Ab Tak Battis?! A Poor Idea

The Planning Commission of India has recently revised its estimates for income levels for the poor in our country. The revised figures have been increased from Rs. 20 & 15 to Rs. 32 and 26 for the urban and rural poor respectively. That is a stupendous upward revision of 60% and 73% respectively. Those are impressive numbers. If you are living in 1987 (well, that is an arbitrary number, but you get the point).

The planning commission is as relevant today as socialism was 30 years back, i.e. not very much. The defunct thinking of the commission has once again indicated our ruling elite's grasp on reality. Our leaders and bureaucrats have drifted so far away from reality that they have forgotten what a rupee is worth in today's time. Understandable if you always deal in unaccounted cash. More so if you have a white ambassador with a tony house in posh locations, with electricity, water and your telephone paid for! It is actually possible for our politicians and bureaucrats to live on 32 rupees a day, because they do not pay for shit. With the normal folk picking up the tab for every comfort they have it is obvious that they would forget the worth of hard earned money.

But we must rectify the situation immediately. I suggest that we pack up the members of the commission and send them to Jhabua or Barmer with 32 rupees a day for a period of one month. No orderlies, no cars, no sarkari perks. Let us see if that changes their definition of being above the poverty line. Any economist or human being for that matter who thinks we can bind the definition of poverty around an income line needs to get their heads checked. When apparently eminent economists such as Montek Singh Ahluwalia make such mistakes they should be booted out with their much above-the-poverty-line incomes repatriated to people who need it much more. In an economic environment so dynamic, so complex, we need a group of people who are still in touch with reality. We need people who understand what poverty is before they attempt to define it. If this bunch of highly qualified, over paid morons cannot even identify the problem; how the heck are they supposed to provide solutions for them?

It is time we employ some above-the-brain dead-line economists to work in the planning commission. People with compassion, people who know what it means to struggle for every meal, people who know how difficult it is for the poor to just survive in our lopsided, 8% growing economy. Our economy exhibits properties of physics assumed to work in black holes. Not only is the gap increasing between the rich and the poor, it is also increasing between the lower sections of the divide; the urban and the rural poor. Devoid of any sense of how our recent growth has been concentrated only across a section of the society, measures such as the above are absolutely futile. In a country where the Prime Minister is an eminent economist (ha!) these medival standards of well being should be thrown into the dust bin (which by the way costs around rupees 50 now days).