Poverty Talk - A new fashion?

When a beautiful Bollywood babe talks about "poverty in India", it becomes a top story in page 3; when a politician gives assurances of poverty alleviation, it makes headlines; when the "contemporary" youth talk about poverty, 'really nice guys' tag is fixed on their foreheads; But when the poor man shouts about his inability to feed his family, no matter how louder it is, no one hears! Couple of days back one of my friend was talking on and on about poverty, poor people, "rich" Indian culture, corruption, and so on. After some time I told him, "there are very few celebrities who really feel the pain of this "poverty evil" and who silently does lot of contribution. There are some celebrities who need a nice photo with orphan children when they visit orphanage, which category you belong to?" I do not blame him. He is still "a nice guy". Only things is, his knowledge about poverty is superficial and that too it is influenced by the media hype. I thought about this incident over and over again. I was convinced that, today, if you talk about poverty alleviation, you can be sure of drawing attention of the public. Thats exactly what our politicians do. No wonder why they come up with new poverty alleviation programs with catchy slogans just before the elections. The question here is, "Is talking about poverty a new fashion?"

Speaking is one aspect, but doing "something" is what we need. Most of us are fed up of hearing "there are still more than 300 million people below poverty line", "27% of India's population lives below poverty line", "govt has to do something about poverty alleviation" and more interesting statement is "this is politics, nothing much can be done!". I believe we should be bit more rationalistic when we make such statements. Its not fair if we just carried away by the media hype. What have we done in last 60 years to get rid of poverty? Is it right to pass on the blame to the govt? Is our govt really committed in implementing its poverty alleviation programmes? Very few people know that govt has done a decent job by introducing many innovative programmes right from 1950s. [Click here to see all programmes]. For example consider the recent National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005. This programme guarantees rural household 100 days of work every year. It is already operational in 330 districts across the country. According to The Hindu [Editorial, August 25, 2007], "While failures and disasters tend to hog media attention, there are several success stories. Tamil Nadu shows the largest participation of women at 81%. In Rajasthan, where public awareness of NREGA is quite high, the programme generated as many as 77 days of employement per rural household in 2006-07. A recent field survey in Chhattisgarh (Surguja and Koriya Districts) found that most families have 'job cards'; contractors have disappeared; minimum wages are being paid; corruption levels have gone down; and employment is being generated on massive scale."

But YES, there are few drawbacks on the other side. In some Programmes like Community Development Programme, Integrated Rural Development Programme, Indira Awas Yojana, Samll and medium farmers' development Agencies programme, Jawahar Rojgar Yojana, etc, not all the identified beneficiaries received the assistance. Why? Here are few reasons

1. Some of these programmes are implemented without testing their local suitability.
2. There were problems in identifying the "actual poor".
3. Lack of awareness about the programmes.
4. Lack of meticulous planning.
5. Lack of funding or some times the lapse of govt funds due to the unawareness of funds.
6. Lack of publicity etc..

In totality, most programmes intended to alleviate poverty have revealed new drawbacks. Every Programme implemented has shown how the resources can be misused. The Process of poverty alleviation programmes is facing an endless phase of experimentation. Now that we have learnt invaluable lessons from the past failures in implementing the poverty alleviation programmes, we must focus on overcoming the obstacles and succeeding in "changing the lives around".

Okay, all said and done, what can we do? "Some of the programmes like NREGA are invaluable initiatives that need to be stabilised, strengthened, and taken forward". Now that we have Right To Information (RTI) Act implemented, we have a huge potential to make a real difference to the lives of the rural poor. There is an urgent need to create an awareness about these programmes in rural areas. Media can be a crucial factor in this task. We need to "Educate and Organize" the "actual poor" to get the benefits out of public funds. If we still do not succeed even after "Educating and organizing", there is a democratic way of "Agitating" to get the work done! Lets talk about poverty to create an awareness about all these factors, lets talk about poverty to get rid of it and lets not make this "Poverty talk" a new fashion.