January 16, 2005

POVERTY is a much bandied-about issue and yet the problem persists acutely in countries such as ours and in most instances, worsens by the day. The more privileged amongst us can either turn a blind eye and conveniently live in a cocoon of immunity or be actively involved to a lesser or greater extent in doing something about it. One such organization in the subcontinent that is committed to making a difference is the Indian Institute of Public Administration based in New Delhi, which together with the Chronic Poverty Research Centre has produced this well researched and informative book based on the proceedings of a Research Design Workshop.

In essence, there are nine articles on diverse issues in the context of chronic poverty in India. The topics include meanings and analytical frameworks, an overview of chronic poverty in India, the political sociology of poverty, chronic poverty and conflicts over livelihoods and space in an urban area, chronic poverty in a remote rural district, panel data based analysis of chronic poverty in rural India, poverty and intra-household differentiation, and childhood poverty and identification of districts in the country that suffer the worst multi-dimensional deprivation.

There are several important policy messages in the papers that feature in the book. Among these are:

• Panel data studies for India show that more than half the households who were poor at a given time remained in poverty over a decade later, thereby suffering long duration poverty;

• A five-tiered categorization of poverty can be used to understand different types of situations in the context of the poverty line — always poor, usually poor, churning poor, occasionally poor and never poor;

• The ‘drivers’ of poverty, the ‘maintainers’ of poverty and potential ‘interrupters’ of poverty need to be identified;

• The causes of falling into poverty and staying in the poverty trap are not necessarily the same;

• The urban poor who live in slums face situations of conflict and contested claims on spaces that provide opportunities for earning a livelihood and escaping from chronic poverty;

• A large number of the poor in remote areas are both chronically and severely poor and the incidence of this is negatively associated with the size of landholding and household population.

• Casual agricultural labourers are the largest group and cultivators the second largest among the chronically poor. Most of the chronically poor (over 79 per cent) are wage dependent.

More specifically, the paper entitled “Chronic poverty in India — an overview” by Aasha Kapur Mehta and Amita Shah discusses the trends in incidence of income poverty in India and analyzes chronic poverty in terms of severity, extended duration and multidimensional deprivation. Next follows a paper entitled “Political sociology of poverty in India: between politics of poverty and poverty of politics” by Anand Kumar which points out that the political sociology of poverty requires an analytical understanding of the relationship between polity and society.

The paper “Understanding childhood poverty in Rajasthan” by Kanchan Mathur, Shobhita Rajagopal and Pradeep Bhargava stresses the fact that childhood is a precious stage in a life-course and deprivation during this period can have long-term adverse impacts on the well-being of children. Yet another paper draws attention to the importance of exploring issues pertaining to intra-household differentiation and various forms of intra-household inequalities.

The book reaches beyond the traditional boundaries of mainstream economics to become an exhaustive and profoundly relevant chronicle of the poverty crisis. It is refreshingly free of irritating stylistic peculiarities. Yet it appears that there is a missing component in the analysis — external factors as a major factor causing poverty and deprivation is only treated cursorily and apart from a passing reference to such poverty-exacerbating phenomena as structural adjustment programmes, no in-depth analysis is undertaken. Further most of the papers are more or less descriptive and somewhat lacking in meaty analysis.

The effects of economic reforms on inequality and poverty are a key issue today. The importance of improving understanding of the effects on poverty of macroeconomic and structural policies has been recognized for some time and extensive research already exists on this aspect of the issue. As far back as 1985, Giovanni Andrea Cornea (Senior Planning Officer at Unicef, previously worked at Unctad) promoted a shift in conventional development thinking by stressing that development was about people, social organizations, and their knowledge and institutions as opposed to simply commodities and technologies. With the publication of Unicef’s “Adjustment with a human face”, the donors established the Social Dimensions of Adjustment programme where the social impact of adjustment policies was given more focus.

For that matter, the virtual consensus amongst economists that structural adjustment lending has led to poor social sector outcomes in the past by their very nature has prompted lending agencies such as the World Bank in recent times for their adjustment operations to begin to give increased attention to poverty reduction, support for sustained social and structural policy programmes and capacity and institution building. Today, therefore, although the original focus on short-term stabilization and addressing distortions remains perhaps appropriate in some cases, much policy-based lending has a more developmental perspective now focused on medium-term structural, social and institutional issues.

But the past cannot be undone, nor the damage thereby. The book could perhaps have widened the canvas of its analysis by taking into account such equally negative impacts of external factors that have resulted in the appallingly high numbers of those living in dire poverty in today’s India.

 

Chronic Poverty in India

Edited by Aasha Kapur Mehta, Sourabh Ghosh, Deepa Chatterjee,

Nikhila Menon

Chronic Poverty Research Centre, Indian Institute of Public Administration,

I.P. Estate, Ring Road,

New Delhi 110 002

ISBN 81-86641-20-3

389pp. Indian Rs350

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