The goal of poverty eradication is getting increasingly subdued in the euphoria of economic buoyancy. India has been growing fast but growth has been concentrated in some sectors, segments and regions. The stock market may have wobbled yesterday, but has been surging towards ever higher index levels even if India is not surging to middle-class comfort. India?s per capita income remains low overall, and even lower in some areas like Bihar and Orissa. International comparisons make this look worse. Other development indexes are equally embarrassing, particularly the human development indicators on health, literacy, infant mortality, nutrition for the young and newborns.
But this is more than mere embarrassment. This is the central challenge for our policymakers. The implicit assumption of merely concentrating on growth and implicitly believing in a trickle-down effect has proved fallacious. There are moral reasons for alleviating poverty as well as strategic ones?poverty feeds extremism and desperation. The growing influence of Maoist and Naxalite groups in large parts of India, whatever be their ideological yearnings, is primarily fed by this deprivation leading to desperation.
So, there are at least three questions to be addressed?how to define poverty, what the current strategy is, and what we need to do about it. These three questions were visited in depth at a recent international seminar on ?Revisiting the Poverty issue: Measurement, Identification and Eradication? held in Patna over July 20-22. The academic participants included both old and new ?poverty practitioners? such as A Vaidyanathan, Arjun Sengupta, TN Srinivasan, SR Hashim, VS Vyas, GS Bhalla, GK Chadha, Kaushik Basu, Pranab Bardhan, YK Alagh, Abhijit Sen, Jean Dreze and Rohini Nayyar, to name a few. Richard Palmer-Jones of University of East Angila, UK, Peter Lanjouw of the World Bank, Vegard Iverson and Shenggen Fan of the International Food Policy & Research Institute and many others reflected international participation.
Ashwani Saith not only made a valuable contribution to the dialogue, but was greatly instrumental in putting together a resolution adopted at the end called ?The Patna Consensus?.
The Patna Consensus grappled with all the major issues mentioned above. For instance, it says: ?The prevalent central Planning Commission methods for estimating the incidence of poverty using the ?inherited? poverty lines are deeply flawed on various grounds. This effectively makes much poverty invisible, thereby leading to serious distortions in analytical deductions and policy prescriptions based on the estimates. This approach, which should be used essentially at a monitoring level, should be holistically reviewed in order to restore its credibility and relevance in the current context of the country. In doing so, there should be a full acknowledgement of the new contexts, constraints and patterns of consumption?especially needs in the dimensions of health, education, travel, fuel etc. The implications for the households of the withdrawal of the state from public provisioning should be factored in fully.?
Empirical findings suggested at the conference indicated that such revisions could generate substantially higher estimates of poverty using the income/expenditure method. We are obviously not doing a good enough job.
The clear consensus of the conference was a recognition that the BPL Census 13-Criteria Procedure has inherently serious methodological flaws which have led to extensive errors in the identification of poor households. Those left out are not statistical errors but human beings.
What to do:
* Err on the side of inclusion as long as we have imperfect estimates. This is for moral and ethical reasons
* Recognise new patterns of consumption, and include these in definitions of what is ?enough?
* Develop better mechanisms for listening to the experiences of the poor and of the NGOs and practitioners dealing with the poor. One way is by strengthening local governance?these levels of government are ?closer to the ground?
* Another way is to move toward more demand-driven programmes, accompanied by some capacity-building to make sure that those who are less able to articulate their demands in the form of project proposals or other requests are not left out
* A third way is to tackle the context of poverty by providing the social and physical infrastructure to enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty. Sustained and credible attention to primary education, for example, would enable those with the knowledge about the obstacles to moving out of poverty to tackle those challenges
The conference was productive in understanding the complexities and definitions: what constitutes poverty, the need to look beyond hunger to the ingredients of a decent life as defined by the original framers of our development strategy. Given new technology enablers and growing international prosperity, we need new and innovative approaches to poverty eradication. The Patna Consensus does not necessarily articulate a coherent better way forward. New strategies for the alleviation of poverty would be discussed in my next piece. For the present, it is important to accept that poverty still matters. Prosperity may be less infectious than we actually believe. Poverty is debilitating. It should and does appall us.
?NK Singh is a former top bureaucrat. These are his personal views