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April04, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net] Counter currents,slum demolition etc >> |
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[1] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Sat Apr 1, 2006 Subject: Assembly of World Council of Churches Call for Definite Steps towards Global Nuclear Disarmament Nuclear 'Minute' from Assembly of World Council of Churches Here is the Nuclear 'Minute' that the recent WCC Assembly passed. [A 'Minute' is a note to the membership applying existing policy in a given area.] http://www.wcc-assembly.info/en/theme-issues/assembly-documents/plenary-presentations/committee-reports/public-issues-committee/elimination-of-nuclear-arms.html ------------------------- [2] From: Parvez Jamasji <parvez1942@yahoo.com> Date: Sat Apr 1, 2006 Subject: Re: [indiathinkersnet] India's First People's Radio: We want you to participate I'd like to join, the endeaver is noble, but I am afraid of getting looong posts to read. My limit - attention span is reached & breached if 9k is seen. Parvez Jamasji "Joy. D" <djoyonline@yahoo.com> wrote: Give me two minutes and please read it till the end as we need your participation for this idea to succeed. Our aim is also expressed in the end. Please send a reply to voiceofambition@gmail.com. Only mails sent to this address will be replied. If you read this before then please forward it to your friends. Thanks in advance. What is Voice Of Ambition all About? http://voiceofambition.com --------------- [3] From: Logically Genius <gurudatta_raut-socialengineer@yahoo.co.in> Date: Sat Apr 1, 2006 Subject: Re: [indiathinkersnet] Reservation for Dalits in the Private Sector I hate dalits , I just hate them now, they are destroying our country by getting unfair advantage over able and learned people, this is just getting too much. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=2667 POLITICS: Indian Firms Must Hire 'Dalits' Says Gov't Paranjoy Guha Thakurta --------------- [4] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Sun Apr 2, 2006 Subject: Redefining 'Poor': An 'Anti-Poverty' Measure! http://www.tehelka.com/story_main17.asp?filename=Cr040106myth_of_the.asp Myth of the poverty line The Indian State must ensure that every citizen not only gets at least two wholesome meals a day but also all the basic amenities required to lead a life with dignity [Democracy's Inheritor: A construction labourer with her child in Delhi AP Photo] The idea of defining poverty in terms of a poverty line was first proposed during the Indian Labour Conference in 1957. A working group under the Planning Commission then stipulated a poverty line of Rs 20 per person per month. They derived this poverty line using consumer expenditure data and a caloric norm. In 1979, a task force was assigned by the Planning Commission to look at this definition of poverty again. After much deliberation, it too fixed a poverty line largely based on calories. It delineated Rs 49 and Rs 57 per month as rural and urban poverty lines respectively at 1973 prices. In 1999-2000, the poverty lines, after adjusting for inflation, were Rs 327 and Rs 454 in rural and urban areas. As of December 2005, these figures stand at approximately Rs 368 per person and Rs 559 per person for rural and urban areas. These official poverty lines in India are, however, woefully unsatisfactory and should in fact be renamed 'starvation lines'. This is because apart from factoring about 650 grams of food grains everyday, this line makes very little provision for the other essentials of life. Is it enough to consume just calories, when State institutions - such as the Indian Council of Medical Research - themselves advocate a nutritious diet? What about drinking water? Shelter and sanitation? Essential clothing? Access to education? Healthcare? The fact is that an average Indian does not have access to these basic needs. For a country aiming to join the league of developed nations by 2020, such a plight is embarrassing, to say the least. A true and complete definition of poverty should therefore include all the basic needs of human life with a modest modicum of quality. Is poverty really declining? The official poverty line can be called starvation line. Apart from a measly 650 gm of food everyday, they make no provision for the other essentials of life It is striking to note that despite what is very obviously a conveniently low threshold of poverty, in 1973 nearly 55 percent of the population or 32.13 crore people were below the poverty line. In 1993, even after 20 years of the State trying to alleviate poverty, the number of poor remained at almost the same level at 32.03 crores. By 2004, the number declined to about 25 crores . However, this is hardly an achievement as the decline of poverty since 1973 has been at a dismal 0.81 percent per annum. Considering the economy grew at over 5 percent over the same period, such a low rate of decline of poverty must be deemed unacceptable. It is not surprising that the Planning Commission and the government prefer not to talk about these figures and instead dwell on the fact that the percentage of poor has declined to 26 percent since reforms. Many experts dispute this claim. If vision 2020 of a developed India is to become a reality, a proper definition of poverty is vital. By that time, the State needs to ensure that not only does every citizen get at least two square and wholesome meals a day but also has access to all the basic amenities required to lead a modestly comfortable life with dignity. However the present inadequate definition of poverty has ensured that all the policies aimed at alleviating poverty aim much too low by focusing on eliminating hunger rather than eliminating poverty as a whole. The sad reality is that despite electoral phrases like India Shining and aam aadmi, an assault on poverty has been terribly low on the list of national priorities A good example of this is the present National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) which guarantees one able-bodied member of each family work at a wage of Rs 60 a day. Therefore, even if this person works on all 30 days of a month, he/she earns only Rs 1,800. For a typical family of five, that amounts to Rs 360 per person, which is exactly what the rural poverty line is right now. Therefore, even a scheme released with as much fanfare as the NREGS at best only ensures that each person in the family consumes a certain quantity of food grains. It guarantees little else. Moreover, the guarantee is only for 100 days in a year leaving the poor to fend for themselves for the rest of the 265 days. This surely cannot be our vision for 2020? The present ceiling on poverty is so low that even if the government were to hand out enough money to each poor family to buy just enough food to be just above the official poverty line, it would only cost around Rs 57, 000 crore per year. This amount is only 25 percent of what it costs to maintain the entire bureaucracy of India (around Rs 2,27,000 crore every year) or a little over 6.7 percent of the annual central and state budgets combined (about Rs 8,47,000 crore) or about 2.1 percent of the gdp (about Rs 27,60,000 crore). Is it enough to consume just calories? What about clean drinking water? Shelter and sanitation? Essential clothing? Access to education? Healthcare? Self-dignity? This is quite telling when you consider that the central government spends over Rs 58,000 crore on salaries and pensions alone and Rs 47, 500 crore on direct subsidies that mainly benefit the already well off. It is ironical that the elimination of poverty is topmost on the agendas of not only the government but all political parties. The sad reality is that despite electoral catchphrases like 'garibi hatao', India Shining and aam aadmi being campaign platforms during elections, a determined assault on poverty and backwardness has in reality been low on the list of national priorities. From 1973 to 2004, the poverty percentage has reduced by more than half from 54.9 to 23.6 percent. This gives one the notion that poverty is declining steadily and soon there will be none of it. However, it is self-serving only to look at poverty rates because the decline of the actual number of people below the poverty line has been less than a quarter, from 32 crore to 25 crore, or as mentioned above, an annual decline of only 0.81 percent. Considering that the absolute numbers of those officially deemed poverty-stricken has only decreased marginally since 1973, the notion that the problem is being tackled is an ill-conceived one. When this is considered with the official notion of what is poverty, it should cause much pondering about the true nature of India's democracy. Excerpted from Redefining Poverty: A New Poverty Line for a New India by Mohan Guruswamy and Ronald Joseph Abraham, Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi Apr 01 , 2006 II. http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2005/10/176 Hard News October 2005 Issue Tripping over the poverty line The official calculation of poverty line in India is way off the mark. A holistic calculation exposes over 90% of the population as poor Ronald Joseph Abraham Delhi Economics these days is hardly about poverty despite the release of the Human Development Report 2005 by UNDP and the UN General Assembly deliberating poverty alleviation. India's 127 ranking out of 159 in the human development index has been brushed aside by incredulity at the 8,000 point Sensex. It is this population that makes India the fourth largest economy in the world. It is pitiful that it is this population that we are ignoring. Why this neglect? The farce that is the poverty line has a lot to do with it. The Planning Commission of India, in its Tenth Five Year Plan, announced that 26.10 per cent of the Indian population are below the poverty line. From 1973 to 1993, we reduced the poverty ratio by less than 1per cent every year. However in the post-reform period, from 1993 to 2000, we managed to reduce this ratio by over 1.6 per cent per year. Thus everything seems to be in order; poverty rates are declining and soon we will have none of it. No notion could be further from the truth. Even the Left Front, who pride themselves in championing the cause of the poor, accepted the poverty line and debated on other issues instead. Leading leftist intellectuals questioned the techniques used in the 55th round of the National Statistical Survey Organisation (NSSO) survey, the primary source for the poverty data of 1999-2000. Many questioned the incongruence of the NSSO data with its surveys in the preceding years. However, few questioned the poverty line itself. But then maybe nobody is to blame because the poverty line in India has almost become a matter of habit. The first official announcement of the Indian poverty line was made in the Rajya Sabha as far back as December 21, 1978 by then Prime Minister Morarji Desai. The poverty line announced was based on the rupee value of a specified nutritional requirement. It was stipulated that the calorie standard for a typical individual in rural areas was 2,400 calories and was 2,100 calories in urban areas. Then the cost of the grains that fulfil this normative standard was calculated. This cost was the poverty line. In 1978, it was Rs 61.80 per person per month for rural areas and Rs 71.30 for urban areas. Since then, the Planning Commission recalculates the poverty line every year adjusting it for inflation. In 1999-2000, the latest year for which we have comprehensive poverty statistics, the poverty line stood at Rs 328 in rural areas and Rs 454 in urban areas. In other words, the government is suggesting that any person who earns more than Rs 454 per month in our cities is above the poverty line. Realistically, the Planning Commission's poverty line is actually a starvation line. To suggest that today the average Indian can live with around Rs 400 a month is preposterous. Food is not the only requirement of a human being. Even in terms of nutrition, the estimates of the Planning Commission are way off. According to the National Institute of Nutrition under the aegis of the Indian Council of Medical Research, the chief authority on nutritional standards in India, the typical rural Indian requires 2,900 calories per day and Indian urbanites require 2,400 calories per day. This is much more than the Planning Commission's recommendations of 2,400 and 2,100 calories for rural and urban areas respectively. Furthermore, the Planning Commission makes no mention of the minimum requirements of protein, minerals or vitamins. Clearly there is a critical need to stipulate the minimum needs that make up the basic standard of living. Such an approach - to define poverty in terms of basic needs - was championed by Professor Emeritus of Boston University Paul Streeten. "Basic needs" were defined as the core goods and services that the bottom 40 per cent of a population needs and included education, health, nutrition, sanitation and shelter. Other prominent economists such as Frances Stewart, Amartya Sen, Gerald Meier and many more have all contributed to the theoretical question of "how to measure poverty?" Amartya Sen's "Capabilities Approach" - which measures poverty as the capability to perform certain basic functions - has become accepted in development theory. The Planning Commission took no heed of the formulation. This is especially unfortunate because just two years before India declared its poverty line, in 1976, the International Labour Organisation had advised all countries to adopt the basic needs approach to measure poverty. The Centre for Policy Alternatives, in trying to fill this gap of poverty measurement in India, undertook a study in which it stipulated some basic minimum standards and then calculated the cost for the same. In development literature, such a method is called the cost-of-basic-needs method or CBN. After taking into account the cost of proper nutrition, shelter with appropriate sanitation and other minimum facilities, basic health care, education up to upper primary level and clothing, the study concluded that the poverty line should be around Rs 1,580 per person per month. This was calculated for a typical family of five with one adult male and female and three schoolgoing children of ages 15, 10 and 5. The total income of the family should therefore be Rs 1,580 times 5, which is Rs 7,900. Any family which cannot manage this should be considered as poor. This figure of Rs 1,580 per person per month is four times more than the Planning Commission's recognised poverty line. It might well be argued that the poverty line proposed by the study is still too low. For example, the basic house stipulated by the study has only two rooms of 10 ft by 10 ft. The electrical appliances are only one bulb and one fan in each room. There are only two taps in the house, one in the toilet and the other in the kitchen. In terms of education, the cost was calculated as per the fees and other expenditures of the government schools in India. The poor quality of education in most of these institutions is common knowledge. Most of us would agree that these minimum standards are indeed as low as they can be to be above a certain level of human dignity. However, even with these low standards, the poverty line is way above the Planning Commissions starvation line. If the poverty line is Rs 1580 per person per month, what percentage of India's population is poor? Latest NSSO figures show that 92.9 per cent of the rural population of India spends less than Rs 950 per person per month. In urban India, 83.6 per cent of the population spends less than Rs 1500 per person per month. After calculating the combined ratio, we find that an astounding over 90.4 per cent of India is struggling with poverty. The results thus obtained are so out of tune with the official estimate of 26 per cent that one is easily tempted to disbelieve the above hypothesis. However, if one takes a look at some of the basic needs individually and sees the percentage of the population that does not meet these needs, the picture becomes clearer. The following statistics from the United Nations and the International Institute for Population Sciences clearly indicate the dismal situation in India. In terms of health and nutrition, 74 per cent of Indian children between the ages of 6 and 35 months are anaemic. Moreover, 47 per cent of all Indian children are under-weight. 81 per cent of Indian children are not immunised against tuberculosis, a mandatory vaccination according to the Government of India. In terms of sanitation, 76 per cent of Indians do not have access to a flush toilet. On the education front, India has improved considerably. However, even then, 85 per cent of Indian women have not completed high school; 52 per cent of women cannot even write their own name. Even after 5 decades of spending on infrastructure, 95 per cent of Indians do not have a telephone connection. From these figures, a poverty ratio of 90.4 does not seem untenable any more. It is not easy for us to fathom the precise implications of such a grossly high poverty ratio. Nine out of ten Indians do not have access to even the most basic amenities of life. However, we have rarely seen any of these nine individuals. Even the individuals who work for us as drivers, peons, maidservants are among the 10 per cent non-poor Indians. However, more telling is the fact that the individuals we interact with closely- be it our relatives, friends or colleagues - constitute the top 2 per cent of this country. This can be derived from the fact that only 1.7 per cent of Indians are internet users and yet most people we interact with have e-mail addresses. This clearly indicates that we are out of touch with over 98 per cent of Indians. All of us reading this article belong to that top 2 per centof India that form its elite, its opinion-creators, its academicians, its policy-makers, its business class or its bureaucracy. While 2 per cent sounds trivially small, it would help to note that this translates to around 22 million people, larger than many countries. The book title, An Idea of India captures very well fact that most of us only have an "idea" of this country and have no clue about the real picture. The author is with the Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi |
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| << March31, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net]Response from the thinkers |
April04, 2006 - [India Thinkers Net] Counter currents,slum demolition etc >> |
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