Everybody Loves a Good Drought

The title refers to the name of the book that I read recently, a book unlike any that I have read before. As the back page reads, it is a story of India’s poorest districts, a journey away from numbers and statistics into the actual lives and struggles of people.

The writer, P Sainath, was a journalist with the Times of India when he filed these reports over a period of two years beginning May 1993. He makes an important point – and keeps on emphasizing it throughout – that too many of us elites are guilty of seeing poverty and deprivation that perpetuate it as events. When in reality, these conditions should be looked on as processes. Cholera deaths might increase overnight, but access to clean water, which is the source of the problem, would not have been addresses for years. There are numerous examples in the book that quote of government action – and that too after the reports were made public – designed to address the event, not the process that led to it. And hence, owing to this myopia, the poor are condemned for life. Sadly enough, they can’t even make for dramatic television footage like those in Somalia and Sudan, and hence, their only hope is to somehow try and get over the magical 2400 calories intake barrier, so that, statistically, they rise above the poverty line – with hardly any life-changing economic consequences.

To quote a recent instance, an H1N1 virus that has so far killed 150-odd people around the world makes for great television news. A concerned WHO has just raised the threat level to 6, concurrent to global pandemic. However, 24,000 people dying daily of hunger elicit barely a shrug. The writer presents a few more facts about India specifically – 450,000 deaths annually due to tuberculosis, 1.5 million infants lost to diarrhea. Every 3^rd human being without safe and adequate water supply is an Indian. Every 3^rd child out of school is an Indian. Every fourth diarrhea death is that of an Indian child. Every 3^rd leper is an Indian. But none of these make news – what does make news is a district that just lost 50 people to plague. And it does so for two major reasons – one, it provides eye catching television footage, armed with which we go to the world with begging bowl, asking for aid. And two, in the West, it helps reinforce old stereotypes. What is never addressed is the fact that never has an Indian government spent more than 2% of its GDP on health, or 4% on education. The agreed-in-theory number, and the actual number for countries like Sri Lanka and Nicaragua – forget the developed nations – is way above.

All the usual suspects that lead to such conditions are verified by the writer’s visits to these districts (in Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). There is the money lender perpetrated debt spiral, the hopelessly inept and petty (and often collusive) administrative machinery, short sightedness and subsequent failure of developmental schemes, the deplorable state of PHCs (Primary Health Centres) and government schools – and the corrupt ways of those who run these, the problems arising out of displacement – mostly forced, in the name of development that never reaches the intended beneficiary, a general ‘we-are-a-higher-species’ outlook of the elites that deal with these people and their problems – all these factors, and more, have liberally contributed to the conditions prevalent in these districts. The consequences – destruction of cultures, breaking of families, failed programs which never once asked the people for whom it was intended if this is what they wanted, and hence a continuation of the poverty cycle – and a handful get richer.

The author also takes a strong stance against a hypocritical attitude of the armchair experts who discuss how best to address poverty – we naturally assume that being better educated, our interpretation and proposed solutions has got to be better than that of the illiterate poor for whom the solution is being discussed, who has to eke out a meal everyday – so naturally the poor are excluded in the process of decision making about their own destiny! He also makes a critical observation against the role of media in portraying poverty and what is being done to alleviate it in this country – euphemistically called developmental journalism. He alludes to a minimum definition of a press – to signal weakness in the society – something that our media has repeatedly failed to do, even in matters beyond poverty and development. And as the author points out, while our media has been quite adept at covering events, they have been increasingly inept at covering processes, especially the development process.

Another point that the writer makes is that development and aid is a big booming industry, around the world – indeed a money spinner. And an attractive one at that – promising huge benefits to the contractors and individuals. The role of the World Bank and some NGOs is presented in an often dismal, and at times, shocking portrayal. (Some of these points, though on a global scale, were also echoed in a subsequent book that I read ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’, by John Perkins)

The writer liberally uses stinging language, punishing in words the establishment at every possible opportunity – but one tends to side with him. If what he has described in those words about the millions who barely eke out a living everyday and of the rapacious face of the authority that controls their lives with as little as a pen-stroke is even half-true, it would make non-believers of most of us, forget being just sarcastic. Here’s a selection --

• ‘Development is a strategy of evasion. The Indian development experience reeks of this hypocrisy. Ignore the big issues long enough and you can finally dismiss them as ‘outdated’. No one will bother.’


• ‘One of the newspaper stories on this appeared several days before the Planning Commission ‘unveiled’ its new figures in January 1986. It said poverty had ‘dropped sharply to the lowest levels ever’. It sourced this finding to ‘highly placed government officials’. There you have a flavor of the poverty debate. The ‘sharp’ drop in poverty is something to be revealed by ‘highly placed officials’. Such modesty, too. It’s like Einstein not wanting to be credited publicly with the Theory of Relativity.’
  
• ‘The forms and channels of abdication are many. One, in recent times, is the most favoured. That is: leave it to the NGOs. NGOs are supposed to be able to take care of gigantic problems affecting hundreds of millions of people. Problems that elected governments, with the full force of state machinery behind them, apparently can’t handle.’
  
• ‘Positive impact does not excuse stereotypes. One of the most widely read stories of that period began: ‘Here is a picture of hell.’ It went on to say that all those who were ‘unable to get away’ from Kalahandi were ‘dead or dying’. Those who remained ‘move in groups, licking water, like dogs’. There you have the essence of an upper middle class view of the poor – as animals. Animals to be pitied, perhaps, but animals all the same.’


• ‘Poverty gets covered in breathless tones of horror and shock that suggest something new has happened, even when it hasn’t. Apparently, crisis merits attention only when it results in catastrophe, not earlier.’

One must give credence to the fact that these reports were filed over a decade and half ago – 2 years after we were pushed over the brink to desperately usher in a free economy. These 15 years have been one of great change in the Third World and especially in India – social, political and economic. The point is not to argue whether these changes have been for the better or worse – there is enough evidence to argue either side – the point is that some of those factors which stood out in relevance even 45 years after independence may not be so today, given the increasing pace of outdated-ness. It is also likely that a lot of those numbers do not reflect today’s reality. This is not to suggest that the outlook of the administration itself might have undergone a sea change – on the contrary, seeing around me, I would rather think that it has lagged the pace of social shift. Also, in due fairness to the government, some attempts have been made to reach out to these poor.

The icing on the cake is that some of these districts actually have higher per capita food production than the state itself – and in some cases (like Kalahandi and Naupara in Orissa), the country as well. Curiously enough, some of the usually quoted draught prone areas (again, like Kalahandi and Palamau), actually receive more rainfall on average than the country itself. Some districts have mineral wealth rivaling countries. But then, what good is any of this? After all, everybody loves a good drought!