India transformed from a begging bowl to a breadbasket

This land of the world's largest mass of poor, has now the technologies, the experience, the capability and, believe it or not, the resource to mount a massive frontal attack on absolute poverty and to pull out millions and millions of people above the infamous Poverty Line. Within a reasonably short span of time, perhaps no longer than a decade. What it lacks is the national will.A decade ago, Indian social scientists discovered Poverty Line and, employing controversial lenses, found that close to one half of the population - a very long and quite obfuscating word for people - lived below that Line of Despair. In the 10 years that passed, India was transformed from a begging bowl to a breadbasket: only a couple of years ago, it exported a million tonnes of grain! India also became the world's fourth largest military power, the third largest scientific and technological power, the sixth nuclear power.At the same time, India sentenced itself to 3.5 per cent annual growth. This bewildering dichotomy was reinforced by repeated confirmations of cold statistics : the Poverty Line continued to pierce through the middle of the body politic, condemning one half of the people to a life that was hardly more than naked existence. Something, however, has happened. The political churnings of the past five or six years have brought the poor closer to the centre of the political process. The political system is still heavily loaded against the poor and the deprived. But the ruling elite is fragmented. The fragments have become highly competitive. Even within the ruling party, unstable chief ministers are kept on their toes by contenders waiting for opportunities to snatch away political power from their feeble jaws. Political parties and actors are vying with one another to claim the vote of the poor. The poor themselves have begun to realise how to use the ballot paper as an instrument of development. Never has the political process in India been more favourable for a systematic attack on mass poverty. Frontal Attack: The poor invaded the planning process during the last decade of rapid political change. The Planning Commission, like the political leaders, swore by the poor from its very inception. But only in 1974-75 did it conceive for the first time a Minimum Needs Programme (MNP) as an integral but distinct part of the Fifth Five Year Plan. The poor themselves have begun to realise how to use the ballot paper as an instrument of development. Never has the political process in India been more favourable for a systematic attack on mass poverty.The poor, particularly the rural poor, received unprecedented priority in the draft Sixth Five Year Plan drawn up during the Janata regime. The final Sixth Plan, as wrapped up by the present Government, carried the anti-poverty programmes further. For the first time, then, the Plan has allocated the priority, the infrastructural framework and the financial resources necessary for a frontal attack on mass poverty. One look at the frequent full-page advertisements run by state governments in the major dailies shows them competing not only with their political rivals but also with one another to show what they are actually doing for the poor.Poverty in India is too gigantic a human problem to be left entirely and forever to the habitually step-motherly care of the Raj, and its flatulent think-tank, the Planning Commission. Indeed, a major rebellion against centralised bureaucratic planning for development mushroomed in India in 1977-79, releasing a flood of welcome voluntary initiatives for an assault on mass poverty. The spring tide was the result of unprecedented mass participation in the political process. It flourished in the heady milieu of a populist assault on monolithic concentration of power, and its comrade-in-arms - the planning bureaucracy that shed plastic tears for the poor but resisted people's participation in development. The present regime, to its credit, has not curbed the voluntary upsurge. It is trying to couple voluntary enterprise to governmental endeavour to map out a many-pronged invasion of the deeply entrenched fortress of mass poverty. As many as 23 anti-poverty programmes are at work in India today under governmental initiative. Scores of voluntary agencies are running their own viable anti-poverty programmes with or without government help covering hundreds of villages and lakhs of poor people.The dimensions of anti-poverty campaigns and their promises and problems can be grasped only when representatives of official agencies and voluntary organisations get together with social scientists and development planners for a close look at the battle map. This happened in Pune in June when two Delhi-based institutions, the Centre for Policy Research and the Family Planning Foundation, got these different streams together at a three-day seminar. After three days of intense debate, the 40-odd participants broadly agreed that dire poverty of the kind that India has specialised in manufacturing can be brought to an end, and income levels and quality of life of the lowermost levels of the social pyramid can be perceptibly raised at costs India can well afford. This consensus emerged not from confrontation between rival theories and measurements of poverty - indeed, Indian poverty's first cousins are the statistics produced by the National Sample Surveys - but from the actual experience of several viable voluntary anti-poverty programmes spread over a number of states. Here are, in bare outlines, the accomplishments of some of them: The Bharat Agro-Industries Foundation (BAIF) at Uruli Kanchan, 25 km from Pune, has become a promising pathfinder in the search for ways of eradicating poverty. It has devised a fivefold strategy: breeding of cattle which can support dairying; fodder which can support the cattle; land that can raise the fodder; an energy source; and ways of so using the idle manpower that it may develop land for the fodder, grow the fodder for the cattle, use the cattle for dairying, and make the waste products a source of energy. The BAIF anti-poverty strategy is now at work in 400 centres covering 8,000 villages in five states, though the bulk of them are still in Maharashtra. One of the largest and most promising centres is in the Chitrakut area of Banda district in Uttar Pradesh. Two BAIF tools - the cross-breed cow and a fast-growing multipurpose low-cost tree called ku-babul are at work in a command area of 3,000 acres of which 75 per cent are now irrigated. The project which is run on professional lines by a registered society hopes to convert a subsistence economy into a surplus economy.At Jamkhed, in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, a young medical couple, Rajanikant and Mabel Arole, have been running for the last six years a rural health care project that now covers 100,000 people. It is an integrated rural health scheme that combines curative and preventive measures as well as family planning. In five years, the project has brought down the crude death rate to 8.5; infant mortality to 41 per 1,000; and has, under family planning, covered 70 per cent of the eligible couples, thus achieving a net reproduction rate of one in 1978. These are the independent findings of Professor Prabhakar Malgavkar of Pune, one of the ablest management statisticians in the country. The most astounding feature of the Arole project is that its costs are met by the villagers themselves, each household paying six rupees per year, or just 50 paise per month.Also in Maharashtra, there is a voluntary agency that runs a rural health project at Vadu Budruk in 19 villages with a population of 30, 000. Once again, the emphasis is on running a health project largely through the villagers themselves, and entirely on modern professional lines. The Social Work Research Centre(SWRC), at Tilonia in the middle of Rajasthan, is now a well-known voluntary organisation run by trained professionals to help villagers with problems of growth and development. Started by Sanjit ("Bunker") Roy and his ex-lAS wife, Aruna, in 1972, the SWRC now employs well over 100 professionals - doctors, engineers, geologists, soil chemists. biophysicists, economists, teachers and social workers, extending a variety of services to villagers at a very low cost. SWRC has expanded in recent years, so much so that it has set up service centres in four north Indian states. On a similar but smaller scale runs the Vedchhi Intensive Area Scheme (VIAS) in Valod, in Surat district of Gujarat. Inhabited mostly by Harijans and tribals, it is one of the poorest regions in that state. Here, VIAS runs an extensive educational service with a team of trained paid teachers. They work as educators. enablers, extension workers in short, as agents of change.Nobody knows exactly how many voluntary agencies are at work in India. Depending on the definition of a voluntary body, the number would vary from several lakh to several thousand. The anti-poverty voluntary programmes of the last few years, however, seem to fall into a different genre. They are conceived, sponsored and run by young or not-so-young professionals. At Tilonia, veterinary help (left) and social workers educate villagers in agricultural technology : agents of changeThese volunteers are not inspired by Utopias but a robust strain of pragmatic radicalism that is clearly performance-oriented. They are cost-benefit conscious, and they use scientific and modern managerial tools as operational instruments. They are not do-gooders of ancient vintage. They do not believe in giving free service to the poor. Rather they go out to seek the village poor, make them aware of the need for change, mobilise and help the poor to help themselves.They start with supplying what the villagers say they need most, and they get the villagers to plan and run their own development. As soon as the people see the fruits of change, they come forward to increase their own participation in the running of the projects, and they are quite happy to pay for the benefits.Vested Interest: No one minimises the obstacles to eradication of poverty. The vested interests that thrive on the 300 million who live below the Poverty Line man strategic limbs of the political and social system from top to bottom. Resistance to poverty eradication comes from everywhere. No anti-poverty programme can be uni-dimensional. A rural health project very soon becomes an anti-caste project. An educational programme develops into an action plan against social and economic inequalities. Those who go into the rural depths of India with candles of change in their hands testify to two remarkable new developments. Everywhere the rural youth are quick to respond to the message of change, to the call to mobilise their own resources to help themselves. Secondly, as Mabel Arole put it: "The rural power structure is not that powerful. It can be isolated once the poor have found their own strength." Nor is the power structure a monolith any longer.Perhaps the greatest change that has happened to the poor in the last six years is that almost all of them are now able to eat. Economist B. M. Bhatia estimates that not more than 10 per cent of the Indian people suffer from insufficient supply of foodgrains. Once a man eats bread, his head spins out ideas and his mind burns candles of hope. Ideas and hope may well burn together to change the Indian rural landscape in the next ten years. The poor, then, will not remain that poor - not, at any rate, in India south of the Vindhyas and west of the Aravallis. That is the Development Line which divides this land today. The Poverty Line will probably blend with this DL at the end of the decade.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 18, 2013 13:32 IST--- ENDS ---

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India transformed from a begging bowl to a breadbasket

This land of the world's largest mass of poor, has now the technologies, the experience, the capability and, believe it or not, the resource to mount a massive frontal attack on absolute poverty and to pull out millions and millions of people above the infamous Poverty Line.

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