December 20, 2006: The matter is not too old for the sands of time to have covered it. On this date, while addressing the people from the public forum of the Indian Marketing Development Federation, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan said two important things. He said that 38 per cent of the people in Madhya Pradesh are leading their lives below the poverty line officially. Actually this number is as much as 60 per cent of the population. He also said that while a lot is being said about development and even if big companies like Reliance Industries set up industries here and earn profit, it does not actually benefit the poor of the state. The clear meaning of the chief minister’s statements is that actually we are hiding the poor status of a large chunk of the society and despite a number of developmental activities, their benefits have not reached the poor.

December 27, 2006: The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of the Indian Government released its 505th report based on the 61st survey round conducted between July 2004 and June 2005. This report analyses the monthly expenditure per person in the country. This shows that the 47 per cent of the rural populace in MP spends only Rs 12 per day. As against this, the 43 percent urban populace spends Rs 19 per day. The democratic government in the country has decided that the minimum of Rs 365 per month (Rs 12 per day) is necessary to live in the country in present circumstances.

Sikroda village is based in the Pahargarh block of Morena district. The BPL Survey found not a single bonded labourer in this village. But when a research team reached the village in March 2004, many persons admitted that they were working as bonded labourers. Government officials denied this information. Later, in July 2004, researchers read in newspapers that 20 bonded labourers were liberated from the village.

For the 2.2 million families who are living below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh, the BPL is the line that passes below the affluent and above the poor. Though in realty, the politics of poverty is presently far more important than any other issue, somehow our state does not want to look at the poverty existing here. The state avoids it as they avoid in Sikroda. Actually, just as a special vision is necessary to perceive beauty, similarly an objective and strong political will is necessary to look at and admit poverty.

The simple point is that poor people exist and poverty is clearly manifested, but the central and the state government does not want to identify or accept them. It is proven now that the government is trying its best to hide the poor people and is trying to sweep them under the carpet. The format of the BPL survey has been finalized in a manner that minimum people are included in the list.

Following this too, the survey process to identify people below poverty line (BPL) has severely impacted people’s rights. First of all the government came out with an order to identify those people as poor who do not get enough to eat or who work as bonded labourers, but this did not happen. The negligence of the surveying teams was so high that either they did not take the pains to visit the interior or remote villages or completed the formalities sitting in the courtyards of some affluent person in the village. Due to this discrepancy, several genuinely poor persons were deprived of their place in the BPL list. For this the government made another provision that such left out families should put forth their claim and get their name included while getting deleted the names of undeserving families. Here the government officials did the mistakes but the punishment of taking animosity with the powerful and affluent of the village was given to the poor people. Despite this, as many as 11.42 families presented their claims and the government had to admit that 8.71 lakh of these families should have been in the BPL list of 44.77 lakh families, which meant that about 25 percent of the names included were those of undeserving people. As per the studies by non-government organizations, only 37 per cent of the deprived people have presented their claim, which means that more than 25 lakh families were affected by the gross negligence of the government.

The state governments identify the poor people residing in the particular state as per a policy-based process of the union government. No state government has the right to set its own norms for identifying poor or drawing developmental schemes for them. How many poor families reside in MP? This is decided by the union government on the basis of the directives (or rather pressure) of the international financial organizations like the World Bank – that have clearly lost the vision of actually perceiving and feeling the poverty. The irony is that the government (which we term as welfare state and as per the constitution the government is responsible to safeguard and preserve the basic rights of all persons in the country) has officially divided the society through the BPL and now the welfare schemes are extended to only those persons who fall into the category of poor as per the government’s definition.

The government has managed to bring about this division, but in the last ten years it has not been able to ensure that a humane and just process of identifying all poor is in place. When the BPL survey was completed in 1997-98, ironically uniformity was noticed in all areas of the country that the government officials (BPL surveyors) kept the land-holders, tractor owners, house owners and politically powerful people in the top of the BPL list. Since the government has already decided that only a fixed number of people are to be included in the BPL list, the genuinely poor got deprived of getting into the list and lost the constitutional protection of the government. After five years, the government announced that poverty had declined by ten percent in the country and by 5.5 per cent in MP.

This announcement could be considered as the most inhuman in the context of human development because the recently released National Family Health Survey III statistics negate the claim of the government on reducing poverty. In about eight years’ period (1998-2006), the per cent of anemic women in MP went up from 49 per cent to 57 per cent and only 14.9 per cent infants get mother’s milk immediately after birth (because the bias with mothers and their food insecurity in the patriarchal society is a big challenge). The percent of anemic children has gone up to 82.6 per cent from 71.3 per cent in this period of rapid development. If poverty has reduced, then the question is that why malnutrition and anemia has increased in the state? And the heartbreaking fact is that till now malnutrition, discrimination, social exclusion and food insecurity are not considered as indicators of poverty. Now the background paper of the 11th five- year plan prepared by the Planning Commission of India lauds the slogan of Inclusive Development, but still the issues of women, children and exclusion are avoided on the political front.

The Planning Commission and the Indian Government also believes the statistics provided by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) and this organization mentions that 50 per cent of the farmers in state are in debt and the average debt per farmer is as much as Rs 20000. The painful truth is that the issue of health has not yet become a political index of human development. The government has also not included this in the indices of the BPL survey although in MP every person has to spend as much as 75 per cent of the expenditure on health from his own pocket while the government bears 25 per cent of the cost and that too on the overheads and staff salaries. In the context of indices, existence of a household lavatory has come up as a big challenge and as many as four per cent of the people have been impacted by this. To treat a disease, it is very necessary to accept that there is a disease and only then one can move on to the process of treatment. The same principle applies to problems like poverty.  Unless the government accepts the reality, the problem will not be solved.