statistical bodies a new concept and definition called informal employment, which includes both the self-employed and the wage employed. That is one of the main contributions at the more abstract, intellectual level.

More concretely, we have helped create or strengthen organizations of the workers and link them up by sector. We’ve helped create national, regional and international alliances of domestic workers, home based producers, street vendors and waste pickers. We know for sure that many of those organizations would not exist without our support or would not be as strong. Those are our two main claims to fame. Otherwise, we’ve been able to change mindsets and get more favorable policies in those contexts. But our two main achievements increasing visibility through the statistics and the second one is increasing voice through organization.

ASAP: You talk about the importance of inter-disciplinary cooperation in doing this kind of work. Why is that cooperation important, and how do you achieve it?

There is the academic context of interdisciplinary research, but the more important interdisciplinary aspect of WIEGO’s work is what I would call inter-constituency. We’re really a 3-legged stool. We have members and partners that are organizations of informal workers, we have members and partners that are researchers and statisticians, and then we have members and partners who are development practitioners in national government, international agencies, and NGO’s, and we bridge those three worlds. I think that’s a signature dimension of our work, that we really try to bridge those worlds and build on the comparative strengths of each to leverage more support for the working poor in the informal economy. We help build the advocacy capacity of the organizations of workers, we gain expertise from them, we get researchers and statisticians working on improving our knowledge of the informal economy and then we partner with development agency members and partners to try to bring about policy change.

ASAP: Do academics have a responsibility to be activists?

I wouldn’t say that all academics have a responsibility to be activists. I think that academics in the social sciences might be more likely to be engaged in the real world effecting some type of change in either policies, or theories or practices that relate to issues that impinge on the poor, so there’s a responsibility to make sure that what they do in the real world doesn’t have contradictory outcomes for the poor. Maybe one way to do that is to become more activist with what you do in the world. But I wouldn’t say that all the people in the humanities or the sciences have a responsibility to be activists.

ASAP: How has your activism work with WIEGO encouraged or inspired your academic research?

I was trained to learn and to think inductively rather than deductively: I don’t start with received wisdom and then try to test the theory, I tend to start with descriptive reality and then build up theory, so my exposure through activism is always feeding into that kind of inductive learning and thinking. There’s just no doubt that it has informed my academic work.

ASAP: What are your future goals?

I see myself for the duration of my career being both academic and activist, primarily through my WIEGO work. The research/intellectual agenda of that work is to continue to push for better statistics on the informal economy, since data drives so much of policy making and to complement that with better field research on the informal economy.

We’ve just completed the analysis of the first round of a 10-city study on what’s driving change in the urban informal economy. We plan, if we can raise the funds, to do a second round so we would have a longitudinal panel of data on observing the workers in those 10 cities.

ASAP: Does WIEGO present its findings to policy makers?

We don’t do research without having that in mind as our targeted outcome. We’ve presented the first round of findings at the World Urban Forum, I’m presenting to the European Commission, and a regional conference with urban officials in Bangkok next week. We wouldn’t do the research if it wasn’t going to be channeled. In each of the 10 cities our lead partner was a local organization of workers, so we have published advocacy tools and materials based on the city level studies for those organization to use in their ongoing advocacy work. It’s always research to advocacy. There’s no doubt about that. That’s the goal.

ASAP: What advice can you share with academics who might be interested in poverty related activism?

I think it’s very important to partner with some kind of member organization of the poor to first know what their needs, demands, and dreams are, and second to tailor your own research and activism to meet those needs and demands and dreams, and to build the capacity of those organizations to carry on the fight. Academics and policy makers will come and go but the poor and their organizations are the ones who are in it for the long haul, to try to make their working environment more favorable and supportive.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: Bangladesh, BRAC, India, Martha Chen, Oxfam, Project: Impact: Global Poverty, WIEGO

Impact Stories: Sukhadeo Thorat on Putting Caste onto India’s Poverty Research and Policy Agenda

2013-03-15 By ASAP Global

Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat
Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat

This article is one in ASAP’s Impact: Global Poverty series, focused on academics making a positive impact on poverty through their research, or in campaign or community efforts outside the academy. The series is intended to inform and stimulate dialogue around ways in which academics have and can positively influence policy, social movements and social discourse on poverty. We would welcome suggestions for other individuals or academic groups or teams to profile. Please contact Luis Cabrera at a.l.cabrera@bham.ac.uk

“The caste system (and its reflection, untouchability), with thousands of subcastes, is like so many stinking ponds which have polluted life for all those who came in contact with them. What we want is a flowing river with fresh and pure water.”

–Sukhadeo Thorat, “Passage to Adulthood: Perceptions from Below”*

As a young boy, Sukhadeo Thorat felt humiliation when an upper caste child slapped his face for inadvertently touching the communal well. As a teenager, he felt anger when he and other local dalits (former untouchables) were slurred or socially shunned at gatherings, and excluded from religious temples.

As one of India’s leading economists and public intellectuals, Thorat has felt compelled to put caste discrimination on the mainstream research agenda, as well as to seek to influence policy and social movements with hard evidence about the ways in which tens of millions of persons remain ‘blocked by caste.’**

Thorat was reared in humble circumstances as a member of the Mahar dalit group in Maharashtra state, northeast of Bombay (Mumbai). By long tradition, Mahars and other dalits in villages across India have been forbidden from living alongside upper-caste residents, and from holding any but low-status, or dirty jobs. In his autobiographical essay, “Passage to Adulthood”* Thorat describes the daily indignities to which Mahars were subjected in his home village. He also tells of a social awakening for himself and others, beginning in the 1950s, under the inspirational leadership of B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution and himself a Mahar.

Residents of Delhi's Baljeet Nagar neighborhood
Residents of Delhi’s Baljeet Nagar neighborhood, where many are Dalits who moved from rural India for greater economic opportunity.

After struggling to acquire a primary and secondary education in various Christian missionary and other schools that would accept dalit pupils, Thorat enrolled in Ambedkar’s Milind College of Arts in Aurangabad, Maharashtra. There, he joined a student body composed almost exclusively of dalits. He deepened his study of Ambedkar’s writings and Buddhism – a religion to which many lower-caste Hindus converted at Ambedkar’s urging – and assumed leadership roles among dalit student activists. He also became determined to pursue further study on caste discrimination.

In a recent interview at his home on the expansive south Delhi campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Thorat recalled the difficulties he faced in actually bringing his student activism, and his personal understandings of exclusion, to bear in his economic research, beginning in the 1970s. His initially proposed PhD thesis topic, on untouchability and occupational linkages, was declared by JNU’s Economics Department as too far outside the mainstream to be acceptable, he recalled.

He was later accepted for doctoral studies at JNU’s Centre for the Study of Regional Development, but only to study a more traditional topic in agricultural economics. “I joined that center, but I was not able to do research on issues that I wanted to work on… So, I lost 10 years.”

It was not until he served as a visiting faculty member at Iowa State University from 1989-91 that Thorat had the opportunity to pursue theoretical and empirical studies on economic discrimination, which shaped his research on economic of caste and the problems of excluded communities in India. There, he had access to North American literature on economic discrimination, in particular that directed against African-Americans, as well as some studies of caste discrimination by non-Indian authors. From those sources, and his own intensive study of Ambedkar’s writings and related material, he began developing an approach to market economics that could take appropriate account of caste discrimination.

Ongoing efforts have involved developing concept of caste and untouchability based economic discrimination through market and non market exchange, and its consequences on unequal opportunity and the poverty of the dalits. He also has strived to persuade other economists, as well as grant-funding bodies, that caste discrimination affects economic outcomes in significant ways. In a study on market discrimination in rural area sponsored by the International Labour Organisation, for example, Thorat provided evidence of discrimination faced by dalits in the sale of milk, vegetables, fruit and other farm goods.

In developing and refining measures of untouchability, Thorat and colleagues have conducted similarly fine-grained field research, measuring exclusionary patterns in village schools, primary health centers, shops and in daily activities. A study sponsored by Thorat’s Indian Institute for Dalit Studies revealed that “Private doctors, for example, often avoid visiting or entering the houses of the untouchables. And often the health service providers avoid touching the untouchable child. They ask the untouchable mother to hold the child and do the treatment from the side.”

As Thorat’s work on caste and economic discrimination deepened and became more influential in academic circles, so was he able to exercise some influence over policy. He was instrumental in persuading the Indian government to recognize that the privatization which accompanied the country’s greater economic openness in the 1990s could be a blow to lower-caste persons who had climbed some rungs on the employment ladder through policies of affirmative action. Because such policies were focused on public jobs, the privatization of public enterprises could mean huge employment losses for dalits.

Thorat and colleagues organized workshops on the issue, gave testimony and met with high-level officials. Thorat himself shared his concerns with then-Finance Minister (now Prime Minister) Manmohan Singh.

He also was instrumental in helping to develop affirmative action policy in India’s private sector. “The private sector says, ‘we don’t discriminate, we go merit and efficiency.’ Through proper research, we provided the evidence of discrimination in hiring.”

A series of studies followed, including ones which involved sending job applications to private employers that were identical except for different applicant names. Some surnames were associated with Hindu upper castes, some with dalits, and some with Muslims. The dalit and Muslim candidates were invited to interview at far lower rates.**

Ultimately, research, testimony and opinion pieces by Thorat and collaborators was crucial to the development of government-backed, incentive-based affirmative action program for private firms, as well as caste-sensitive policies on government procurement. Thorat noted both as important steps forward, but he also said that recent reviews have found private-firm compliance with affirmative action policies uneven, and that more pressure likely will have to be brought to bear.

Besides impact on government policy, Thorat has made significant contributions to broadening the study of societal exclusion and supporting civil society groups with research. In the early 2000s, he took leave from his duties as a JNU faculty member to develop the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies in Delhi, along with dalit NGO leaders from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). Backed by a grant from the Ford Foundation, initial efforts were focused on providing a research base for the campaign, which sought formal United Nations recognition of caste discrimination as a human rights violation. The NCDHR continues to call attention to caste-based exclusion across India.

Thorat remains integrally involved with the Dalit Studies institute as its Managing Trustee, conducting and facilitating numerous major research projects with Institute members.

Further, as chairman of India’s main higher-education funding body, the University Grants Commission, from 2006-11, Thorat oversaw the creation of 32 Centres for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at universities around India. “I could see that there was a huge interest now around these subjects, and a group of scholars who wanted to do work but could not find space to do it. Now many of these researchers have opportunities to undertake research on issue related to exclusion and problems of discriminated communities,” he said.

Thorat appreciates now how much progress has been made in bringing caste into the mainstream of academic research in economics, which in turn has provided a knowledge base from which important policy concerns can be raised.

“There was nothing by way of economic data much when I started in the early 1990’s,” he said. “The data organizations used to publish only few isolated report on dalits and adivasi [tribal groups]  … There were many issues that we were not able to address. So we had to really provide an empirical base.”

Sukhadeo Thorat has written more than 70 articles and written or edited 19 books on social exclusion and dalit and other excluded groups, with Oxford University Press, Sage and other international publishers.

*Sukhadeo Thorat. 1979. “Passage to Adulthood: Perceptions from Below,” in Sudhir Kakar, ed., Identity and Adulthood (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 65-81.

**Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell. 2010. “The Legacy of Social Exclusion: A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India’s Urban Private Sector,” in Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine S. Newman, eds., Blocked By Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 35-51.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: II, India, Sukhadeo Thorat

Number Games: India’s Declining Poverty Figures Based on Flawed Estimation method; Accurate Figures Show 75 Percent in Poverty

2012-08-25 By ASAP Global

Utsa PatnaikIn this featured article, Utsa Patnaik, Professor of Economics (Retired) at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, argues that the Indian government massively undercounts the poor because the consumption standard against which poverty is measured has itself been allowed to fall over time. If the original definition of poverty line is used then three-quarters of India’s population today are poor. China also would see a dramatic increase, and the World Bank’s global poverty numbers would be revised far upward.

Poverty estimates from India’s Planning Commission recently stated that a person was to be considered ‘poor’ in 2009-10 only if his or her monthly spending was below 22.4 Rupees per day – the equivalent of 48 U.S. cents — in rural areas, and 28.7 rupees per day in urban areas. This has exposed how unrealistic ‘poverty lines’ are.

Some television channels assumed that these figures covered food costs alone and showed how they could not meet even a fraction of a persons minimal nutrition needs at today’s prices. These paltry sums, however, are supposed to cover not only food but all non-food essentials, including clothing and footwear, fuel for cooking and lighting, transport, education, medical costs and rent.

Even a school child knows that working health cannot be maintained, nor basic necessities obtained, by spending so little. Amazingly, however, 350 million Indians subsist below these levels. They can hardly be said to ‘live’ in any true sense: their energy and protein intake, and consumption of cloth and other necessities, is far below normal. They are underweight, stunted, and subject to a high sickness load, but without the means to obtain adequate food or medical treatment. The official poverty lines do not measure poverty any more; they measure destitution.

The outcry against calling these destitution lines, ‘poverty lines’, is justified, for true poverty lines are much higher and show 75 percent of all Indians to be poor. Per head energy and protein intake, as well as cloth consumption, has been falling for the last two decades. Despite a good growth rate of per capita income, this result is because of worsening income distribution, with a small minority monopolizing all the gains while the majority has suffered loss of purchasing power. With 80 million tons of unsold public food grain stocks — 50 million tons in excess of normal levels — piled up by July 2012, the sensible policy is to do away with targeting and revert to a universal distribution system, combining it with an urban employment guarantee scheme.

Unfortunately the neo-liberal policy makers today ask the wrong question: ‘How can we reduce the food subsidy?’, and not the right question: ‘How can we lift the masses of India from the current level of the lowest food consumption in the world, even lower than the least developed countries?’

The poverty line for rural India has been revised upwards by 15 percent by the Tendulkar Committee, whose brief in 2009 was to review poverty measurement, but it still remains absurdly low. Members of the Planning Commission and the Tendulkar Committee are academic experts, so how have such laughable figures of minimum cost of living emerged from their statistical labors? The fact is that over thirty years ago the then-Planning Commission made a mistake of method, and the present Commission stubbornly continues to cling to that mistake despite its being repeatedly pointed out, including by this author (The Republic of Hunger, 2004). The mistake was to change the definition of poverty line and de-link it from nutrition standards.

The original definition of ‘poverty line’ was a sensible one, based on an Expert committee recommendation in 1979, and was applied to the National Sample Survey data on consumption spending. The NSS presents, every five years, data on 12 groups of spenders ranging from the poorest, able to get only about 1300 calories per day to the richest with about 3000 calories, The poverty line was defined as that particular level of total spending per capita on all goods and services, observed from these data, whose food spending part satisfied the nutrition level of.2400 calories of energy intake per day in rural India, and 2100 per day in urban areas. The rural norm was scaled down soon to 2200 calories. Both nutrition norms are modest. The Commission accepted the Expert Committee’s nutrition-based definition but applied it only once, to the 1973-4 data, to obtain correct monthly rural/urban poverty lines of 49 and 56 rupees per day. At those levels, 2200 and 2100 calories, respectively, were accessible. Some 56 percent of rural and 49 percent of urban persons spent less than this, and so were poor.

Then the Commission, for reasons unknown, changed the definition in practice, and it never again directly looked at the total monthly spending on all goods and services which permitted nutrition norms to be accessed. This was despite the fact that every five years the required information on this for every spending level was available – the physical quantities of food intake, and the corresponding daily average intake of energy, protein and fat. The definition the Commission actually adopted was that the 1973-4 poverty lines were to be adjusted for inflation using a price-index, regardless of whether the lines so obtained still allowed nutritional standards to be met. This amounted to taking a fixed 1973-4 basket and merely adjusting its value for price change.

The 1993 Expert Committee also opted to continue with this mistaken method. Price index adjustment to the fixed basket has been followed for nearly 40 years since 1973-4, including after the minor modification by the Tendulkar committee. It produced the absurdity of 22.4 and 28.7 Rupees as the rural/urban daily poverty lines by 2009-10. Indexing for two more years raises it to Rs. 26/32 per day for 2011-12. But Rs.32 today will not buy even a single kilogram of sugar on the urban open market.

Why these economists should have such faith in the ability of price indices to capture the long-term rise in the cost of living is not clear. Price indices are useful for short period dearness allowance calculation, but they do not reflect the actual rise in the cost of living over longer periods of time. This fact is of great importance for all labour unions and occupational associations.

As an example from personal experience, the starting gross monthly salary of an Associate Professor in a Central University – those established by Acts of the Indian Parliament — in 1973 was Rs. 1,000. This was quite adequate, since ration cards could be used; on this income one even ran a car. Applying the Consumer Price Index for Urban Non-Manual Employees, which had risen seventeen-fold by 2011, the equivalent monthly salary for an Associate Professor joining now should be Rs.17,000 (US Dollars 340) on the Planning Commission’s logic. But this would not support the most modest professional life-style of four decades earlier. The newly appointed Associate Professor’s actual salary today is three times higher, thanks to the Pay Commission, which every ten years has hiked salary grades to maintain living standards of government servants and employees in publicly funded institutions.

Yet, denying all experience and evidence, these economists assert that mere price-index adjustment is enough to obtain current poverty lines from those of 40 years ago. No wonder they have created such a mess with their unrealistic estimates. By 2005, a rural person needed Rs.19 per day total spending to access 2200 calories; at the official Rs.12 per day poverty line, she could obtain only 1820 calories. (The Tendulkar Committee merely tinkered with the problem, raising the Rs.12 marginally to Rs.13.8). An urban consumer needed Rs.33 per day in 2005 to meet 2100 calories, whereas the official Rs.18 permitted 1790 calories. At the 2009-10 official poverty lines of Rs.22.4/28.6 rural/urban, the minimal cost of living is even more seriously understated.

Yet, in March 2012, the Indian Planning Commission once more claimed a decline in the percentage of those living in poverty. It said in a press release:

The all-India HCR (head-count ratio) has declined by 7.3 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10, with rural poverty declining by 8.0 percentage points from 41.8% to 33.8% and urban poverty declining by 4.8 percentage points from 25.7% to 20.9%.

This claim is as false as all previous claims by this and earlier Commissions on poverty decline, because the standard has been continuously lowered over time. A person living at the official 2009-10 poverty lines would have been able to consume 1880 calories in rural areas and 1720 calories in urban areas. Compare that to the 1993-94 figure of 1980/1885 calories, which already had fallen well below the 2200/2100 norms for minimal caloric sufficiency, satisfied by official poverty lines only in 1973-4.

State poverty lines vary in India, and in a number of states, the daily energy intake the unrealistic official poverty line can command has fallen below 1500 calories. For example, the official poverty line for urban Delhi state for 2009-10 is Rs.1,040 monthly, or 34.7 per day. That trivial sum permitted only 1400 calories daily energy intake while the observed spending level on all goods and services satisfying the nutrition norm was five times the official one.

We cannot accept a claim by a school of improved academic performance citing that the  percentage of failed students has declined over time, if we discover that the pass mark has been lowered substantially, and at the original pass mark more students have actually failed. For any valid comparison, the standard has to be kept unchanged. Actual poverty, measured by keeping the standard unchanged, far from declining, has risen, with 76/73 percent of the rural/urban population unable to reach the modest nutrition standard of 2200/2100 calories by 2009-10, compared to 68.5/58.5 percent five years earlier.

Not only energy, but also protein intake has been falling for all except the top population decile and so has cloth consumption. The rise in poverty is not surprising, given the twin impact of global recession from 2008 and severe drought in 2009-10. Per capita annual food grains consumption for all uses (including feed for producing animal products, processing and so on) at 174 kg. in India by 2008, touched the lowest level in the world, lower than the average for Least Developed Countries. People are being forced to cut back on food and other necessities, including the poorest deciles of consumers, not only owing to high food price inflation when their money incomes are not rising in tandem, but also owing to higher cost of health care and utilities as these are privatized.

China’s official poverty lines are equally absurd, and for the same reason as in India. A nutrition norm was applied in 1984 to obtain a correct 200 yuan annual rural poverty line, which thereafter was merely indexed, giving 1274 yuan by 2011, or 3.5 yuan per day. This is supposed to cover all living costs but would not have bought even a single kilogram of the cheapest rice (information provided by China residents). Actual poverty in China is far higher than claimed.

One wonders if we will ever see honest estimates from official sources anywhere, since by now hundreds of economists are closely imbricated within a vast global poverty-estimating structure with the World Bank at its apex, producing increasingly misleading estimates every year in its glossy Reports. The World Bank’s global poverty line is an equally large underestimate, for it is derived using “purchasing power parity conversion” from local currencies to US dollars, of these very same absurdly low local-currency official rural poverty lines of developing countries, including India and China. The World Bank claim of poverty decline is equally unsound.

What are the realistic poverty lines in India today applying the Planning Commission’s own original definition and method, namely directly observing what level of current spending satisfies the modest nutritional norms? From the 66th Round, 2009-10 nutrition data of the National Sample Survey, the actual spending levels on all goods and services allowing per head daily norms of 2200/2100 calories rural/urban to be met in that year, were Rs.1,090 per month (Rs.36.3/day) and Rs. 2100 per month (Rs. 70/day). The percentage of persons falling below these poverty lines was 76 in rural and 73 in urban India. This high level of deprivation is the rationale for going back to a non-targeted, universal food distribution system, but this will not be enough. The purchasing power of the poor has to be raised at the same time through employment generation schemes.  The proposed draft National Food Security Act, if it stays with the 46 percent figure of total population to be covered on ‘priority basis’ will be arbitrarily excluding from its ambit 350 million poor persons.

Note: An earlier version of this article was published in The Hindu in 2011. This revised version incorporates the Planning Commission’s March 2012 estimates.

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: Chapter: India, India, Theme: Institutional Reform, Utsa Patnaik, World Bank

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