Abstract
Had adequate attention been paid to the concerns raised by the editors of the Book titled Poverty, Chronic Poverty and Poverty Dynamics: Policy Imperatives when it was released, India might have been better prepared to tackle the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s lives. The set of nine essays in the Book highlight key concerns of the poor and vulnerable, whose insecurities in everyday life often get overshadowed by the dominant discourse on attracting foreign investments, improving the ease of doing business and accelerating economic growth.
The essays in the book have been written against the backlog of poverty in India as well as the nation’s commitment to realising the SDGs by 2030. This book is one of the many outputs of the research sponsored and supported by The Chronic Poverty Centre, United Kingdom and the Department for International Development (DFID), now renamed the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Apart from an Introduction by the editors and a conclusion by Mehta and Bhide, four essays deal with different dimensions of poverty. Two essays by Mehta and Bhide discuss poverty trends and review issues relating to poverty dynamics. The essay by Anand Kumar and Kanihar Kant distils lessons learned for addressing poverty and conflict from a Gandhian initiative in Mushahari, located in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur. Amita Shah, Itishree Pattnaik and Animesh Kumar reflect on the challenges posed by the changing scenarios of migration and poverty. The remaining three essays deal with critical dimensions of human poverty. N. C. Saxena addresses the challenges of hunger, undernutrition and food insecurity. Aasha Mehta and Animesh Kumar focus on ill health and its inter-connections with poverty. Amita Shah, Kiran Banga Chhokar, Sanjay Pratap and Itishree Pattnaik discuss the interface between education and poverty in India.
How many people live below the poverty line in India today? Mehta and Bhide, in their first essay, provide the answer. No one really knows. And perhaps we will never know.
Tracking poverty, chronic poverty and poverty dynamics is essential, especially if a country is interested in ensuring that the benefits of growing overall economic prosperity reach the most insecure and vulnerable populations in a society. All this stopped a decade ago. Until 2012, economists were deeply engaged in the study of poverty in India, largely because poverty alleviation (if not poverty eradication) was an avowed goal of public policy. The Government of India’s National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) conducted ten large surveys on a quinquennial basis from the early 1970s until 2011–2012 to put out official estimates of the head count ratio (HCR), patterns and trends in poverty based on an analysis of data on household consumption expenditures. Using the official poverty line, in 1973–1974, one out of every two Indians (54.9%) was poor. Within 30 years, by 2004–2005, this proportion had been halved to 27.5%, which is one out of every four Indians. Between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, the proportion of population below the poverty line further fell to 21.9%. The NSSO no longer conducts these surveys.
Unfortunately, today, the absence of an official poverty line and consumption data has led researchers to arrive at different estimates of poverty. The variations in such estimates are large with poverty due to the measures of income and consumption used to define the poverty lines. It is not surprising, as Himanshu points out (Himanshu, 2022), that India’s poverty estimates for 2017–2018 range from 2.9% (Bhalla et al., 2022) to 13.6% (Roy & Weide, 2022) and 35.1% (Subramanian, 2019).
According to the World Bank, 1 in 2019, only 10% of India’s population lived in extreme poverty, defined as $2.15 using 2017 prices for measuring poverty in low-income countries. However, if we set the poverty line at $3.65 for lower–middle-income countries (India is one of them), then the proportion of India’s population below the poverty line jumps up to 44.8%.
Regardless of the numbers and proportions, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the enormous insecurity and precarity in the lives of large segments of India’s population. Migrant workers, owners of small and micro-enterprises as well as women, a large proportion of whom work in the informal sector, were most seriously affected by the pandemic-related lockdowns. According to the World Bank’s nowcast of global poverty (World Bank, 2021), nearly 56 million (80%) of the estimated 71 million people globally, who became poor between 2019 and 2020 due to loss of earnings, were Indians.
The global multidimensional poverty index (MPI), since its launch in 2010 by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and UNDP’s Human Development Report Office, uses health, education and standard of living indicators to determine the incidence and intensity of poverty experienced by a population. Reports indicate that India has made ‘momentous progress’ (Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, 2018), with the incidence of multidimensional poverty being almost halved to 27.5% between 2005–2006 and 2015–2016. Over the past 10 years, the number of poor people in India has fallen by more than 271 million—a truly impressive achievement.
Unfortunately, even the global MPI can no longer be used to compare India’s levels and progress vis-à-vis other countries. This is because the global MPI has been modified for India based on the recommendations of NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index Coordination Committee (NITI Aayog, 2021).
Mehta and Bhide, in their second essay, point out that while the incidence of poverty might have come down over the years, the chronicity of poverty is still severe. Accurately estimating the number of poor is necessary, but it is not enough. Equally critical is to understand poverty dynamics: Why are people stuck in poverty? What are the factors that explain the persistence of poverty? What enables people to move out of poverty? Did the poor manage to stay out of poverty? What can be done to prevent people from falling into poverty? Urbanisation, improvements in infrastructure, quality education, good health care and geography are certainly ‘ladders’ to enable the poor to escape poverty. At the same time, ensuring effective reach and universal coverage of policies and schemes that offer social protection, such as employment guarantees, health insurance, subsidised food grains, crop insurance and old-age pension is vitally important for preventing people from falling into poverty.
Apart from low and insufficient earnings, other forms of deprivation undermine people’s capabilities to lead a long and healthy life. Food insecurity is one of them. N. C. Saxena, in his essay, draws attention to ‘a curious problem’ that has ‘haunted the country and vexed its policy makers.’ India’s rising per capita incomes have had little impact on food security and the nutritional levels of the population. According to the National Family Health Survey-5 (International Institute for Population Sciences [IIPS] and ICF, 2021), in 2019–2021, close to 36% of India’s children aged 0–59 months were stunted—down marginally from 38% in 2015–2016. More than half (57%) of India’s women aged 15–49 years were anaemic in 2019–2021—up from 53% in 2015–2016. And two-thirds (67%) of its children 6–59 months were anaemic—up from 58.6% in 2015–2016. Apart from the slow to no progress, equally disturbing are the large variations within India. For instance, the proportion of stunted children aged 0–59 months varied from 23% in Kerala and Manipur to over 40% in Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh.
N. C. Saxena refutes the arguments of some (Panagariya, 2013) who argue that India does not really suffer from worse child malnutrition than sub-Saharan Africa and attributes the narrative to ‘the artefact of a faulty methodology that the World Health Organisation has pushed and the United Nations has supported.’ On the contrary, he argues that lack of availability and access to a balanced diet are among the important factors contributing to hunger and malnutrition. This is most starkly reflected, for instance, in the finding from NFHS-5 that, in 2019–2021, only 11% of all children aged 6–23 months were fed the minimum acceptable diet. Saxena reviews the functioning of several government schemes that address the issue of food security and undernutrition. He concludes that ‘in the ultimate analysis, the constraints to overcoming malnutrition and hunger are rooted in bad politics, faulty design, lack of appropriate monitoring and evaluation, poor governance and lack of political will.’
The state of food insecurity in India can be inferred from the fact that the National Food Security Act legally entitles 75% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population to food subsidies every month. India’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic further reflects the precarity of the food security situation. In March 2020, the Government of India launched the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) scheme to provide an additional five kilogrammes of free food grains per person every month for 3 months to the nearly 814 million beneficiaries covered under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). What was meant to be a short-term measure to reduce the hardship faced by people during the lockdown period has been extended several times beyond 3 months until December 2022. Starting 1 January 2023, the Government of India has discontinued the PMGKAY but will provide free food grains under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) for 1 year.
Policymakers would have been so much better prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic had they paid heed to the messages in the essay by Amita Shah, Itishree Pattnaik and Animesh Kumar on the changing scenario of migration and poverty in India. The authors point out the serious shortage of data and evidence on the migration-poverty interface and the use of migration as an exit route out of poverty. While macro-level data fail to capture the interface, micro-level studies are too few to draw inferences on the extent, motivation and outcomes of migration. Limited evidence points to three features of migration. One, those having irrigated land are less likely to migrate. The poor, who often migrate for short durations, barely earn enough to subsist. Three, the trajectories of the rich and the poor who migrate are very different. Long-term migration tends to be higher among higher-expenditure classes, whereas short-term migration is higher among the poor. This is to be expected given that the poor do not have adequate social capital to opt for long-term migration, and earning opportunities for the poor, in especially in urban destinations, are neither substantial, certain or continuous. Any attempt to evolve an appropriate migration policy should begin with recognising the rights of migrant workers and their families, particularly children. The focus ought to be on reducing forced distress migration and, at the same time, creating conditions for encouraging migration as a route out of poverty. This will call for a dual approach: improving agricultural productivity, increasing the coverage of land under irrigation and extending the coverage of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and at the same time, stepping up investments to address the challenges of urban poverty and improve urban infrastructure.
Aasha Kapur Mehta and Sanjay Pratap discuss the close inter-connections between SDG1 (end poverty in all its forms everywhere) and SDG3 (ensure healthy lives and promote the well-being of all at all ages). In their data-driven essay, they present strong evidence to show that the ‘state of health and health care in India is grim.’ They point out that India’s mortality rates and disease burden are unacceptably high in both absolute and relative terms compared with countries in the WHO South–East Asian region. Spatial inequalities in health outcomes and reach of services are ‘extremely high.’ Significantly responsible for this is the extremely low public spending on health—which at around 1.2% of GDP is among the lowest in the world.
India is nowhere close to ensuring universal health coverage or adequate financial protection. In 2019–2021, according to the NFHS-5, only 30% of women age 15–49 and 33% of men age 15–49 were covered by health insurance or a health scheme (IIPS & ICF, 2021). In the absence of financial protection, costs of medical care severely impoverish the poor and cause immense financial stress even among those who are financially secure. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when the financial burden of treatment severely impacted millions of families in India.
Mehta and Pratap point to several lessons that can be drawn from India’s experience of delivering health care as well as child nutrition schemes. These include the importance of spatial mapping (as distance is a major impediment limiting access), ensuring conscious inclusion of women from the poorest households in decision making, strengthening physical infrastructure, balancing the workload and ensuring adequate motivation, training and compensation for health as well as anganwadi (day care centre) workers. The lack of community ownership of health and day-care facilities is another critical factor that results in poor performance and low accountability of the health care delivery system to people.
The authors, however, do not delve much into the reluctance of the Indian state to embrace universal health coverage. There is nothing in the 2017 National Health Policy for the majority of Indians. The government seems to have adopted a three-pronged approach: pay for the medical insurance of those living below the poverty line (the proportion should progressively come down as incomes rise), offer free or at modest payment medical care to a privileged few (such as Members of Parliament and Members of Legislative Assemblies) and leave the rest of the population to purchase medical care from commercial insurance companies. Such a reliance on private health care providers and commercial insurance companies is likely to continue impoverishing millions of Indians in the years to come.
Amita Shah, Kiran Banga Chhokar, Sanjay Pratap and Itishree Pattnaik examine the interface between education and poverty in India and highlight the unfinished agenda of universal and free quality elementary education. Literacy and schooling vary by class, gender, caste, geography and rural–urban locations. The association between education and chronic poverty is strong. Income poverty is likely to have a compounding impact on education poverty, first through the income effect and then through social marginalisation. The negative impacts of poverty on educational attainment seem to be far more widespread than the positive impacts that educational attainment exerts in terms of reducing poverty. Their analysis shows that while the association between literacy, schooling and poverty is strong, not much is known about the nature of the precise benefits that education confers on the poor and the chronically poor.
The authors raise several concerns, including the mismatch between education and skills required for employment, the high costs of schooling, the poor school environment that contributes to children dropping out and the growing privatisation of school education that runs against the grain of the Constitutional guarantee of free education till the age of 14 years. Equally disconcerting is the increasing emphasis on vocational education and skilling, which are no substitute for good quality basic education. Missing from the analysis is a sufficient gender perspective on looking at the benefits of schooling. Discussion of education, employment, higher earnings and rates of return apply mostly to boys. Millions of Indian girls continue to be denied the opportunity to complete schooling and take up jobs where they can get paid.
Included in the Volume is an unconventional essay by Anand Kumar and Kanihar Kant, who assess the learnings from a Gandhian initiative led by Jaiprakash Narayan (JP) to end poverty and conflict in Mushahari, Muzaffarpur in Bihar. Violent conflict between 1968 and 1972 arising out of socioeconomic injustices and poverty brought Maoists and Gandhians into a face-to-face conflict and resulted in a new approach to ending poverty-related conflicts.
JP visited Mushahari at the height of the Naxal violence in June 1970. He realised that the responsibility for the eruption of violent conflict between the landowners and the rural poor could not be exclusively laid at the door of the Naxalites. There were many actors and several factors colluding to exploit the landless poor, including big farmers, government officials, moneylenders, financial predators, landowners, upper caste men, politicians and administrators, as well as courts of law that deny a fair deal to the poor. JP encouraged the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD), a Gandhian organisation, to develop an integrated block-level five-year development plan to harness the growth potential of the area and create a self-sufficient economy. Embedded in the plan were political and sociocultural components to promote community spirit through participatory decision-making.
After nearly 50 years, one can see the positive impact of Gram Swaraj’s work. There has been a visible correction in the power imbalances, with those belonging to marginalised communities gaining ground. Domination by landlords has ended to a large extent. Democratic changes in rural polity and spread of caste consciousness have enabled villages, have contributed to socio-political mobility among the other backward castes and enhanced the capacity for resistance among the marginalised groups.
Nevertheless, poverty continues to dominate village life due to a lack of infrastructural improvement, natural calamities like floods and droughts and socioeconomic challenges such as malnutrition, caste discrimination, illiteracy, unemployment and crime-politics nexus. Limited modernisation of agriculture, migration, leasing-out and leasing-in of land have emerged as three major coping strategies among those suffering from pauperisation. But the dependence on agriculture continues to hold people back. The authors identify a number of changes in the functioning of the state, exercise of market forces and community systems for the continuation of poverty and discontent in the post-conflict period. In the ultimate analysis, however, it appears that the people’s power-based Gram Swaraj approach has become a victim of party rivalries involved in the politics of power. The united effort at fighting poverty has been replaced by a nexus of politicians, bureaucrats, rich farmers and contractors. This has led to institutional decay and the derailment of a genuine people’s movement towards self-reliance.
In the last essay, Mehta and Bhide highlight several challenges facing the implementation of two core Government of India schemes that are central to the country’s poverty elimination efforts: the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. These include problems in identification and registration of beneficiaries, delays in making payments and shortfall in funds. Looking more broadly at India’s poverty reduction efforts, they conclude that for outcomes to match expectations, it is critical to adopt a systematic approach for identifying and tracking the poor, design programmes and schemes keeping in mind the poor and chronically poor and ensure that implementation of schemes is well integrated and sufficiently well resourced.
India’s aspiration and efforts to become a ten trillion-dollar economy by 2030 should be matched by an equally strong commitment to ending poverty in all its multidimensional forms. The essays in this Book identify key priority areas for doing so: expanding the reach of appropriate direct benefits transfers to the poor, strengthening social protection, enhancing the nutritional status of children and adolescents, improving the quality of basic education, stepping up investments in primary health care and extending financial protection to significantly reduce private out-of-pocket expenses on health care. The authors also offer valuable suggestions on how to do things better, faster and more efficiently while ensuring the equitable distribution of the gains of economic growth. However, for this to happen, the starting point has to be a recognition by political leaders and policymakers that poverty can and needs to be eliminated as a priority. Such a conviction, backed by a strong political commitment to poverty eradication, can put India on a new trajectory of progress, peace and prosperity.