Poverty Alleviation Through A Sieve

Poverty Alleviation Through A Sieve


In the eighties, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi rued the bitter fact that only fifteen rupees out of every hundred, earmarked for any poverty alleviation programme in India, actually got through to the “real poor”, the intended recipients. The rest went without a trace, presumably into the pockets of various facilitators.

Even at the time, the more cynical set the effective percentage at nearer 5 than 15, with inflated bills and sub-standard deliveries added in. This is obviously unacceptable in a country where the bulk of the people are poor, earn less than $450 a year, even 62 years after independence, with nearly a quarter of our billion plus population below the Poverty Line; defined by the World Bank at an income of $1 or less a day or $365 a year.

The Indian Government defines the Poverty Line much lower, at an income of just Rs. 10 a day, stating that it is enough to buy food that can deliver 2,000 calories of nutrition. It is difficult to see how this is feasible in 2009 unless the presumption is that multiple family members will beg, borrow or steal at least Rs.10 daily. Over 300 million eligible for work Indians are both unemployed and languish below the Poverty Line.

Internationally, also in the eighties, Irish rock-star-activist Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats organised the Band-Aid (Song: Do they know It’s Christmas), and Live Aid concerts in 1984 and 1985, respectively, watched live on TV by over 400 million people in 60 countries.

Live Aid in particular, raised nearly $300 million, right in the first flush, for the starving in Ethiopia, while advancing the capabilities of global satellite television, the so called “global jukebox”, with simultaneous live concerts on different continents, hooked up and broadcast in real time.

Geldof persisted with the serious work of getting the succour to the needy after the razzle dazzle of the concert was over. And unhappy with the chronic leakages in disbursement, he set up a parallel administration to reduce the waste, profligacy and corruption endemic in a great deal of charity work, as even more money poured in; but with predictably mixed results.

Much of the funding or the relief material was siphoned off by NGOs and Ethiopian government agencies, even the carefully vetted ones, not above profiteering on the misery of the helpless. Black markets prospered on Live Aid largesse. This even as the entire effort benefited from the sympathy of the world, provoked by the massive publicity generated – not the least of which were from the harrowing, prize-winning, images of the starving and dying shot by highly acclaimed photo-journalists.

The subsequently knighted Sir Geldof’s moral successor in the Irish rocker cum economic activism stakes, Sir Bono of U2, is more philosophical about the actual good that concerned people are able to do, choosing to persist regardless.
Initiated into the charity arena by Bob Geldof, Bono helped organize Amnesty International’s Conspiracy Of Hope global tour in 1986 alongside rock-star Sting. Bono subsequently organised Live 8 in 2005 and remains committed to his fund and awareness raising efforts for a host of global issues to this day.

Viewed in broader terms, celebrities and charities, ranging from causes such as Aids to global warming, and the vanilla, if vital, universal needs of education and health, have been enjoying a mutually beneficial relationship for quite some time now. The protagonists feature the stars of Hollywood, the international sporting world, entertainers of various hues, senior Western politicians and ex-presidents of the US, Nobel laureates and so forth, in its fold.

But here in India, or internationally, in all the global distress spots, the rate of disbursement of relief to the most needy continues to be badly afflicted.

The United Nations and its agencies, less headline-grabbing, perhaps less glamorous, definitely less self-serving, but with demonstrably long-term commitment and steadiness of purpose; also ploughs on with dogged determination. It is realistically attuned to doing as much as it can. It carries out authentic and formidable research on its subject areas before acting, despite the corruption and the thicket of political pressures applied to it under the guise of nationalism.

Meanwhile, over twenty years after, Congress Party General Secretary Rahul Gandhi is famously focussed on the trials and tribulations of the poor in rural India, seeing in their betterance, the panacea to most of India’s ills.

He is allegedly the prime mover in many of the UPA government’s recent rural upliftment initiatives which have been riddled with delays, sluggish implementation, and rampant corruption. Rahul Gandhi on the campaign trail recently, put the figure, actually of benefit to the target audience, at just one rupee out of ten.

Clearly therefore, something needs to be done to overhaul the popular models of poverty alleviation. The United Nations, no fair-weather friend to the task, privately bemoans the lack of strategic thinking in this regard, the near non-involvement of academics and thinkers, who might be able to fashion plugs for the loopholes.

But perhaps the answer lies in buying something to show for your money, creating rural and poverty alleviating infrastructure, instead of targeting the minimum guaranteed employment programmes with their on paper progress and their dig-a-ditch- and-fill-it-back-up dynamics.

By this reasoning, the rural roads programme, initiated by the earlier UPA government, has/will probably yield better results than yet another “rozgar” programme. Infrastructure development also possesses a bottom, budget overruns notwithstanding, unlike hand-out style poverty alleviation which gives new meaning to the term “bottomless abyss”.

The United Nations set itself some millennium goals for “all United Nations Member States”. In 2000 it wanted to “eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” by 2015, amongst a host of other objectives such as “universal primary education” and “environmental sustainability”. Peopled by highly skilled professionals, it is nevertheless used to revising its time-lines.

But, perhaps if it developed a consensus with the Indian Government, and those of other countries, that it will only fund poverty alleviation infrastructure, instead of intangibles, more than the disgraceful five to ten per cent of the funding may yet turn out to the benefit of the poor.

It is not everyone’s case, but those less concerned with the exigencies of creating compliant vote banks, may see merit in encouraging the abject poor to help themselves via decent and plentiful facilities placed within their reach.

(1,049 words)

Friday 12th June 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Published as the Leader Edit on 17th June 2009 in The Pioneer under the title"Wrong strategy to fight poverty". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under Columnists.