Renaming The Poverty Line

What is poverty? Who is poor? According to the Planning Commission only 22% of Indians are now Below the Poverty Line. This means that 78% of Indians are blessed. To define a line that stands at Rs 27 a day is to say that anyone earning Rs 28 a day is not poor. It is to remove what little difference there exists between man and a scavenging animal. A man who earns Rs 28 a day is not poor because he is now an animal who lives only so that he can survive.

Wrong! Man ceases to be poor not when he survives but rather when he thrives.

The Poverty Line should be renamed the Relief Line. If the Relief Line goes up, more people come under its ambit, more will get government benefits – and correspondingly, the government need not be shamed into fiddling with numbers – it will only be perceived as compassionate. On the other hand, if the Relief Line goes down, the government can legitimately say that there are now less people who require relief than there were when it came to power.

It’s a win-win solution. The government doesn’t have to keep appointing Tendulkar and Rangarajan and Alagh committees just because it’s scared of the adverse reaction to each of these committees’ poverty line figures. Some have even started naming poverty lines on their creators – the Alagh Poverty Line, the Tendulkar Poverty Line, the Rangarajan Poverty Line.

Stop! This isn’t a chemical reaction to be named after its discoverer. The nation is not a beaker or a conical flask, nor are its citizens ether.

All it would take for the Chairman of the Planning Commission to become human again, is for him to stop defining who is poor and who isn’t. The Relief Line hurts no one. It talks down to, or speaks on behalf of, no one. It is a line. Plain and simple. A statistic that isn’t judging anyone morally or snootily. The Relief Line is more humane. Use it.

To define poverty in the context of money – and then, too, money as little as Rs 27 a day – is a crime not yet recognised as such by the Indian Penal Code. If it were, then those who were guilty of defining who exactly is poor in India and who exactly is not, would be punished. Their punishment would be to live on Rs 27 per day for a whole year.

What debases a man so much that he begins to look at fellow humans as a commodity, as a statistic? Is it a degree, is it universal acclaim, or is it a following?

There are millions in this country who earn 50 paise more than Rs 27 a day. Their struggles are so horrific, their lives so wretched, that for you to tell them they are no longer eligible for a BPL card is to stab them 27.5 times each day every day for the rest of their lives and yet not let them die. It is to supply drip to a vegetable. It is to condemn them to a life of perpetual misery.

And then there are millions in this country who do not even earn as much as Rs 27 a day – and yet are not poor. These are the diamond merchants of Maximum City who are on a long walk to salvation, these are the kawadias who walk barefoot from one town to the next carrying nothing but a potli tied to a stick, these are the Naga sadhus who charge at the sin-obliterating tides with gay abandon. Define them, Montek!

Agreed, to define a line is important for the government as those below it then stand to receive state benefits. But to call it the poverty line is as much a work of unimaginable sham as it is of a debauched mind. It is the work of a machinery that is no longer run by humans or oiled by compassion.

Two of the most thought-provoking articles to have appeared on the subject recently have been by Vivek Kaul and Swaminathan Aiyar. Kaul hit the nail on the head when he asked a question that no one thought fit to ask before him: If only 21% of Indians are poor, why does the government, then, want to feed 67% of us through the Food Security Bill?

The hammer was then snatched from Kaul’s hand by Aiyar who cheekily questioned the lack of applause for the government at eradicating poverty by as much as 15% since it came to power in 2004.

The answer to both these questions is the same. This government that was chosen by the people is now no longer of or for the people. It has become a sheik’s tent, a hedonistic recluse for Planning Commission fat cats that think nothing of defining poverty or poverty levels while they fly Business Class and walk ’n talk their way to stardom.

They do not understand that, while with Rs 27 a man may find his daily bread, where will he find the resource to make his progeny not struggle like him?

They do not understand that once the stomach is full, poverty of the mind becomes as debilitating as poverty of the body. The hapless genes bring evolution to a juddering halt.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but wake up at five every morning to fetch the day’s supply of water.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but live seven to a shack in a slum sandwiched by two flyovers.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but stand in 45 °C and 80 % humidity for twelve hours directing parking in the level 3 basement of a happening mall.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but haul themselves up the road-side garbage bin to sift waste.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but float into the unreserved compartments of a train through the window.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but pull a cycle rickshaw when they should be treating their tuberculosis.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but send their children to school to eat pesticide.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but work six houses a day and don’t get a day off.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but can never afford a blanket in winter.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but are told where to vote and who to vote for.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but have never read a book or a newspaper.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but have to wait for their turn at the Safdarjung Casualty.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but do not have a bank account or a locker.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but cannot find a private space to shit.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line but cannot afford to take part in a revolution.

Blessed are the poor who are above the poverty line and are no longer poor.

O Lord, why have you forsaken me?