Why is IT not beneficial for average Indians?
Answers
Explanation:
per-capita terms, India is twice as poor as the .
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Half-truth 4: Narrow escapes
Does it matter whether some individual rising above the $1.90 poverty line achieves a new income level of $2.15 or of $5.50? It does, of course, but not in official circles, where each type of ascent counts equally in the tally of progress.
A singular focus upon the aggregate number, upon quantity rather than quality, has led to two kinds of tunnel vision among planners of anti-poverty measures. Officials assess poverty in terms of the share of the poor in the total population. But neither do they pay heed to how many people actually escaped poverty (and how many fell into poverty) nor are they usually concerned with how high above the poverty line different individuals have ascended.
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Official statistics do not help distinguish between the number of poverty escapes that were of a marginal kind (a rise from $1.90 to $2.15) and how many others moved far beyond the zone of poverty (say, to the $5.50 level). In the official count, every escape from poverty is totted up as a success, even those that are marginal and temporary.
Probing half-truth 5: How effective are the existing national programmes?
What the Indian government has been doing for reducing poverty is impressive in its scale of operation.
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Two problems limit the impact, however, of this approach to poverty reduction. The first problem arises from an assumption inherent to the top-down and aggregative view, namely that poverty across the land will respond similarly to the same intervention: that what works in Assam will also work in Tamil Nadu; within large states, some the size of France or England, the same policies and programmes can be followed; that settlements across the land are essentially homogeneous: beyond–5 km villages need the same supports as those located closer to cities.
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A second problem with the national programmes that have been implemented has to do with the theory underlying this approach to poverty reduction.
These programmes do not address the reasons underlying poverty flows: they are not aimed at preventing or slowing down the flow into poverty, and they do little to improve the extent, far less raise the quality, of escapes from poverty. This inattention has been costly in terms of longer-term impacts of national programmes. While they help make the conditions of poverty easier to deal with, they do not nurture people’s capacities to move out, and stay out, of poverty on a permanent basis.
Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House from the book The Broken Ladder, authored by Anirudh Krishna. We welcome your comments at [email protected].
india, policy, france, government, poverty
https://qz.com/india/1013004/
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