DailyPost 2099
ROMANTICISING POVERTY!
The Politics of Poverty was a book written in an African setting. You can very well make out what issue would it be addressing to. The UN Missions and UN Agencies have spent a lifetime for improving the lot of the poor in most parts of the continent, certainly not making very visible difference, in the backwaters of Africa. I have worked in Southern Sudan with United Nations, they need to have a relook into the politics and economics of poverty. At the other end of the spectrum, we have a treatise, from a purely economic angle, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid written by renowned economist C K Prahalad. In India we are practitioners of the art of romanticizing poverty.
It is an emotional outpouring, which at times might end up in some amount of philanthropy as well. We love rags to riches stories and also stories of the students who studied under street lights, under very adverse circumstances and proved their worth and might. They are termed as inspirational stories and forgotten. The harsh reality of poverty is really intriguing and way beyond common sense understanding. Coming out of poverty and gaining positions of power is ultimate story of Indian politics and bureaucracy and then they keep bragging about it. That goes down as a medal for all your life, even if you don’t do anything else. What you give back in return is never a part of the same story. That everyone should be responsive is the ideal, but someone having faced poverty personally, will have a different feeling for that scourge and would proactively act to eliminate it, to the best of his ability, is an usual expectation.
The story is pretty simple, the earlier it is understood the better, otherwise the country will be kept in an emotional conundrum of poverty. The poor themselves will one day, see through it. The two parties are the people who are battling poverty and hunger on a day-to-day basis, and ones in government and mainly in the political arena, who were poor at some point in time, in their life. They romanticise that background to their advantage. Today they live a life of comfort, pomp and glory, with stray thoughts on the long lost connect with poverty, only to be used in their public outpouring, to their advantage. How difficult it is for the self-proclaimed army of Samaritans in influential government positions to make the government services available to the poor?
In crisis situations things are even worse, may it be floods, Covid-19, or any other disaster, the romanticists of poverty are conspicuous by their absence. The hordes which land at the time of the elections are nowhere seen in the picture. This is the politics of poverty in India, they are needed only for votes. You need to have a cruel heart to allow poor to languish. The government resources on display during elections, for inaugurations, for legislative sessions and tons of jamborees are nowhere seen in crisis hitting the poor. The self proclaimed messiahs of poor are nowhere to be seen. Leave aside Covid-19, what in general is the fate of governmental health services in rural India. And ditto for the quality of education being imparted by the government, can quality not be ensured? The infrastructure and funding are provided for, by public money. The ones who have escaped from the morass of poverty and are in positions of power, now have different audacious goals to achieve. They feel that doles being dished out by the government to cleanse poverty are transforming poor lives or so they claim.
INSTEAD OF ROMANTICISING POVERTY, THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDICES NEED TO BE MET EFFECTIVELY.
Sanjay Sahay