Frontier India Current Affairs

Written on May 21, 2008 – 7:10 am | by FICA |

Even after 60 years of independence and democracy, India has over 250 million people living below the poverty line. This forces one to raise questions on the effectiveness of the reforms and development programs initiated by the government. Keeping this in mind, a Round Table Discussion on “Are We Fighting Poverty Effectively?” was organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Aspen Institute India in the New Delhi today. The seminar was addressed by renowned economist, Prof Abhijit V Banerjee, the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was attended by some of the best minds in the industry, the government, civil society, international agencies and media.

In his address, Prof Banerjee briefly highlighted some of the reform and development initiatives implemented by the government that have succeeded vis-a-vis areas that have not. Stating the nation’s democratic elections system, the public distribution system and the Prime Minister’s Gram Sadak Yojna as examples, Prof Banerjee mentioned that these were areas where the administration has tasted success and seen results. As against this, he highlighted the lack of adequate reforms in areas such as health, education and environment.

Drawing examples and statistics from research that he had conducted across various under-developed states and districts in India, Prof Banerjee amply highlighted the government’s failure in executing and successfully implementing health schemes and facilities for the poor. Some very disquieting numbers thrown up by the field researches indicated that the government clearly was focusing attention, energy and funds in wrong areas.

According to Prof Banerjee, full immunization rates are still less than 45% for the country as a whole. 48% of children under 5 are stunted while 24% are severely stunted due to lack of nutrition. 43% of children are underweight and 20% are wasted. This is more than twice the rate in Sub-Saharan Africa and worse than that in Pakistan.

Prof Banerjee candidly stated that the government’s decision to allocate 1% of the GDP towards National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) was an example of spending on systems that do not work. Prof. Banerjee also said that the rural poor are over burdened with just the stress of making ends meet day-to-day to be bothered about empowerment and self governance.

Privatization is a solution to the issue, says Prof Banerjee, but only if the government is equally involved and is constantly monitoring results. “The market cannot solve everything”, said Prof Banerjee and insisted that the government should closely look at regulating doctors and teachers in rural areas, bringing about a behavioral and pro-social change among the rural poor and redistributing to the ‘right’ people. He also made a few recommendations on improvement - giving money to poor people, use of technology, using universal schemes as against targeted ones and the need to experiment before going to scale.

During the discussion which followed, Prof Banerjee highlighted the streamline the various schemes that have been created to tackle poverty, rewarding pro-social behaviour by the poor among others.