POVERTY

Meera, Hari and Sunita Rani are neighbours. Common thing between these two women are both of them work as servant (at different houses of their nearby residence), both their husbands are rickshaw pullers, both of them has more than two children. But meera’s husband tortures and abuses her besides, putting false questions on her character while the scenario of sunita’s family is completely different-she has a peaceful life. If we investigate main reason behind this, the only answer would be poverty. First, for staying at below poverty line they hardly meet up their both ends meet and their marginal propensity to consume is higher. Second, being struct by poverty, lack of education forces meera’s husband to respect her wife. Neither education sufficiently leads to this result nor the uneducated persons are necessarily disgraceful but education acts as a signal of development of both, minds and states. Whether meera’s husband would be like this or not, if he would have been educated, is a controversial question. But it could be expected that good education would help him to find a good job and thus, he could get rid of present uncomfort zone. Whereas, the real picture is different. Lack og education on the one hand leading to this situation and on the other hand, his local circumstances leading him to addicted to alcohol and so on; story making useless neighbours comparing meera and sunita’s situation so that meera’s husband is disuaded very easily besides, not judging the actual case. These are adding fuel to flame. Self-consumption, addiction towards tobacco, alcohol are not only leaving them with a lower wealth to carry on monthly expenditures but also these low qualitative addictions without sufficient nutritions are affecting his health. This in turn again leads to impediment towards the road of their today’s savings. They are trapped in vicious cycle of poverty. Third, this is not the ultimate story. One more cause of sunita’s higher well-being is that she is quite removed from the secondary poverty. She is well accessed to her capabilities. The women of the houses where she works are far better than the women where meera works. Sunita gets clothes for herself as well as for her family members from her madams. She also has delicious breakfast where she works. In addition to that often those women helps sunita by providing books, copies or money for the education purpose of their children. Sunita’s husband is very nice and let sunita to live her life besides, taking care of the family. This necessary requirements being filled up, sunita easily carries her consumptions and desire savings. Even those women helped her in grooming so that sunita often goes to microfinancial institutes, NGO’s if needed now-a-days. All these things clearly distinguish the life style of sunita and meera and explains some reasons behind that. This story tells us that, poverty is a great matter of concern everywhere and every when. How can then it be judged that whether rupees 47 in urban areas is necessary or sufficient margin of poverty? It may happen that one earns rs.40/day but the real goods enjoyed by one if is added to that, it may exceed the margin of rs.47. Hence that person is counted as poor where as she is actually not. The flip side of the coin says, say, one earns rs.50/day but political bullies take away rs.10/day from that guy. Though that person would not be counted at BPL, actually he/she is. The moral is that we should look over development, rather than economic growth as economic development is much broader concept than growth whereas, growth is necessary condition for development and development sufficiently comprises economic growth. Distribution, allocation should be taken care off more. Going beyond the term poverty we should ponder over secondary poverty and development should adorable more by looking over sustainable development (taking care of environment so that pollutions do not disturb or it might not impede our future generation from the consumption of their minimum rights). Being honest if wealth are allocated and distributed properly for social developments by government (which are not generally done by private entrepreneurs due to their profit maximizing motives), then we could utter “Bharat amaar Bharat borsho korme mohan hobe..dhorme mohan hobe”,  as the picture of the society as well as economy would be well and good.

By - 

Prantik Bagchi