FIGURING IT OUT

FIGURING IT OUT

In and out of poverty

Pothik Ghosh

NOW that Uttar Pradesh is in the last lap of its marathon seven-phase assembly elections, it would perhaps not be out of place to do some stocktaking, if only to briefly outline the policy priorities of the government-to-be so that it can effectively address some of the most chronic troubles that plague UP. A paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly (April 21-27, 2007), which examines the dynamics of rural poverty of the state, both in terms of its economic geography and social identity, does precisely that.
It compares the dynamics of rural poverty in UP as revealed by the findings of a sample survey (2004-05) on which it’s based with that of the BPL Census of 1989-90 to show that while 52.3% of rural households in UP were poor in 1989-90, the figure in 2004-05 stood at 45.74%. In those 15 years, 38.69% of the poor households remained BPL, while 13.61% of them had actually escaped into the APL zone. More importantly, of the 600-strong sample of rural households (150 from each of the four regions of the state), 7.05% had, between 1989-90 and 2004-05, sunk into BPL, even as 40.66% of them had remained non-poor. Consequently, these two movements — away from poverty and into it — led to a 6.56 percentage point decline in rural poverty in UP in almost one-and-a-half decades.
But rate of rural poverty reduction in UP varies wildly across its four regions. The greatest movement away from poverty (20%) was discerned in the western region, and that offset the greatest movement towards poverty (10.67%) so much so that net reduction in poverty was the highest (9.34 percentage points) here. The southern region did better than the east because the downward movement there was relatively less than in the east. The central region was the worst off with the maximum number of sample households remaining poor. (See Table.) The apparently paradoxical phenomenon of greatest upward and downward mobility of households occurring together in west UP should be ascribed to it being traditionally the most market-friendly region of the state. That probably enabled economic reforms to penetrate it the most. And while most people of west UP leveraged the opportunities it provided to enhance their economic standing, its negative impact in terms of phasing out of many traditional jobs and businesses was also clearly the most pronounced here. As for the southern region of Bundelkhand, while it stood second to west UP with 6.67 percentage points reduction in poverty, the difference between the two regions on that score was much more (2.67 percentage points) than between Bundelkhand and the third-best region of eastern UP (0.42 percentage point). This, read in conjunction with the fact that the maximum number of rural households (50.67%) that remained non-poor are in south UP, indicates how Bundelkhand’s rigid traditional social structure — which is geared towards concentrating political power and wealth in a few hands — has obstructed economic diversification that would have broadbased the high rate of post-reform growth.
The fact that poverty reduction was the highest among SC households (8.51 percentage points), followed by BCs (5.4 percentage points) and general castes (2.66 percentage points) must surely be attributed to base effect. And yet the fact that the percentage of households that remained poor between 1989-90 and 2004-05 were the highest among SCs (48.98%) followed by BCs (34.85%) indicates the limitations of subaltern politics, which while it gives agency to hitherto disempowered social groups, is only driven by the will to create a new elite from among them. That obviously does not dispose it well towards socio-economic transformation. As a consequence, the base of the modern economy does not expand and its growth fails to alleviate the poverty of the subalterns in absolute terms.