Belated Reactions to the Poverty Debate
Uncouth politicians apart, I am appalled by the misleading discussion by well-informed academics to score cheap brownie points and hog prime time TV limelight. Mihir Shah (The Hindu, 5-Aug-2013) benevolently laments: "There could not be a more ridiculous tragedy of errors on all sides." But this spectacle is surely neither comedy nor tragedy; it involves unethical and unprofessional populist posturing to the point of being utterly disgusting!
In one debate (in one of the previous rounds) there was a well-known academic (don't recall the name) who came into the studio flaunting a pouch of the costliest available full-cream milk in Delhi so that the idiots in audience like me shouldn't miss her much laboured point. She dramatically waves that and thunders: How can a mother buy her hungry child a pouch of milk if her "income" is as "prescribed" by planning commission experts? What, indeed, can the poor BPL mother get for the child? - she asks reading out the price-tag. Having made her brilliant point, she now smirks. What can the TV audience do, but agree? Even the simple technical detail that the numbers under discussion are all per-capita is deliberately thrown to the wind and decent professionals are painted as rogues.
A new spin has been given by Professor Emeritus Utsa Patnaik in her take on the subject (The Hindu 30-Jul-2013). Frankly, I expected something better from her. Should one be just bemused or be contemptuous of her rather ingenuous kite flying? Besides her well known issues with definitions, she now has invented a new and rather clever argument: poverty lines must be revised akin to pay commission - the great bonanza that the Indian labour aristocracy dreams of every ten years to get out of "poverty". Surely, she doesn't want to be left behind! Thankfully, even the mainstream left hasn't yet latched on to that (may they will, after these ideas are published in the proper forum!). By that approach, even the high class "proletariat" in public sector will be considered just marginally above BPL and to keep afloat, they will be in dire need of a higher dose of subsidies than they enjoy now. They are already dreaming of the 7th pay commission now, with occasional rumours and "leaks" of new pay-scales.
How come the "pay-commission" approach is not used for minimum wages? The official minimum wage for unskilled agricultural labor in Punjab is about Rs 148/- per day without meal (Rs 100/- in Gujarat) and Rs 132/- per day with a meal. Assuming that just two adults in a family of five are working with these wages, this works out to be Rs 53/- to Rs 60/- per head per day. Are these based on pay-commission type of revisions? How far are these numbers from those we are discussing in the poverty debate (ie. per capita figures)?
For poverty estimates, we would surely agree on the need for better methods and functional definitions. But how come we don't have a few serious options to choose from, given the abundance of rather wise critics? Understandably, emeritus professors like Utsa are a bit shy of putting their foot in mouth, actually suggest an alternative method, apply it and come up with some real computational output. They will only lecture us on "sound principles" that ought to be used, which even a less knowledgeable person like me would readily agree. Surely, we must improve the methods. Or better, define it in the first place and then agree on a method of comparing data periodically (i.e., correcting for inflation etc. aren't enough; may be even devise a "pay-commission" type multipliers for each time step!).
The main question in the current debate is not about all these. Nevertheless, in every discussion informed experts mix up their basic disputes (ideological or professional) with what they consider as faulty definition and secondly the apparent inadequacy of corrections used for data comparison with baseline. Without an alternate computational exercise, some of these enlightened scholars want us to believe that poverty, as they suspect, has increased.
As far as impressions go, in the last 20 to 25 years many like me who are in direct touch with all kinds of locations in India through field work have not noticed significant aggravation of visible abject poverty. Those conditions surely do exist in pockets; but incidences have come down. From a computational point view, the question is: if we do alter the scale used for measurement, how to treat the old baseline measured differently?
The dissenting experts do not address that question directly or discuss how a proper comparison can be applied. Either we apply corrections as the present exercise has done purely for the sake of comparison or retrospectively apply new approach to the baseline and revisit the entire data analysis. Instead, the discussion is hell bent on rubbishing the findings.
Given current data availability and computational capabilities, it is not an impossible task to at least raise the level of debate after making some serious computational effort instead of such flippant, populist and highly misleading rhetoric that is passed off as academic opinion. I don't recall the article. But some had made a little effort in that direction and had concluded that if we use a higher standard and apply it retrospectively to the baseline, even in that case, the data does show a substantial decline in poverty. May be not by the same degree as is now stated; importantly there is no increase.
Thinkers like Utsa wishes to change the scale itself - a case of shifting goal-posts. They will not specify anything concrete and compute, but will preach about what principles must be used, which automatically leads to substantially higher numbers below poverty. If we use such an approach, where do we end up? Instead of getting rid of perverse subsidies for the better off, we will end up with a huge population under BPL. What purpose will that serve?
Mihir Shah: Understanding the poverty line
Utsa Patnaik: The dishonesty in counting the poor
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