Below the sarkari line

Stop complaining about rising prices. So what if food inflation is close to 10 per cent? You’re still stinkin’ rich. The sarkar has decided that if you spend Rs 32 a day, you are not poor. (It dips to `26 a day for rural folk.) And considering you spend way, way more than that, you are utterly untouched by poverty. Whew! Isn’t that great news? Relax. Enjoy your new status as Mr and Mrs Moneybags, stop fretting over the price of pulses and rice and onions. That’s so low class! The point of being rich is that you don’t think about prices. Life is priceless. Just focus on getting ahead at any cost.

So get into the mode, sister. Stop being so middle class. Remember how kind our sarkar is. For ever changing to suit your needs, forever trying to make you feel better. Dignity is so important in life, don’t you think?
Reminds me of a Bengali poem, Daaridra-rekha (Poverty Line) by the late Tarapada Ray. It goes:
I was merely poor, very poor.
I had no food to eat
No clothes to hide my shame
No roof over my head.
You, the very soul of benevolence,
You came to me and said:
“No, ‘poor’ is an ugly word,
It robs people of human dignity,
No, you’re actually poverty-stricken.”
Stricken by relentless poverty,
My days of suffering,
My days of pain,
Ran on day after day,
I wasted away.
Suddenly, you appeared again, and said:
“Look, I’ve been thinking about it,
‘Poverty-stricken’ isn’t a good word either;
You’re impoverished.”
My days and nights in chronic impoverishment,
Panting in the furnace of summer,
Shivering in the chill of winter nights,
Soaking in the monsoon rain
I became more and more impoverished.
But you are tireless,
You came to me again, and said:
“Impoverishment makes no sense.
Why must you be impoverished?
You have always been deprived,
You’re deprived, historically deprived.”
There was no end to my deprivation,
To bed half-fed year after year,
To bed in the street, under the naked sky,
I had a skeletal existence.
But you did not forget me,
This time, your clenched fist raised high,
You called out:
“Awake, arise, ye dispossessed!”
By then, I had not the strength to rise,
Hunger had almost finished me,
My rib cage rose and fell like bellows,
I could not keep up with
Your enthusiasm and excitement.

See, that’s the problem. We can’t keep up with the enthusiasm and excitement of our brilliant sarkar. Why, even many of us freshly discovered stinkin’ rich, instead of being delighted at our new status, have been attacking the sarkar, demanding to know what possessed it to keep the poverty line so ridiculously low. Was it to minimise the number of the poor? Was to it deprive the poor of government benefits? Was it to look more presentable in general?
This is not a measure of poverty, we snapped, it’s a measure of desperate destitution. What can you get for `32 a day? Certainly not good health. Not nutrition. Not proper clothes. Not a roof over your head. Not education. Not regular access to transport. Not old age security. Not healthcare. And certainly not the joy of living. What is the point of this absurd exercise in limiting poverty to absolute deprivation of the naked and the half-dead?
“If Rs 25 for rural areas and Rs 32 for urban areas per capita expenditure was ‘adequate’, then it is not clear to us why Planning Commission members are paid up to 115 times the amount (not counting the perks of free housing and health care and numerous other benefits),” fumed social activists, including some members of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, like Aruna Roy. And several distinguished economists and social scientists, including Ashok Mitra, Prabhat Patnaik and Yoginder K. Alagh, urged the government to delink food entitlements from such a curious poverty line. Undernutrition is more widespread than income poverty anyway, they said, and linking such faulty official poverty estimates to basic entitlements of the people, particularly entitlement to food, is counterproductive.
Besides, why should there be a poverty line that determines “caps” on the below poverty line population? Access to food is a basic entitlement. Why link it to a silly imaginary line that measures deathly destitution, not adequate nutrition and basic standards of living?
Come on! Aren’t we being unfair? Give the sarkar its due. It’s trying so hard to establish us as a world power. To get us the dignity we deserve. Shouldn’t we help? Forget the old roti, kapda and makaan logic. Things change. We can’t be trapped in a time warp for ever. We should recognise the importance of being a rich country — as we now are — and allow the sarkar to reduce poverty in any way it can. Lowering the threshold of prosperity magnificently improves our looks as a rich nation, buzzing with billionaires and a vibrant first world economy. Focusing on the abysmally poor doesn’t. Anyway, we still have 450 million people living below this crawling poverty line. And you want more, mister?
Besides, how has a more inclusive poverty line helped? The poor still spend far more than `32 a day merely to get a BPL card that gives them access, after deducting middlemens’ cuts, to welfare schemes. We must move with the times.
“Long days have passed in the meantime,
You are now wiser,
And smarter.
This time, you have brought a blackboard with you,
On it, with great care, and with some chalk,
You have drawn a perfectly straight line;
This time you’ve had to work hard,
You wipe the sweat from your brow and tell me:
“See this line? Below it,
Way below it, is where you are.”
Wonderful!
Thank you, thank you so much!
Thank you for my poorness,
Thank you for my poverty,
Thank you for my impoverishment,
Thank you for my deprivation,
Thank you for my dispossession,
And finally, thank you for that long and perfect line,
Thank you for this bright and shining gift.”

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at:
sen@littlemag.com