Persistence of Poverty in India

Nandini Gooptu, Jonathan Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351378062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What distinguishes Persistence of Poverty from most other poverty studies is the way in which it conceptualises the problem. This volume offers a variety of alternative analytical perspectives and fresh insights into poverty that are key to addressing the problem. In looking at the day to day lived realities of the poor the volume points out that in order to understand poverty one must take into account the wider system of class and power relations in which it is rooted. This volume suggests that 'democracy in India may be as big a part of the problem as it is of the solution.'

1

Introduction On the Persistence of Poverty in India

JONATHAN PARRY

The eradication of poverty is a modern aspiration. Its persistence was long taken for granted as part of the natural order. ‘The poor are always with you’, says the Gospel of John (12: 8). In both Indian and Semitic religious traditions, (voluntary) poverty was valorized, and lay charitable giving was represented as a kind of expiatory gesture towards the higher goal of renunciation. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in England, nobody seriously envisaged a world without poverty, or without the ethical duty of the rich to mitigate its effects (Himmelfarb 1985: 41). It was the productivity of the new industrial economy that made it possible to imagine a society from which absolute poverty was eliminated, although by the middle of the nineteenth century it seemed to many only to have exacerbated it. According to Engels’ assessment of The Condition of the Working Class in England, the lives of the new proletariat represented the ‘most unconcealed pinnacle of the social misery existing in our day’ (Engels 2005 [1845]: 29). That misery was vividly depicted in contemporary novels such as Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), and was meticulously documented by a succession of social reformers from Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth to Seebohm Rowntree—a tradition of committed social research that in the mid-twentieth century was carried forward in the universities by influential writers such as Richard Titmuss and Peter Townsend. Poverty was investigated as a pre-eminently urban and social problem. Those who studied it systematically were by then concentrated in departments of sociology and social policy.

In India, as Béteille (2003) has pointed out (and from whom this contrast is drawn), the trajectory has been different. It was the poverty of the nation that preoccupied early nationalists, rather than the plight of particular segments of the population (Gooptu, this volume). Dadabhai Naoroji was not alone in blaming the British for making and keeping India poor. In the early years of Independence it was assumed that without them economic growth would largely take care of the problem. In managing growth, the Planning Commission was assigned the key role and relied heavily on the expertise of economists, statisticians, and demographers. Economic growth (at an average between 1950 and 1980 of 3.5 per cent per annum, the famous ‘Hindu rate of growth’) was, however, perceived as discouragingly sluggish,¹ and its dividends were largely eaten up by population increase. Attention soon turned to distribution as the way to address the needs of the poor; and again it was these experts who were charged with devising the policies. The study of poverty became pre-eminently the preserve of economists, who were preoccupied with measuring its incidence and decline. At Independence, and by contrast with Britain, the population of India was moreover overwhelmingly rural, and so was the incidence of poverty. Although sociologists and anthropologists have a long tradition of village studies, it is striking how little they wrote about it.²

While most of the contributors to this volume are concerned with political economy, only one of its chapters (that by Himanshu and Sen) is written by mainstream economists. Our aim has been to make space for voices that are less clearly heard in these discussions. Apart from anthropology and sociology, our authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. All, however, share a central focus on the lived reality of the poor, and the perspective that many of their papers adopt is that from the bottom up. It is, of course, indisputable that such micro-studies are open to challenge on the generality of their findings. What they have to offer, however, is some insight into the human actualities that lie behind the macro-statistics, some reality check on the generalizations that these suggest, and—what has often been missing from the literature—some valuable hypotheses about causes, about what generates the larger-scale patterns. The chapters that follow substantiate these claims and open up new issues for investigation.

Taken as a whole, the most general message that emerges from them is that the persistence of poverty is at least as much a matter of politics as of economics, and that it can be adequately understood only in the context of a broader analysis of the distribution of power. Poverty cannot simply be seen in terms of the individual attributes and capacities of the poor. Their situation is explicable only in terms of the wider system of class and power relations in which it is embedded. Poverty, as Mosse (2010; cf. Harriss 2009) has argued, must be studied ‘relationally’—as a relationship between categories of actors unequally endowed with power. It is ‘an effect of direct assertions of power’; and this power is a matter not only of ‘the direct assertion of will’ but also of the ability to acknowledge poverty and define what it is, and to create the ideological conditions under which it persists and goes effectively unchallenged. While it is widely supposed that democracy must in the long term inexorably destabilize that power and create the conditions for a more just and more equal society, what this Introduction will suggest is that democratic politics in India may tell us at least as much about why poverty persists as about its inevitable decline. Democracy may be as big a part of the problem as it is of the solution.

* * *

The paradox of poverty in contemporary India is familiar. Rhetorically at least, the claims of the Indian state to legitimacy are in large measure based on what it purports and proposes to do for the ‘common people’, and no political party goes to the polls without putting poverty alleviation near the top of its proclaimed agenda. In reality, however, the achievements seem disappointing, despite the more propitious economic circumstances of the past twenty years. Over the first decade of the present century, GDP expanded at an average annual rate of 7.5 per cent, and public revenues more than kept up. Government consequently had roughly four times more to spend than twenty years previously (Drèze and Sen 2013: 4, 270). With regard to the funding of basic welfare provision, it has nevertheless seemed to lack will. Although India signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, and thus at last to making school education free and compulsory for all children between the ages of 6 and 14, and while the Supreme Court turned education into a legally enforceable ‘fundamental right’ in the following year, it was not until 2002 that this constitutional amendment was ratified, not until 2009 that the bill was passed by parliament, and not until 2010 that it came into force. Although the state has been proclaiming its aspiration to spend 6 per cent of GDP on education since 1966, by 2011 it had still reached no more than half that target, and little had been done to expand the resources required to meet its new legal obligations (Mooij, this volume). By international standards, India devotes only a small fraction of GDP to health (around one per cent per year over the past 20 years). On a whole range of social indicators—child nutrition and mortality, maternal health, immunization, life expectancy, sanitation, literacy, standard of schooling, and much else besides—its performance has been widely judged as dismal and as significantly worse than that of many other countries with lower per capita GDP. Living conditions in seven of its major states ‘are not much better, if at all, than in the poorer half of Africa’ (Drèze and Sen 2013: 73–7).

From these gloomy evaluations there are, however, dissenters. Bhagwati and Panagariya (2013) dismiss most of them as ‘myths’, and it is generally accepted that—by head-count measures at least—poverty has been declining, even if the experts are not agreed on the extent or speed of the reduction. According to Planning Commission figures, rural poverty has gone down from about 50 per cent in 1993–94 to 34 per cent in 2009–10, although this improvement must be seen in the context of a poverty line that is in reality a destitution line, and in light of the fact that many of those who have risen above it have done so only by millimetres (Drèze and Sen 2013: 30). Needless to say, their elevation is extremely precarious, and the quality of the lives of many of them can have improved only marginally. Sengupta et al. (2008) divide India’s ‘common people’ into four categories: the ‘extremely poor’ (with consumption expenditures that amount to less than three-quarters of the poverty line); the ‘poor’ (the remainder of those who fall below that line); the ‘marginal’ (whose expenditure is up to 25 per cent above it); and the ‘vulnerable’ (with per capita consumption between 1.5 and 2 times the poverty line). Taken together, in 2004–05 these four categories accounted for 75–77 per cent of the total population of the country. Nearly 22 per cent were ‘poor’ or ‘extremely poor’—that is, some 237 million people (and with other data sets these figures are higher).³ The number of those who teeter near the brink of poverty line is, of course, even vaster. What Sengupta and colleagues also show is that an extremely high proportion of the Scheduled Caste and Tribe population, and an only slightly smaller proportion of Muslims and Other Backward Classes, fall into the ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ categories. That is also true of workers in the informal sector and of those who are illiterate or schooled only up to primary level.

The precariousness of the existence of the ‘marginal’ and ‘vulnerable’ cannot be overemphasized. While poverty may persist at relatively invariant rates, ‘the poor’ keep changing. Over the course of a decade, many might escape poverty, while many others fall into it. On the basis of a large-scale sample from Rajasthan, Krishna (2011: 51, 145) calculates that up to one-third of the poor were not born into poverty. The commonest cause of the descent is the cost of ill health. ‘Millions of households are only one illness away from chronic poverty.’ Each year an estimated 3.2 per cent of India’s population—around 32.5 million people—are plunged into poverty by health-care costs (ibid.: 157–8). There are, of course, a number of other contingencies which produce the same result, and, as will shortly be argued, changes in the size and composition of households that result from the developmental cycle of the domestic group make it inevitable that at some point many will experience it.

In this volume, Himanshu and Sen’s paper focuses on what has been happening to poverty rates since 1991 and examines the complex and highly contentious evidence for their decline. A public furore followed the Planning Commission’s release of its poverty estimates for 2009–10, claiming an accelerated rate of reduction, and these estimates were subsequently withdrawn. The reason why they became so contentious was that it seemed that they would be used for targeting, and that government spending on poverty alleviation would be pared to match them. The chapters by Gupta and Mooij take up the issue of targeting more directly. What more centrally concerns Himanshu and Sen is the rate of decline. By head-count measures it would appear that this has speeded up in the period since 2004–05, during which the Indian economy has experienced unprecedented growth, but by more sophisticated measures it has slowed. The rate of decline has been lower in poorer states than in better-off ones, leading to an increase in regional disparities. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the reduction has been negligible, while in Chhattisgarh poverty has actually increased. Its persistence has been particularly stubborn among Dalits and Adivasis, though for different reasons. In both cases, part of the explanation lies in their heavy concentration in agricultural labour and their low educational attainments, but for Adivasis poverty is largely due to ‘locational factors’. For Dalits it has more to do with their occupational segregation and with ‘caste-based discrimination’ in urban employment.

The importance of occupational segregation resulting from what Tilly (1999) calls ‘opportunity hoarding’ will seem self-evident to anyone familiar with the lower levels of the Indian labour market, in which job recruitment is characteristically ‘referral-based’ (Mosse 2010), has a ‘closed shop character’ (Breman 1996: 257), and is commonly ‘compartmentalized’ by caste (Harriss-White 2003: 31). The extent to which Dalits are excluded because they are Dalits (rather than because they do not belong to the group that has a monopoly in that particular occupational niche) is, however, less clear. Corbridge et al. (2013: 252) cite compelling evidence that in white-collar employment discrimination based on simple caste prejudice does play some part, although in the general case it is difficult to assess how large that is. It is worth recalling the well-argued case presented by the sociologist William J. Wilson (1987) to the effect that poor Blacks in North American cities are now primarily victims, not of racism, but of being stuck in ghettos that have become ‘sinks’ for the ‘truly disadvantaged’, as the Black middle class has moved out, their neighbourhoods have run down, and they are reduced to an ‘underclass’.

The economists who have studied recent trends seem generally (if not universally) agreed that the decline in absolute poverty has been accompanied by increased material inequality. Poverty and inequality, as Béteille (2003) has cogently pointed out, are not simply two sides of the same coin—at least, not if poverty is defined in absolute rather than relative terms (that is, as a threshold in terms of income, wealth, or whatever, rather than as a measure of the gap between rich and poor). It is equally possible to point to empirical circumstances under which they decrease (or alternatively increase) in tandem, and to circumstances under which one rises while the other falls. But although it is certainly true that the relationship between them is contingent and variable, it is also true that in contemporary India inequalities of power and material condition are commonly correlated with, and are a cause of, the poverty of the powerless and of those who—in a casualized and over-supplied market—have nothing to sell but their labour. Why don’t most casual workers receive even the legal minimum wage? Why are innumerable peasants displaced from their land without meaningful compensation? The answers seem obvious: radical asymmetries in the distribution of power and wealth. Inequality causes poverty and ensures its persistence. To put it differently, it is undeniable that economic growth can be, and is, an engine of poverty reduction; but it is also the case that capitalist growth has resulted in the absolute impoverishment of some (Mosse 2010). Adivasis are the victims of land grabs by large industrial corporations; bonded labour is paid a pittance on major construction projects (as Picherit describes in this volume).

Of a piece with this, Harriss-White’s chapter identifies four principal ways in which the dark side of capitalist growth creates and perpetuates poverty: (i) ‘primary accumulation’ (akin to Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ and Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’), by which labour is deprived of the means of production, and of which the most obvious examples are the state-protected land grabs just mentioned; (ii) self-exploitative petty commodity production, which prevents accumulation and is ‘a form of production locked into poverty’; (iii) increasingly casualized and poorly remunerated wage work and unemployment; and (iv) the commodification of the commons, the human body, and nature. Wealth creation and impoverishment are both products of capitalist growth in present-day India.

Harriss-White’s case is forcefully made, although what it leaves unclear is the role of the state. By implication it is, tout court, passively complicit with the interests of capital, and it is explicitly taken to task for its ignorance of the real conditions of the poor. Although the power of big capital is no doubt very great, one might wonder if the relationship between it and the state is simply one of the latter’s compliance. Although the state’s knowledge of the conditions of the poor is no doubt imperfect, one might wonder if the structural constraints that prevent it from implementing its policies are not more important than its ‘ignorance’. Otherwise stated, an analysis of the relationship between capitalism and poverty needs to be complemented by a realistic analysis of the ways in which that relationship is mediated by the state, and by an analysis of the compulsions under which the state operates in a ‘democratic’ polity.

Much of the literature seems surprisingly unconcerned with the practical politics of poverty alleviation, even if paradoxically some of the distinguished economists who have made seminal contributions to it have much greater familiarity with the corridors of power than do the run of social scientists. The financial press has recently been full of a debate sparked by the publication of Bhagwati and Panagariya’s Why growth matters (2013), and Drèze and Sen’s An uncertain glory (2013) and prosecuted with unprepossessing bombast from one partisan corner.⁴ The substantive disagreements have been well rehearsed and require only the baldest recapitulation. The main issue is one on which neither side seems to make a satisfactory case: the political constraints on implementation. Both put their faith in democracy without paying much attention to the way in which it works.

Crudely summarized, the argument has been about growth—about the best way to accelerate and sustain it, about how and at what point to redistribute its benefits to the poor. Bhagwati and Panagariya are long-standing champions of the economic liberalization to which they attribute the high rates of growth that the country has enjoyed over the past twenty years, and the reduced rate of poverty. What is needed now is more of the same, and most especially reform of the labyrinthine labour laws that supposedly fetter the expansion of business and industry and hold back employment (although th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: On the Persistence of Poverty in India
• Part I: Identifying the Poor
• Part II: Targeting the Poor
• Part III: Empowering the Poor
• Part IV: Controlling the Poor
• Part V: The Improving Lot of the Poor?