Poverty of the Debate on Poverty

It is good that poverty has been widely discussed recently in India, but a careful look at the context of most of this discussion would reveal that this debate has been overwhelmingly devoted to norms on the basis of which poverty may be defined or the poor may be classified.

In a language so familiar to India’s poverty discourse, we may say that the debate has been almost obsessed with the APL-BPL issue (the classification of people between ‘above the poverty line’ and ‘below the poverty line’).

This, however, is one of the relatively less important issues in the debate on poverty.

The most important issue is the model of development which is most capable of ensuring rapid elimination of poverty and ensuring sustainable livelihoods as well as basic needs to all people.

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THE question arises as to why such an obvious fact is being ignored in the current intense but, nevertheless, poor level of debate on poverty? The most likely reason appears to me to be that in most of this discussion the current economic development model has been taken for granted.

Despite the fact that this model is clearly not based on elimination of poverty as its most important goal or priority, the relevance or necessity of this model is not generally questioned. Or even if some questions are raised, clear alternatives are not presented.

Once this most obvious task of articulating a different development model aimed predomi-nantly at poverty elimination (environment protection has to be a necessary part of this) is neglected, it is not at all surprising that the entire debate is reduced to various kinds of reliefs and doles to the poor.

Real poverty elimination is based on well-rooted sustainable livelihoods and an equitable sharing of resources. But when this is neglected, the entire debate is reduced to the classification of APL-BPL and providing various reliefs to the poor dressed up as rights.

At a time when the biggest need is for challenging the dominant prevailing model based on increasing inequalities, destruction of environment and perpetuation of discontents, the amazing levels of cooption in mainly clinging to APL-BPL, relief and dole debates while ignoring the need for much more basic changes is tragic and unfortunate.

There is clearly a need for urgently reducing this poverty of the debate on poverty!

The author is currently a Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi.