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Writing On The
Wall: Yeh Parivar Garib Hai
WSN Network
 How
would you identify a poor household in case there is a government
scheme to extend some sort of help to the impoverished? And how
would you maintain these records?
Depicting utter
lack of sensitivity, and in keeping with the official apathy, here
is how officials in India are going about identifying poor
households: they are splashing and painting bold lettered signs on
the front doors of houses of the poor saying, "This Family Is Poor"
or "This Family Is Too Poor."
The poor, of
course, have little choice. If they resist and ask that their
poverty not be made a matter of town square tamasha, they will lose
out on the few rupees that could be crucial to them.
In Narsinghpur
in Madhya Pradesh, where the Hindutva spouting BJP is ruling, the
administration has not even second thoughts about parading the
poverty on their front walls.
The Narsinghpur
administration had recently marked several homes in villages in the
Karera and Tendukheda tehsils as “poor” and “very poor” in large,
coloured letters.
The branding
said ‘Yeh parivar garib hai’ in blue letters on a white background
and ‘Yeh parivar ati garib hai’ in yellow letters on white,
corresponding with the blue cards issued to BPL families, and yellow
cards issued to the ‘poorest of the poor’ eligible for the Antodaya
Anna Yojana.
According to the
administration, the colour-coding was meant to ensure that the
benefits of pro-poor schemes went only to those for whom they were
meant — and it had hoped that being branded ‘poor’ would shame the
rich into giving up their claim on resources not meant for them.
Such public
humiliation of the poor has elicited little reaction from India's
civil society. The administration has neither shown a discerning
nature nor has been sensitive while writing on people’s walls. Why,
for example, was it not possible to mark out the beneficiaries by
displaying lists of blue and yellow cardholders at every gram
panchayat office?
Besides
foodgrains and kerosene supplied through PDS shops at highly
subsidized rates, BPL cardholders are eligible for free medical
facilities in government hospitals.
5
August 2009
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