Painting On The Wall: Poverty Is Crime In India

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

In the absence of the wherewithal, a person either has to forego opportunities or make do with those on the lower side of the scale. Income is one of the three measures which measures the Human Development, but in the absence of money, the other two, health and knowledge as acquired in schools become difficult.

It could be suggested that poverty is thus a huge inconvenience but that is an understatement. It ceases to be merely that when government treats the poor as a mere statistic, thus eliminating the human element, and humiliates the poor by rubbing it in. Poor, it has to be understood, though it should have been patent, also have their self-respect.

Rajasthan has taken steps to humiliate the poor by having their home walls painted indicating their status including the PDS they are entitled to. This is sheer mindless finger-pointing, stripping away the poor of the last vestiges of their self-worth which could be measured in terms other than their incomes. Their usefulness to the society being one.

The entire village knows their income status and painting it on their walls is no way to keep records if records was the intent. Those who are entitled to get support like foodgrains via the public distribution system already have the ration cards and thus a place in the registers that clerks meticulously keep. Rajasthan has not yet managed to convincingly explain away this sheer administrative madness.

If the poor need to paint their walls to attract the attention of inspectors who have to come to survey them, then it speaks a lot about the honesty of the babudom at the cutting edge of delivery. And to expect the poor already deep in poverty to invest in painting their walls is another mindlessness. If the government was assisting with it, then a racket is on at some level for money could be made.

This across-the-state practice was preceded by patches of yellow being painted on such homes in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district, probably as a pilot, but even before that, an insensitiveness so common to authorities had surfaced in Madhya Pradesh too. It is as if being poor was a crime and they needed to be branded. The rationale for such stupidity is elusive.

If one were to ask a well-heeled person to make public his or her income tax returns, the immediate response is that it was an invasion of privacy. The Reserve Bank of India had told the Supreme Court that making public the data on those who owed huge sums to banks would distort the credit processes of the bank. It refused to name and shame the defaulting corporates.

Corporates are not humans with a soul but they seem to be sensitive to the public relations aspect of being identified as defaulters even before an apex court. But the poor in Rajasthan, as elsewhere, of course, have souls because they are human and this aspect has been ignored. As if, because they are poor, they could be trifled with in such a gross manner.

The poor should have ceased being poor long ago because every budget of the Centre and the states have not mere allocations for poverty alleviation but periodically newer schemes are launched. That they have not worked is the reason the poor remain poor, though statistically, a rupee earned more than the prescribed BPL income level is seen as being out of poverty, thus shrinking the size of the population of the poor.

Perhaps it is time to paint the homes of all involved in formulating poverty alleviation programmes and their implementation, from the Central ministers downward to the village head should have their homes painted bright orange for their failure? Not ensuring success of anti-poverty programme is as much of mocking as asking the poor to paint their status on their front walls.