India that is not shining

The 11th Five Year Plan document has sounded an alert on increasing poverty in a season of gravity-defying surges, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 31, 2007, 03:54:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The 11th Five Year Plan document has sounded an alert on increasing poverty in a season of gravity-defying surges that saw the Sensex scale beyond 20,000 points on Monday.

The plan draft has shown that in five states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Orissa — the number of poor people has risen, although overall poverty has fallen from about 44 per cent in 1983 to 27.5 per cent.

The document would be discussed at a Planning Commission meeting on November 8.

It showed that Uttar Pradesh had 5.5 crore people living in poverty in 1983, which increased to 5.9 crore by 2004. In the corresponding period in Bihar, the number increased from 3.6 crore to 3.69 crore. In Maharashtra, the 1983 figure was 2.9 crore which increased to 3.17 crore by 2004 and in Orissa from 1.54 crore to 1.78 crore. Uttarakhand, which had about 20 lakh people in poverty in 1983 — the region was still part of Uttar Pradesh then — had 32 lakh poor people by 2004.

All these states have a higher poverty percentage than the national average. Though statistics have shown a dip in the percentage, the number of poor people has increased in these states.

For instance, Orissa had 65 per cent of its population below the poverty line in 1983. This has come down to 46 per cent now. Similarly in Bihar, which has second highest percentage of poor people in India after Orissa, 42 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line now compared with 62 per cent in 1983.

The Planning Commission document also showed that if an urban-rural comparison was done, it would show that a greater percentage of people in urban centers had scrambled out of poverty than in rural parts. In states like Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, the addition of people in the poverty basket was much more than those who had managed to climb out of it.

The Planning Commission document also pointed out that after two decades of poor-friendly measures, the poverty burden had transferred to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — a sign that class and caste discrimination was blocking government programmes from including all.

Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra account for 75 per cent of the country’s rural poor, most of them being Scheduled Castes.

In Orissa, 73 per cent of the poor are Scheduled Tribes while in Bihar, their figure is 59 per cent and in Madhya Pradesh 57 per cent of the total poor in the state.

The plan panel documents suggested two remedies. The first was to implement land reforms, the second, improve agriculture services.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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