Published paper titled "The mining of poverty" in Social Work foot Prints; (Special issue journal on poverty and income inequality in India: Social Social work responses) (ISSN: 2230-8830) Volume VII, Issue 5, November 2017
Title: The
Mining of Poverty
Type: Socio-Political-Economic
Analysis
Author: Ajith Fredjeev Dinakarlal,
Faculty, School of Social Work, Marian College, Kutikanam
(ajith.fredjeev@mariancollege.org, fredjeev@gmail.com)
Co-Author: Dr. Lokesha MU, Faculty, Department
of Studies and Research in Social Work, Tumkur University, Tumkur (lokesh_mu2000@yahoo.co.in)
Abstract:
“First they ignore
you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
by Mahatma
Gandhi
It is not NEWS that the
believers of the ‘divine right’ from the West as well as the pseudo-democratic
champions of the East have both been abusing the rights and minority interests of
the vulnerable for a very long period of time; yet, it must be realized that the
impact thus created, has been quite severe on skewing the identity of the
majority living within the barriers of geographical restrictions who end up bearing
misrepresentations and its subsequent consequences. Our resistance (as Indians)
to global disparities and dialectics of internal and external identities that
have emerged as a result of these causes has not altered as the majority still live
in a state of complacency of ignorance; if not, apathy. Resistance to forced
identities has remained unrevoked and the Indian identity that has been skewed on
the parallel to favour some hypocritical agendas set forth by funding and
funded organizations in the development sector, can be only set right upon the realization
of the fact that this plunder and ruin have been silently and systematically
hatched, patched and dispatched, ignoring the identity of the majority and of
course, with a certain level of deliberated resistance towards this wrongful
depiction and misrepresentation. The following analysis at a
socio-political-economic level, aims to disturb the complacency of silence in
order to stop manifesting what necessarily does not represent the identity of every
Indian and calls for rudimentary, majority response for its reversal.
Keywords: India, Identity, Human
Rights, Funding, Development Sector, Violations, Abuse, Resistance, Social
Action
Seeding
the thought
“Where
the clear stream of reason has not lost its way,
into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
where
the mind is led forward by thee into
ever
widening thought and action,
into
that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake” Rabindranath Tagore
If
one were to draw blind-folded, an image of an Indian, from what is heard and
seen about India and its people by others outside its borders, perhaps it
should not be surprising to see anyone drawing a dark, skinny and dusty person
with a grim face and a turban wrapped several times around the head, standing amidst
dark, gloomy clouds of lust and violence, corruption and scams, pollution and
population hovering in the backdrop, holding a deep-pitted begging bowl raised
towards any leaking place from which foreign funds have the slightest hint of
dripping… no matter how demeaning the picture might be.
A few decades back, this is how we too, as global
citizens, played a part in painting the whole of Africa as a continent with
sick, poor, bony, dusty, dark children; undeniable that we expected every child,
woman and man coming out of Africa to fit into boxes and images of our forced
imagination seeded by the exploitative colonial powers. To a certain extent,
seeding this dark thought of an entire continent into our minds that so
stubbornly refuses to leave has been achieved; so much so that we cannot stop
seeing Africa and its citizens without sympathy; even if they don't ask for it.
Thus remains Africa, a continent with absolute poverty and misery, violence and
barbarism, with resent for advancement and justice requiring the saviours from
the fair West to be present there all the time for establishing control of
biblical proportions over otherwise tagged “barbaric” tendencies-confirmed and
affirmed within the limitations of our mind if not anywhere else. With that
idea established, is sealed the fate of Africa as an ever-impoverished nation
in need of never-ending support in global perspective. Eventually, crossing
borders and treading seas, India, seems to have become the new destiny, the new
Africa, for the West to muse in the pretext of development.
Historically, the colonial powers
enter a particular territory only when there is a promise of economic
prosperity and would not leave until the last drop of anything left is drained.
Africa, I believe, has still some more fuel, diamond and un-questioning people
left for the colonies to optimize and the West would go any length to skew the
African identity to make space for them to remain until Africa’s resources are
completely exploited. Amidst faith-based, pseudo-justice-based, exploitative
colonial powers born out of intentions conceived through the marriage of
hypocrisy and greed, it would be interestingly revealing if the following
questions are reflected upon: How is this image drawn so
conveniently? Who frames these images? What benefit is derived by giving and
taking up such an identity?
From the Moral Eye of Democracy
Despite
glamour and its commercial side taking on the best centers and corners of the
mass media, some remnant gaps do bring highlights of contemporary social issues
by chance or by choice and at times articles with NEWS-value do make it through
media gate-keepers, that expose racist ideologies and stereotyping of the
subaltern collective that indicate the cause of the selective-perception. It is
then that the media finds its rightful place as the fourth pillar or rather the
moral eye of the democracy that opens to reveal hidden agendas. Instances may
be seen as run below.
The Problem of Plenty
For a
country which till recently had a weak civil society movement, India is now
witnessing a boom in the NGO sector. With a population of 1.2 billion, the
country could well be the land of opportunities for non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) with the Central Bureau of Investigation conservatively
estimating 20 lakh of them already operating in states and union territories.
The
mind-boggling figures boil down to one NGO for every 600 people. Compare this
to the latest government data on police. According to the latest figures from
the Union home ministry, India has just one policeman for every 943 people.
But there
is an accountability deficit among the NGOs. And that's how CBI got into the
picture as the Supreme Court responded to a PIL. Many don't submit details of
receipt of grant and spending to income tax authorities, the CBI told the apex
court.
The Funding Inquisition
Based upon the receipt of previously received,
documented and established figures, NGOs operating in the country had received
a staggering Rs 11,070 crore during 2013-14, with the US topping the list
of donors by providing over Rs 4,491 crore, followed by the UK which
contributed Rs 1,347 crore, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
Interestingly, the NGOs received donations even from secretive countries like
North Korea.
· Malawi, a landlocked country in South East Africa,
which is counted among the world’s least developed countries, is mentioned as a
donor with over Rs 27 lakh donation to various NGOs during 2013-14.
·
Swaziland, one of the smallest countries in Africa,
donated over Rs 9.5 crore.
·
Donations from Pakistan during the same year were
about Rs 50 lakh while Greece, which has been gripped by its worst economic
crisis till date, donated Rs 61 lakh.
·
People from violence-hit countries like Afghanistan
and Bosnia too donated to the Indian NGOs. Rs 1.23 crore came from Bosnia while
Afghanistan’s contribution was Rs 1 crore.
These are funds received besides the funding
NGOs/NPOs in India receive from the Government of India itself.
·
In the last decade, more than Rs 85,000 crore has
come in for the NGO sector from global patrons
·
Of the 40,000-odd NGOs registered under Foreign Contributions
Regulation Act (FCRA), at least half do not file proper accounts with the
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)
·
As per a report published by the Home Ministry for
the year 2011-12, there were 41,844 registered associations under the FCRA and
some 22,702 NGOs reportedly received Rs 11,546 crore as foreign contributions
·
As compared to 2004-05, the amount received in
2011-12 was up by 85 percent (from Rs 6,257 crore to Rs 11,548 crore) and their
number 38 percent (from 30,321 to 41844)
·
A total of Rs 1,16,073 crore was received by the
NGOs between 1993-94 to 2011-12. Only about 55% NGOs gave audited account
·
Among the list of donors, the United States tops
the list (Rs 3838.23 crore) followed by the United Kingdom (Rs 1219.02 crore)
and Germany (Rs 1096.01 crore)
·
A majority of donors, including the top three, are
church-based organisations such as Compassion International USA (Rs 183.83
crore) followed by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, USA (Rs 130.77
crore) and the Kindernothilfe e.V. (KNH) Germany (Rs 51.76 crore)
·
Of the top 15 donor agencies, 13 are related to
some or the other Christian sect. Over 90 percent of the top 30 recipient
organizations are engaged in missionary activity
·
The highest amount of foreign contribution was
received by the following Christian organization namely World Vision India,
Chennai (Rs 233.38 crore), followed by the Believers Church India
Pathanamthitta, Kerala (Rs 190.05 crore) and Rural Development Trust,
Ananthpur, Andhra Pradesh, (Rs 144.39 crore)
·
To put this in perspective, India’s total defence
allocation (2011-12) was Rs 1,64,000 crore. Thus, foreign-funded NGOs (FFNGOs)
in 2011-12 received seven percent of India's then defence budget
The
Emerging Thought
Over six decades of freedom later and after millions
of dollars raised outside our borders in promised lands by the so called
“compassionate” and those living off that money raised in the name of the poor,
with a stage set for provider-receiver drama to happen with lakhs of
organizations to act as actors, traitors and betrayers (from within and out),
nothing much has changed in the socio-economic-political diaspora of our
country; we remain still burdened and still plundered and those we claim need
help, upon whose needs the welfare-oriented development sector fuels itself,
remain deprived, marginalized, excluded and vulnerable till date. Let us take
the following statistics available
from the past five years for some revelation:
·
The Planning Commission of India has
accepted the Tendulkar Committee report that says that 37% of people in India live
below the poverty line (BPL)
·
The Arjun Sengupta Report (from National
Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector) states that 77% of
Indians live on less than INR 20 a day (about $0.50 per day)
·
The N.C. Saxena Committee report states
that 50% of Indians live below the poverty line
·
A study by the Oxford Poverty and Human
Development Initiative using a Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) found that
there were 650 million people (53.7% of population) living in poverty in India,
of which 340 million people (28.6% of the population) were living in severe
poverty, and that a further 198 million people (16.4% of the population) were
vulnerable to poverty
·
421 million of the poor are concentrated
in eight North Indian and East Indian states of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand,
Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This number
is higher than the 410 million poor living in the 26 poorest African nations
·
The World Bank estimates that India is
ranked 2nd in the world of the number of children suffering from malnutrition
·
The UN estimates that 2.1 million Indian
children die before reaching the age of 5 every year – four every minute –
mostly from preventable illnesses such as diarrhoea, typhoid, malaria, measles
and pneumonia
·
Every day, 1,000 Indian children die
because of diarrhoea alone.
The 2011 Global Hunger Index (GHI) Report ranked India 15th, amongst leading countries
with hunger situation and
· The Oxford Poverty and Human Development
Initiative in its Global Multidimensional Poverty Index published in 2015,
ranks two North Indian states amongst the five “poorest” sub-national regions
in the world
The only thing gained and maintained by us at the
end of the day, is the image of an always poor and absolutely needy, ever
“developing” nation. As we continue to be abused for the virtue of patience we
hold, often we are forced to live in a culture of fear, denial and silence. This
attitude of ours to supply to the demand of other nations with our poverty,
will always remain and be kept that way for a very long time. The image thus
created and along with our identity, just like that of Africa, will be a story
of never ending poverty and sorry endings and we shall soon be dressed in rags
with Western imagination for the amusement of the rest of the world. This
misrepresentation of our identity, (ab)using the vulnerability of select
targets, has been the greatest injustice done to the people of India and the
greatest damage done to the image of the country… the greatest abuse of our
collective patience.
GO
and NGO Lock Horns
Most
funding organizations function nothing more than as the neo-capitalists of the
contemporary scenario who see the poor and the vulnerable as nothing more than
a Return on Investment (RoI); and their lives, their communities and the
problems they deal with in everyday life as their Unique Selling Point (USP) to
be optimized and highlighted outside the borders to nurture profits and
dividends back in their homes out of which a portion found fitting is thrown at
us for which we are busy fighting among ourselves to take a grab.
And up the political front and in government
quarters, leave alone finding it difficult to strategically tackle poverty over
the years, our topied-babus seem to find it hard enough even to define it.
Shifting from per-capita income to kilo-calorie food consumption, we have
indeed shifted focus defining poverty rather than focusing on the welfare of
the poor. Of late, we have brilliantly figured out that the fastest and
immediate way to bring down the poverty level of a country is to just adjust
the way we define it. The once Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek
Singh Ahluwalia, submitted new price data that pegged the urban poverty line as consumption
of Rs. 32/day per person in urban areas and Rs. 26/day in rural areas, a
revision that would immediately lower India’s own measure of its poor from 37%
to 32% of its population. Behold! Sixty million people, suddenly are no more
poor by definition.
Optimizing
on the poor who the government manages to define and the remaining that are
left out undefined, at the end of the day, the NGOs from within and out, hover
to notice and peck and fill themselves with benefits sought in their names.
Big Fish Eats Smaller Fry
Cracking
down on erring NGOs, government has cancelled licenses of 1,142 NGOs belonging
to undivided Andhra Pradesh, under which they get foreign funds, for not filing
their annual returns for three consecutive years. Earlier, government has said
that 69 NGOs have been blacklisted from receiving foreign funds after finding
fault in different aspects. Among those NGOs which were prohibited from
receiving the foreign funds include 14 from Andhra Pradesh, 12 from Tamil Nadu,
five each from Gujarat and Odisha, four each from Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and
Kashmir and Kerala and three from Delhi. Government had also initiated action
against 26 NGOs in current fiscal after finding “irregularities” in receiving
foreign contribution while 14 foreign donors have been placed under prior
approval category.
On
February 25, government told Parliament that more than 31,000 NGOs were served
notices for not filing annual returns on their foreign contribution. In
2011-12, notices were sent to 21,493 associations which were found to have not
submitted annual returns under Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010 for
2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09 and in 2014, and notices were issued to 10,343
associations which had not filed annual returns for 2009-10 to 2011-12.
In October, the Home Ministry announced
that the non-governmental organizations can’t do transactions of over `20,000 in cash—a clause
which is applicable to only business enterprises under the Income Tax Act. In
December, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular was released, listing NGOs
whose funds it said should be monitored by banks. In January, a new circular
was released with a list of 10 donor organizations, including Danish
International Development Agency (Danida), Mercy Corps, US; Hivos International
of the Netherlands; Climate Work Foundation, US; and Greenpeace International.
Any NGO receiving funds from them will
now need prior permission of the MHA before they bring in the funds. In fact,
starting 1 April, 2015, all organizations registered under the FCRA have to
reapply for licence within a year. While licences issued by the MHA in the
ongoing year will be applicable for five, those issued before 1 April 2015 will
be deemed cancelled from April 2016. Anil Choudhary, senior member with Indian
Social Action Forum (INSAF), said, “If you are independent and critical of the
market and the government, you face the music in the form of regulatory
restrictions.” Those working in the development sector are hopeful of
alternative funding models emerging, though not necessarily through CSR. Once
community-centred funding comes into the picture, the voices of dissent and
people’s movements will be harder to stamp out; it is believed.
At the
end of the sudden screening and lowering of shutters of NGOs by suddenly
vigilant government bodies and the ironical subsequent screaming of “foul-play”
by representatives from the civil society who claim this to be a direct attack on
democracy to shut voices of dissent and disapproval of activists and
nationalists, I wonder why voices of dissent and disapproval over a
government’s unjust manifestation of oppressive tendencies to cover-up hideous
corporate crimes suddenly stop when financial ties are cut(?!) Do voices of
such heightened passion earlier heard require financial assistance to ensure
volume?! Is this the junction of hypocrisy?
The painting of M.F. Hussain,
titled 'the Rape of Mother India, portrays the image of a woman caught in a
struggle to escape from the strangling force of two wild bulls; this painting
was heavily criticized for the imagery as well as the titling. Revisit the
painting and you get to see the Indian identity suffer a similar accord; torn
apart by the betrayer from outside and the traitor from within and it is then
that you realize that the painting would find no more contempt yet just
absolute relevance in the present context to understand the fate of the poor
caught between these two sectors that promise development.
The Mining of Poverty
“The identity of an individual is
essentially a function of his/her choices, rather than the discovery of an
immutable attribute.” Amartya Sen
India
has always been seen as a land of harvest if not by us, at least by the West.
As we try to think that gone are those days, when the great whites packed up
after reaching our shores and mining us off our riches that they controlled,
reaped and shipped to their land to be preserved, wrapped and sold, it is
equally pertinent to be a little watchful and realize that today those we
believed to be gone, are back in our shores and this time, to mine us off our
poverty instead. Their first stop often as they reach our land are the slums,
pavements and areas of claimed-underdevelopment, poverty and hunger-their
choicest destinations (often with good connectivity through air), where they
pull out their point and shoot cameras, to do exactly what it is meant to
do-point and shoot-megapixel after megapixel of great whites amidst the poor,
vulnerable and unprotected lot in an impoverished nation that will soon get captioned,
tagged, uploaded, downloaded and blown up to unimaginable proportions to be
presented in slides, posters, brochures, coffee-table stand-alone and anything
creative and unimaginable during hair-raising, fund-raising campaigns to a
bunch of mesmerized audiences who fill the high-raised bowls of those that seek
on behalf of those who are not even aware (nor ever will be.) Thus emerges a
breeding ground for forced-need-based communities and strategic-greed-based
organizations and the marriage of these two groups have become subsequently complementary
for each other’s survival.
In
this rights-based-era we live in, with globalization in vogue, it is not just
commodities that are traded yet often tags that come with an unstoppable influx
of infused culture-new, foreign and distant to us; and as we stand in awe at
the conqueror, we despise our own within the boundaries and step across even if
it is in the risk of giving up our culture, traditions and freedom. There is a
wide difference between these cross-cultural ideas; like the idea of feeling
self actualized and satisfied that according to Western philosophy is possible
when facilitated through the accumulation of materialistic resources to
maximize satisfaction that is directly contradictory to the Indian philosophy
that speaks about the idea of giving up materialism to attain nirvana. The
solution to many problems in the Indian context cannot lie in plausible
formulae that seems to have worked in the West or elsewhere; owing to the fact
that there is a serious discrepancy in the way hypothetical assumptions have
been made of Indians and India on the basis of flawed conclusions drawn from
misrepresentation and ideas drawn from an equally plausible imagination.
Concluding
Idea of Justice
India has become a country where a plethora of projects
are drafted for the money collected; when ethically it should be the other way
around; this is when and where the Indian soil and its people have become
testing grounds for launching medical and other researches banned in other
sensible parts of the world, where pesticides, bio-modified seeds and pilot
projects considered harmful gets conceived, incubated and hatched on our open
grounds thus condensing our land to blocks of wasted and barren exploited
pieces and our people to mere guinea pigs and lab rats capitalizing on the
illiteracy and ignorance of the exploited masses.
Eventually,
it is the poor, blanketed under the darkness of poverty, who are being silently and systematically plundered, ruined and
tagged and we, as a majority carry these imprints in our represented, presented
and misrepresented identity; yet it is not such a rarity that these isolation
chambers are what many walk into these days willfully and voluntarily; giving
up pride, respect and dignity which some of our earlier Indians refused to
exchange. Much of the damage has been partly due to an
identity thrust upon us and much more attributed to us for accepting the
identity thrust without defending our own.
In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen, hints on the
need for the concept of ‘open impartiality’ in a global context that cannot be
abstracted without the existence of ‘global democracy’. This is one of the
weirdest situations where a global dialogue that is imperative for ensuring
global justice under the organization of commonalities of identities and
institutions in the contemporary world gets dismissed for evoking ‘distracting
details’ that shun the purity for exercising fairness while delivering justice.
Often, this is the same detailing that is available to understand the global
presentations of vulnerable people and communities and their identities that
are un-spared and brutalized, very often on global grounds of injustice.
The
images of the beggar tapping at car window at a traffic signal, a working child
carrying a sack-load of waste in a gunny bag, a pavement dweller living in a
pipeline discarded from an unsuccessful project, a pathway seller rushing to
hide his commodities when the cops come in, a push-cart monger who yells at the
top of his voice right outside the house and everyone else we drive past or
possibly just pause to pick a decent bargain or take a moment to pity have been
raised to be identified as the symbols of poverty and objectified.
The
life that drives these people into who they are, where they are and where they
come from and why they do what they do, are interestingly heart-warming stories
of endurance and courage if rightly captured and truthfully represented. The
stories from the everyday life of these people, true and alive, have a greater
significance for living the great Indian philosophy that teaches of artha,
kama, dharma and moksha that will help us to understand the essence of breaking
barriers of conceived perception by observing their very simple way of life amidst
struggles like anyone else’s. The idea to capture their lives, courage and
dream amidst their struggle may change our perspective of them and provide a
spectrum of understanding of the immense resilience of an ordinary, regular
Indian to the rest of the world.
The
irony behind these stories of struggles and endurance amidst suffering,
tragedies and difficulties is that these issues need not be faced in the first
place if policies that run the government, non-government and community systems
were functioning as promised and as truthful as told in the first place.
Diamonds are rare, beautiful and valuable, but their beginnings were always as
humble in form as the common carbon-dark, dirty, and combustible. Through years
of withstanding intense heat and high pressure, they become pure, beautiful and
strong; this makes the gem a good metaphor for the patient Indian endurance
that has historically withstood abuse, chaos and catastrophe. This can be
understood through the lives of a few contemporary and lesser known Indians
when presented and represented from an un-hideous and positive angle and their
misrepresentations get subsequently erased.
Reference
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, [iii]
, [iv]
, [v]
, [vi]
, [vii]
, [viii]
, [ix],
[x],
[xi],
[xii],
[xiii],
[xiv],
[xv]
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[iii] Ziauddin
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[vi] Rabindranath Tagore, 1913,
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[viii] "Country Briefing: India,
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as on 19th April, 2015
