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Power & Poverty
Gian Inder Singh
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The region
that has contributed so many chief ministers to Punjab
also boasts of highest incidence of Below Poverty Line
population. In any democratic society, such data would have been
devastating during any election campaign. In Punjab, it has not
even come in for a mention by the opposition. Clearly,
politicians as a class love vote banks, not voters. |
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 Incredibly
explosive data emerged in
Punjab right
amidst an intensive election campaign. Only the most apathetic of
the politicians and the most compromised of the media could have
failed to make it an issue, but the sad truth is that it did not
become an issue worth even a mention
Such a scenario
is in keeping with the national Indian pattern where poverty and
hunger are no longer issues that matter to the politicians, the
media or the newspaper reading googling middle class. The suicides
of 1,82,936 farmers during 1997-2007 failed to become a central
issue.
India
slipping below Sub-Saharan African nations on the Human Development
Index did not get even a mention. Poverty levels increasing in times
of unprecedented growth rate did not bother the middle classes. So
Punjab
should not perhaps have been such a surprise.
But when the
political fortunes of a string of Chief Ministers come to depend
upon the data, it should have jolted anyone.
Let me walk you
through this boring exercise of number crunching with the promise
that the thrill is around the corner. Indian poverty data is
collected in the form of population earning less than a miserable
sum required for subsistence level survival. This is called Below
Poverty Line (BPL) population. Till now, it was possible to access
state level BPL data, and for
Punjab, the BPL
stood at Rs 356 a month for rural areas and Rs 539 a month for urban
areas. That meant anyone earning Rs 12 a day or more will not be
considered as being below the poverty line in Punjab’s villages.
Even with such
shameless data,
Punjab has a fig
leaf of a figure to defend itself. The proportion of such population
in Punjab was 8.4 per cent this year, much better than the Indian
national figure of 27.5 per cent. (Shame on every single one of us
who ever quoted the nine percent growth data).
Unfortunately,
all these years, it was not possible to know how many BPL families
are there in
Ludhiana, or
whether Bathinda’s villages have more BPL population than Ferozepur.
Districtwise data was simply not collated.
But the National
Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), India’s top statistics
marshalling body, has now made available the 61st round
of data nationwide. This pertains to the year 2004-2005 (NSSO and
other data collecting bodies normally take considerable time in
returning finalized figures), and now we know the BPL figures
district wise for
Punjab.
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Sukhbir Singh
Badal’s wife Harsimrat Kaur is fighting the Lok Sabha election
from Bathinda, and it should be a matter of shame for the top
ruling party that 62 years after the country’s independence, the
top issue for the electorate is availability of drinking water
and people getting afflicted with cancer because of water. |
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It has now
brought about startling facts as to how in the area which has been
contributing a string of Chief Ministers for the state is one of the
most neglected. While the figures for
Punjab
for BPL population stand at 8.4 per cent, in Muktsar district, 28.3
per cent of the rural population lives below the poverty line while
22.8 per cent are condemned to survive on less than Rs 18 a day.
That shows the
situation as worse as in the rest of India since the national
figures for BPL families are 28.3 per cent for rural areas and 27.5
per cent urban townships and cities.
Senior economist
Sucha Singh Gill has underlined how the BPL figures in rural areas
for Moga (25.2 per cent), Faridkot (23.9 per cent), Bathinda (23.1
per cent), Ferozepore (17.5 per cent) and Mansa (16.6 per cent)
prove that the politicians have found it more convenient to
perpetuate poverty rather than ameliorate it because it is easier to
get loyal hordes and electoral vote banks from pools of poverty than
from the middle classes.
Pulling out
people from the hell holes they have become accustomed to will make
them start sending their children to schools, engaging with the
outside world, reading the newspapers, questioning their own place
in the scheme of things and worse, start wondering if their lot
could not have been improved by the politicians.
Moving away from
the areas represented by the Badals, Bhattal, Harcharan Brar, Partap
Singh Kairon and now the special focus area of the Amarinder family,
the northern district of Gurdaspur has 2.3 per cent rural population
below poverty line and all districts of Doaba region like Jalandhar
(0.9 per cent), Nawanshahr (1.2 per cent), Hoshiarpur (1.7 per cent)
and Kapurthala (4.2 per cent) show a very low incidence of rural
poverty.
You get an eerie
feeling that someone has been hard at work in trying to keep people
poor, nay, very poor.
The NSSO data
also shows that the districts which display the highest level of
rural poverty in the state have the highest proportion of population
dependent on agriculture. As per the 2001 census 39.4 per cent of
the total workforce in the state was engaged in agriculture as
cultivators and agricultural laborers.
But in the
southern districts this ratio ranges between 59.1 per cent in Mansa,
(58.9 in Muktsar) and 51.2 per cent in Bathinda. Thus the proportion
of population engaged in dynamic occupations such as manufacturing
and services is quite low in these districts.
In other words,
these districts have lagged behind in terms of diversification of
the economy towards modern sectors which could reduce poverty at a
fast rate. The idea of health insurance schemes used so effectively
in many states with collaboration of insurance companies has not
even occurred to the ruling politicians. The only people’s movement
that could have been one, the cooperatives societies sector, has
been run in such a fashion that it has been totally turned into a
government department. The interference of the babu and the
politician is so intense that the villagers have little role in
deciding the functioning of cooperative societies.
For a state that
occupies merely 1.6% of the total land area of the country, Punjab
produced nearly a quarter of the total foodgrain of the country and
contributed to approximately two-third of the entire central pool of
foodgrains. If, as an offshoot of its success in the agricultural
sector,
Punjab
emerged as the most prosperous state of the country with the highest
per capita income, then such levels of poverty in its Malwa region
can only come about by design. It is time we stop living in denial
and recognize that our leaders love poverty.
Punjab’s
Malwa region is seen as politically more empowered, with better
access to the centers of power. Even without the NSSO data, the
civil society and the media should have been focusing on the fact
that the Badals have been claiming of being dedicated to the
development of the area for several decades now, so why are the
conditions so bad till date. Sukhbir Singh Badal’s wife Harsimrat
Kaur is fighting the Lok Sabha election from Bathinda, and it should
be a matter of shame for the top ruling party that 62 years after
the country’s independence, the top issue for the electorate is
availability of drinking water and people getting afflicted with
cancer because of water.
That Malwa
boasts of cancer trains between Bathinda and Bikaner should have
seen any politician out of business of managing the lives of people
but in Punjab it has kept them in business. Clearly, poverty pays
well. Makes you rich. And keeps you in power. The politician has
cracked the code.
13
May 2009
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