Recently the Planning Commission, a key decision making entity of Govt. of India, came up with some interesting numbers to define poverty. An income of Rs 32 or below per day and Rs 26 or below per day, respectively in urban and rural India could place an individual in the below poverty cap. Those of us have lived in India for long enough realized how little those numbers are to lead a life and came down all guns blazing on the Govt. Fair enough, if the Govt. commits a mistake, the society is not going to be a lame observer, was the clear message sent across. Of course this post is neither to bash the Govt. nor to support it. What I intend to convey here is, unless we have a fair understanding of the matter it makes all the sense to refrain from passing judgments.
Let us try to understand some facts, which I bet more than 90% of those passionate Govt. bashers don’t seem to consider. They say, statistics can be used to prove almost anything. Yes, it’s a very tricky discipline. Firstly, what does Rs 32 per day as per capita translate into? An average Indian family size is supposed to be made up of five people. In case of the lesser educated class, the average size seems to be slightly higher. Let us say six members per family. So for such a family to be placed in the below poverty category would be a case of their income below (32x6x30) = Rs 5760 per month. Ah, this doesn’t sound too bad, right?
Going further it’s important to understand, who fall into the below poverty category? These are the people most likely belonging to the unskilled labor, who earn their living working in the unorganized sector, say your domestic help. If the Govt. were to take the voice of the middle class, which is the most active on social media, seriously and overhaul their calculation as this: Monthly income below Rs 9000 would be categorized as below poverty line, which means the per capita cap now would be Rs 50 per day. Would the middle class be happy about it? The answer is simply NO. Why? The Govt. has limited resources and cannot lay itself open to extra expenses. The possible way would be to introduce a minimum wage act, like in the developed countries, and make sure the unorganized sector gets paid more from their employers. This means your domestic help would have legal rights for much higher salary than what he/she is making today. This would only affect the pockets of the middle class and I can safely say that if the middle class gets know this solution, they would be the first to support the Govt., in a desperate attempt to fight the current inflation.
Only if the middle class was less hypocritical, we wouldn’t have had a situation of being judged guilty unless proven innocent. What the semiliterate population needs to understand is that the media’s job is to supply raw data and expect the society to process it in such a way that there arises an ambiguity. That’s the beauty of journalism, creating sensation out of simple facts, which could just go unnoticed. The bottom line is, if you aren’t interested in making that extra effort of processing information, stop being judgmental. This holds good in any walk of life.
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