Development and Governance

Category: Poverty

  • Dimensions of Urban Poverty

    For the new government in India, poverty is the proverbial elephant in the living room.

    Poverty in the tribal areas and the resulting unrest is brushed off as a law and order problem; rural poverty is hidden well away from the public consciousness by the pliant and adoring media… But what cannot be hidden from visiting dignitaries and potential foreign investors, is the urban poverty, so blatantly on display in all of India’s metros. It is argued that if these slum-dwellers can afford TV sets and mobile phones, they aren’t actually poor. Problem solved. Q.E.D.

    This myopic view stems from the 1960s mindset that the poor are poor because they have no income, but development theory has since moved on…

    It is now widely accepted that poverty everywhere, but especially urban poverty, is no longer a question of lack of income or insufficient calorie intake. It has broadened to include several areas of deprivation such as inadequate and unsafe housing, insecure workplaces, debilitating environments, insufficient social services, lack of opportunity for education and formal employment, increased vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters, and consequent disempowerment, and even disenfranchisement, of vast swathes of urban society.

    Unlike rural areas, where lack of assets and incomes is still a reasonably good measure of poverty, the complexities of providing adequate shelter and workplaces has added several dimensions to urban poverty – chiefly, deprivations of income, health, education, security and empowerment. The urbanisation of poverty, which has unpredictable, irreversible and long-term social, cultural, psychological, behavioural and political effects, has also brought to the forefront its multidimensional nature. Let us look at these dimensions in some detail…

    Income Dimension: Poverty of income may have its genesis in a macro-economic crisis, which in a developing country could be triggered by a couple of failed monsoons, a border conflict, internal unrest, weak governments, communal strife, poor fiscal policies, or global events like a sharp rise in the price of petroleum goods. In such a crisis, real incomes fall at every level, and naturally, those at the bottom of the income pyramid are worst affected.

    Secondly, a country may have very stringent planning and zoning laws prohibiting small enterprises in certain areas. In India, most Municipal bodies also regulate a number of private activities like trades, professions, house building, land use, markets, entertainment and transport. These additional controls involve lengthy bureaucratic procedures, which the poor simply cannot cope with, and they get pushed further into the informal sector, as a result.

    Finally, in most developing countries – like India – the local government depends entirely on taxes generated from the wealthy (property owners and traders) and therefore they are under great pressure to set their development priorities according to the needs of their ‘paying customers’. Consequently, in budget after budget, road expansion and maintenance get priority over public transport; large hospitals over primary health care; and because the wealthy have other options for educating their children, municipal schools remain understaffed and ill-equipped. This has an immediate and long term impact on the life chances of the poor, and their income generating abilities.

    Income poverty is characterised by dependence on cash for purchase of goods and services; employment insecurity; casual work/ labour/ unskilled wage labour; lack of skills to get well-paid jobs; and trade-off between distances to jobs and cost of housing.

    Health Dimension: The biggest factor that makes health a dimension of urban poverty is inadequate, congested and unsanitary housing, and unsafe places of work. Land and housing regulations can make proper housing unaffordable, and the poor often end up living in dangerous places like near the roads or railway tracks, or on disaster-prone riverbanks or hillsides, or near polluted areas like garbage tips or toxic waste dumps, where they salvage and scavenge to eke out a living. This is as true of Manila or Bangkok, as of Mumbai. The hazards are further aggravated by the inadequate physical and social infrastructure and services provided in poor neighbourhoods, whether it is water and sewerage, solid waste disposal, drainage, or vector control.

    Poverty itself is debilitating in several ways – in fact its effects begin in the womb. A poor, malnourished and anaemic mother is more likely to give birth to an underweight child, who may suffer from birth defects and chronic disorders which greatly reduce its chances of survival beyond infancy. Such a child is also more vulnerable to preventable diseases like polio because it may fall outside the formal immunisation efforts of Government. If the child survives, an inadequate supply of food and water will haunt its growing years and undermine its natural resistance to the health hazards that the urban environment will throw at him or her.

    Lastly, the poorest countries have the most polluted cities in the world, posing an ever increasing danger to the health of its citizenry. Increased respiratory mortality, decreased lung function, aggravated asthmatic problems, higher blood pressures, increased cardiac risks and cancers, cough, drowsiness, and eye irritation, have been identified as some of the health hazards emanating from polluting vehicles. It is estimated that more than 250,000 deaths are already attributable in Indian cities to such pollution.

    Education Dimension: Lack of adequate education translates into lack of opportunity, making it that much more difficult for the urban poor to break the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next. The inadequacy of schools in poor neighbourhoods is just one aspect. Most poor families need to put their children to work to augment family income – this is especially the case if the family breadwinner is incapacitated for some reason. Child Labour is a curse that’s unlikely to vanish from Indian workplaces any time soon. Even those parents desiring to educate their children and with access to neighbourhood schools, may be unable to afford additional school expenses like transport costs and extra coaching, especially in larger cities.

    Security Dimension of Poverty: The strongest feelings of insecurity engendered in the urban poor arise because in most cases they have no security of tenure on the already inadequate places they live and work in. In most countries, insecurity of tenure arises from retrograde land laws and planning practices – usually a colonial legacy, whether in India or Africa, or Latin America.

    Even if one does not go far enough to impute an anti-poor bias, the fact remains that Indian planners have simply not been trained to plan for the poor. When such attempts have been made in the past, they made no impact because planning is a holistic process, and area-based initiatives like slum improvement do not tackle poverty in its multiple dimensions. Thus, we have building laws and criteria that make safe housing too expensive and unaffordable for the poor; our zoning laws prohibit hawking, small businesses and small shopping in most areas; our development control rules (which prevent the densification of Indian cities) have made urban land unrealistically expensive and unaffordable, and any poor settlement coming into existence, immediately violates half a dozen rules and regulations.

    So if a family has no rights of tenure and may not even know where it will rest the night, how are the children going to register in schools and get an education? How will the parents earn a livelihood? How will the family draw the rations to feed itself? And where will the sick find succour?

    Empowerment Dimension: As immortalised by Dostoevsky, Dickens and Hugo, poverty is above all, synonymous with helplessness, reduced options, and loss of control over one’s life and decisions. This is disempowerment at its most basic. The deliberate disempowerment of the urban poor allows them to cast their vote in every election, but curtails their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The poor get the short end of the stick, and this is especially the case in a hierarchically rigid society like India. As a result, the urban poor often live in isolation from the social and economic activity of the city, and are denied the vital information they need to survive – such as their legal rights to services, and availability of jobs etc.

    Since independence, India has witnessed several development initiatives to address rural poverty, and despite their sluggish pace, they have succeeded to a large extent in at least providing food security to the poor. However, by failing to see the multi-dimensional nature of urban poverty, we have been stuck with sporadic slum redevelopment programmes with a few basic amenities provided here and there.

    Poverty is a historical, social, economic and political problem. Therefore there can be no simple engineering solutions to poverty.

    Perhaps, there are other ways in which the elephant can get moving. The new Government should seriously consider:

    • Ending the rural-urban bifurcation
    • Tertiarising the rural economy to stem distress migration to cities
    • Assuring food security for all: rural and urban
    • Providing a place of business that is legitimate, affordable and secure
    • Moving towards urban housing that is formal, affordable and secure
    • Putting in place a representational system for all assets, liabilities, and inventories
    • Augmenting access to institutional finance for all, not just rich industrialists
    • Vigorously enforcing the Right to Education
    • Giving easy and universal access to immunisation and health care
    • Guaranteeing public goods and services on the basis of equity and inclusion
    • Putting in place a social security net to cope with the unexpected

    This way, we may eventually succeed in providing sustainable livelihoods for all citizens – a concept I hope to look at in detail in a future post…

  • Understanding Poverty

    The world now understands poverty basically as a lack, or inadequacy, of:

    • Food security
    • Secure Shelter/ Address
    • Access to basic services
    • Sound Health
    • Education
    • Choice and Voice
    • Personal security

    Not knowing where your next meal is coming from is termed as absolute poverty; and a paucity of basic necessities like shelter is known as relative poverty.

    Globally, there has been an evolution of approaches to dealing with poverty, down the years:

    1960s: Governments looked at macroeconomic criteria like GNP. In those halcyon days of optimism, it was believed that with redistributive justice, global poverty could be eradicated

    1970s: With the quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Vietnam war fiasco of 1975, all optimism went out the window, and governments were happy just to broaden the concept of income-poverty to a wider set of ‘basic needs’ and the lack of access to health, education and other services

    1980s: Also called the lost decade of development, saw the emergence of ideas like sustainable development and the feminisation of poverty, and policy makers waxed poetic, adding powerlessness, isolation, and vulnerability to the poverty matrix

    1990s: Saw the emergence of the capability approach, and the UNDP Human Development Reports focused not on what people do or do not have, but on what they can or cannot do .

    The Human Development Index measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions:

    • A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth
    • Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio
    • A decent standard of living, as measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in US$.

    2000s: Through the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations set specific targets for countries to achieve, and have brought about noticeable reductions in poverty in many countries. These goals are:

    1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
    2. Achieve universal primary education
    3. Promote gender equality and empower women
    4. Reduce child mortality
    5. Improve maternal health
    6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
    7. Ensure environmental sustainability
    8. Global partnership for developmentThe global scenario for poverty makes very depressing reading:

    2010s: In the second decade of the new millennium, the chickens of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation are coming home to roost. Poverty did not reduce as much as expected, because countries were chasing economic growth and international trade at the cost of their obligations to the poor. In fact, during this decade, social divisions became more marked, compounded by the digital and knowledge divide, so evident in a country like India.

    As a result, the current scenario looks rather depressing:

    • Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
    • At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day
    • More than 80% of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening
    • The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of global income. The richest 20% accounts for three-quarters of world income
    • A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population. The next 51% of all wealth is owned by the next 8.4 million — just 0.14% of the world’s population.
    • For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.

    The situation in a developing country like India, is no better:

    • India is estimated to have one third or 33% of the world’s poor. It is estimated that 8 Indian states have more poor people than 26 poorest African nations combined, which totals to more than 410 million poor in the poorest African countries.
    • The latest UNICEF data shows that one in three malnourished children worldwide, are found in India, whilst 42% of the nation’s children under five years of age, are underweight. It also shows that a total of 58% of children under five surveyed, were stunted.
    • The 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) Report places India amongst the three countries where the GHI between 1996 and 2011 went up from 22.9 to 23.7, while 78 out of the 81 developing countries studied, including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Kenya, Nigeria, Myanmar, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Malawi, succeeded in improving hunger conditions.
    • An estimated 421 million of the poor are concentrated in eight North Indian and East Indian states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

    There are many reasons for the endemic poverty in India, such as: pre-colonial and post-colonial exploitation; caste and gender discrimination; failure to develop secondary and tertiary sectors of the rural economy; lack of redistributive justice for the landless; poor physical infrastructure; low quality social infrastructure; a sluggish, low-capacity bureaucracy that tends to be reactive rather than proactive; and poor design and implementation of anti-poverty programmes like IRDP, JRY, NRY, SGSY, SJSRY, which are top-down, based on the axiom of ‘one-size-fits-all’ and fail because they do not take local socio-cultural variations into account.

    Where local variations have been encouraged, they have achieved tremendous success – like the women’s self-help groups of Kudumbashree in Kerala. But then, women in Kerala have always wielded more economic and social power than anywhere else in India. Perhaps men’s workers’ collectives and thrift societies will be equally successful in the traditionally patriarchal northern States.

    In my next post, I hope to look specifically at urban poverty and its many dimensions…