Produced below is an excerpt from an essay titled “A Blueprint for Eradication of Poverty” by Dr B.P. Godrej, published by the Forum of Free Enterprise in December 1980. Through the essay, Dr Godrej critiques the public sector’s inefficiencies in addressing poverty and unemployment. He highlights the widespread malnutrition and lack of economic progress, advocating for systemic reforms to improve food security, productivity, and overall well-being. This piece remains relevant as it addresses the persistent issues of hunger, poverty, and economic mismanagement, challenges that India continues to face even today.
The biggest problems facing India today are poverty and unemployment. Eight months ago, a new government was formed in New Delhi. People’s hopes were aroused but for a short time only. Already, there is strong evidence of manifestations of frustration. As no other large country in the world faces the twin problems of poverty and unemployment of the magnitude as India, the new government’s responsibility is very grave. It would do well to bear in mind that ultimately economics rules politics. It is recognized in some quarters that even with half of India’s population, everything else remaining the same, the difficulties in transforming India into a welfare state are immense.
When India became free on the 15th of August 1947, a tremendous euphoria was generated. It was considered to be the dawn. But it is clear as daylight now that the economic dawn is nowhere in sight.
After the end of the Second World War, the common man’s lot, especially in Western Europe, improved vastly and rapidly. He was better fed, clothed, and housed than ever before. In developed countries, economic growth and social welfare proceeded side by side. This feature gained universal acceptance. The proportion of the national income spent by the state in democratic capitalist countries rose sharply, and thus gave rise to the concomitant growth of the public sector. Indian thinking was naturally influenced by this. In a number of capitalist countries, up to one-half of the national income was spent on the public sector.
The running of the public sector was something entirely new for Indians. Take, for example, the case of the railways. In 1947, India had one of the biggest networks, and several joint-stock companies were owned and run by Britishers. In the financial and engineering management, Indians had no part and no experience. Apart from that, the concept of the predominance of the public sector was adopted for ideological reasons without checking the likelihood of its success under the then prevailing Indian conditions. The question that naturally arises is whether Parliament was enamoured of this idea even before considering whether it was in a position to make a success of it. Whether the government sector of industry was conceived out of envy, as a prominent and responsible industrialist once said in a public lecture, is worth a doctoral dissertation on the part of an enthusiastic youngster. It is pertinent to quote Collins in this context: “When I was young I thought socialism was the mathematics of justice. Now I realize it is only the arithmetic of envy.”
Let us now review what characterises India today. More than three decades after Independence, half the people are below the poverty line. Most of the other half are also poor. And the poverty line is defined as the point below which a worker cannot afford to buy enough food for calories to enable him to perform a full day’s work. By this definition, India figured in 1968 that 38% of its people were below the poverty line. In 1978, according to official surveys, 50% of the population fell below this line. The following extract is from the MID-DAY of August 5, 1980:
356 million live below the poverty line
The Minister for Planning also tells us that:
“In India, an adult male doing heavy physical labour for more than 12 hours a day gets less than 2,000 calories from his food!”
Those who get less than 2,400 calories a day in rural areas or 2,100 calories a day in urban areas can be considered among that 356 million. What does less than 2,400 calories a day mean? A study done in Maharashtra some years ago shows that “less than 2,400” can be as little as 940 calories (and people have wondered how someone who consumed so little could be alive to answer the interviewer’s questions).
What happens when someone consumes calories below the minimum daily requirement? The Minister for Planning did not go into this question nor did members of the Rajya Sabha think of asking him this question. However, there is information from elsewhere about the effects of malnutrition. Someone found that among 500 middle-class children only one had an IQ below 80, but among 500 poor children who suffered serious protein-calorie malnutrition in their first months, some 62% had IQs below 80. There is another way of looking at calorie intake. A daily intake of some 2,250 calories is appropriate, according to dieticians, for an eight-year-old child in a Western country.
In India, an adult male doing heavy physical labour in the fields for more than 12 hours a day gets less than 2,000 calories from his food. The human effects of this have also been described: “Chronically hungry people are physically less developed and mentally less alert than people who eat enough.”
In this connection, we would be wise to heed Bernard Shaw’s warning: “Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all crimes.”
Read the complete text here.
