Economists have arrived at these estimates through various means, including projections of past data to private sources. One estimate is based on an entirely different threshold for poverty, while another uses unemployment data.

Officially, there has been no update to India’s poverty estimates since 2011, when there were about 269 million poor people in India (21.9% of the population), which was equivalent to 2.5 times the population of Bihar at that time. These estimates are based on data from the Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys, typically carried out every five years. But India is missing two rounds of data.

Poverty numbers are important for gauging the economic progress of a country, and the government also needs these numbers to estimate the number of beneficiaries of schemes, such as the Public Distribution System for food, meant for poverty alleviation.

The official poverty line

Officially, a person who lives on a monthly expenditure of Rs 1,000 or less in cities and Rs 816 or less in villages, at 2011-12 prices is poor, per the poverty line determined by an Expert Group (Tendulkar) in that year. This is the threshold used to determine poverty status in India. Those who live on or below the poverty line can avail of subsidised rations (up to 35 kg for the poorest households) under the National Food Security Act, subsidised loans for construction of housing under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Prime Minister’s housing scheme), Skill Training for Employment Promotion among Urban Poor (STEP-UP), etc.

Even people who live above the poverty line, especially those in urban areas, lack access to basic facilities.

Madhura Swaminathan, a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, had criticised the poverty threshold at that time, for using a lower consumption of calories than required for a healthy diet, and considering very little expenditure on health and education. Even people who live above the poverty line, especially those in urban areas, lack access to basic facilities like housing, health and education, as IndiaSpend reported in 2022.

The Rangarajan Committee, appointed by the United Progressive Alliance-II government, in 2014 suggested a different poverty threshold, using higher expenditures, and estimated the poor at slightly higher than the 2011 official estimate. But the findings of the committee were not accepted by the government, and the official poverty line continues to be based on the 2011 numbers.

The poverty lines set by both expert groups are based on the expenditure required to purchase a minimum standard of living and includes the expenditure on health, education and housing. The source of consumption data are consumption surveys by the National Statistical Organisation from 2011-12.

Other estimates of poverty in India

Given the lack of recent consumption surveys, poverty estimates have tried using different methodologies on either public or private data.

Estimates of the number of poor people after the 2014 Rangarajan report are based on adjustments to existing data to bring them on par with the NSO data.

Surjit Bhalla, executive director for India at the International Monetary Fund, along with economist Karan Bhasin and Arvind Virmani, a member of the NITI Aayog, used the World Bank’s poverty line of $3.2 as the threshold and growth in expenditure from the National Accounts Statistics to project consumption. They found that poverty had decreased considerably after 2014: Only 2.5% of the population were living on $1.9 a day, the threshold for “extreme poverty”. The authors however suggest that the poverty line be raised to $3.2 a day, and estimate that 26.5% of Indians live below this new poverty line.

As the authors note in the paper, this “is the first paper (at least known to us) to measure the direct explicit effect of in kind-transfers and subsidies on poverty in India”. When they consider the effects of subsidies and in-kind transfers, they estimate that only 0.9% of Indians were extremely poor (living on less than $1.9 per day) and 18.2% were poor (living on $3.2 per day) in 2020.

They estimate that only 2.5% of Indian people were poor (without the effects of food transfer), going by food expenditures recorded from over a week to a year. This is called the “recall period”.

A significant difference between the estimates put forth by the researchers is the use of different “recall periods” or the duration of time over which the survey respondents are asked to list their expenditures. The NSO switched to the mixed recall period or reference period from 1999-2000, meaning that expenses on high-frequency purchases like food are captured over a period of 30 days and those on durables like clothing are captured over the preceding year. On the other hand, the CPHS data are based on the uniform recall period under which all expenditures are recorded over a period of 30 days. A third method, used to estimate both the Rangarajan poverty line and that used by Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani, considers three different recall periods: a seven-day recall period for some food items, 30-day recall for some items such as rent and utilities, and 365-day recall for other items, such as clothing and shoes.

The methodology used to “forecast (or nowcast)” (sic) poverty, wrote Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani, is useful in the absence of high-frequency data. However, the absence of data cannot be overcome by just methodology, according to Amaresh Dubey, an economist and senior consultant at the independent economic policy research institute, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi. “In fact, we say that methodology is no substitute for the data.”

Researchers at OP Jindal and UNU-Wider university show that poverty rose during the pandemic.

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, which is an independent think-tank that gathers data related to the Indian economy, conducts its own consumption surveys called the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS). Some researchers have used this dataset to estimate poverty. But Jean Dreze and Anmol Somanchi have criticised these data for not being representative of poor households, and researchers have used different techniques to make these estimates more comparable to data from the NSO surveys. In response, Mahesh Vyas, the Managing Director and CEO of CMIE, wrote that the CPHS data have practical limitations but are not biased towards the rich.

For instance, World Bank economists Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide, adjust the CMIE consumption data to bring it closer to the NSO consumption data in their 2022 paper. They found that the number of people living below the World Bank poverty line fell in 2022, reducing to 145.71 million or 10.2% of the population.

Using the same private data source of CPHS, researchers at OP Jindal and UNU-Wider university show that poverty rose during the pandemic (because of the decline in income) and fell to 4.7% in rural areas and 0.45% in urban areas after the second wave. Their results also confirm that the number of poor people in India in 2022 is less than that in 2011. The difference between their results and those of the World Bank economists is because the latter used different weights for the consumption of poor households to make the results comparable with the traditional poverty estimates based on the NSO data.

The most recent exercise in poverty estimation was by Columbia University economist Arvind Panagariya and Vishal More, an economist and financial researcher with Intelink Advisors in New Delhi, using consumption data gathered as part of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). They found that the number of people below the Tendulkar poverty line fell in 2020-21 and was at 26.9%.

“PLFS data may not be appropriate for estimating poverty,” said P.C. Mohanan, former chief of the National Statistical Commission.

IndiaSpend reached out to the writers of all papers for their comments. This story will be updated when they respond.

Why do we need these data

The consumption expenditure survey for 2022-23 is complete but the results will be released along with the results of the 2023-24 round to make them more credible, according to Mohanan.

In December 2022, we had reported how India is missing key poverty and consumption estimates, and why these data are needed frequently and should be of good quality.

For instance, the data on poverty indicate how many people live above and below the poverty line. But this number changes as people can become richer and move above the poverty line or, become poorer and move below the poverty line.

“Success of poverty eradication initiatives depend on equitable distribution of economic growth, as 87% of poverty reduction has been due to growth. However, those who do not participate in the growth process directly, need to be helped through poverty alleviation programmes,” said Dubey.

Without these data, the respective ministries cannot update the list of beneficiaries for poverty alleviation schemes.

Based on new poverty estimates, India needs to update the list of beneficiaries eligible for food subsidies; using old data could be missing nearly 100 million who need food rations, as we reported in April 2020. Similarly, outdated data from the 2011 census are being used to target beneficiaries for welfare schemes meant for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, etc., we reported in June 2022.

IndiaSpend wrote to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation for their comment on the release of the consumption expenditure survey. This story will be updated when they respond.

This article was originally published on IndiaSpend.

Despite this push towards adoption of technology, lack of access to hardware and lack of know-how is causing the exclusion of many. To put this in perspective, according to the India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide by Oxfam, approximately 70 percent of the population has poor or no connectivity to digital technologies while more than 60 percent of Indian households remains digitally illiterate.

On our podcast ‘On the Contrary by IDR’, host Arun Maira spoke with Kiran Karnik and Osama Manzar on how access to and knowledge of technology is a factor of existing inequalities, and what the government can do to bridge the gap. Kiran Karnik is the former president of NASSCOM and has also worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Osama Manzar is the founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation, a nonprofit that works on increasing digital literacy in India.

Below is an edited transcript that provides an overview of the guests’ perspectives on the show.     

Digital technologies aren’t accessible to all

Osama: The power of real technology is not in inclusion, but in the exclusion that it causes. And this is systemic. I would like to explain this with an anecdote. When I was visiting a digital centre in Chirala, Andhra Pradesh, I saw that there was a long queue of people [with] INR 50, an Aadhaar card, and a phone in their hand. On enquiring further, they told me they were going to give this INR 50 to the service centre [to] update their Aadhaar card. [This is] the role technology plays in inclusion [but also in exclusion]. [People] are excluded if the Aadhaar does not match; they are excluded if [their] data is not updated; they are excluded from food, ration, pension, banking, and so on if by any chance this connectivity doesn’t work. And they’re paying for any discrepancy in [the system].

During COVID-19, the learning of more than 280 million children got affected due to the closure of schools.

So are we thinking of the exclusion that is taking place? Or are we [just] thinking [about] the government that has created a chance to serve so many people with the click of a button? But that click of a button is also excluding millions of people. During [the second wave of] COVID-19 [in India], for instance, the learning of more than 280 million children got affected due to the closure of schools. But did we have 280 million devices in the hands of those children for them to access online education? According to the data, 30 percent of the schools were supposed to have computers, but [these computers] weren’t functional.

When we create a digital system to increase efficiency, we design it [thinking about how many more] people will get additionally connected. But we don’t think [about] how many people are suffering because of being disconnected.

Kiran: Inequities are created through access, affordability, availability, ability to use it [technology]… The problem arises when we think of technology [as a] magic wand that [can] solve all our problems. And the difficulty is that our institutions and social systems are not looking at exclusion in the excitement of technology and what it does. You mentioned 280 million schoolchildren, but it’s not just [about the] big numbers. A society that cares for small numbers, a minority of any kind, is a society that truly cares. It doesn’t matter how small the number is, we should worry about who is excluded. But in our excitement about new technologies, we seem to have forgotten about this crucial aspect.

For example, [if there is] an old woman whose fingerprints are not discernible because they have worn off completely, you can’t exclude such a person. [Even if this constitutes] a small percentage of our population, you have to worry about them and your systems must take care of them. 

Digital inequalities are exacerbated by system-level flaws

Kiran: I was one of those enthusiasts who thought that technology and the internet will make access to information more democratic. That it will help create a system where everybody can access everything, and enable horizontal, two-way communication among people…[but] that hasn’t quite happened. We’ve divided ourselves into echo chambers…and I think these concerns about where inequity is being created and divisions are being created are very serious concerns… [And] there are many problems that we need to worry about and take care of. [But] not all of this [can be] taken care of by technology; this requires a rejigging of the structures, the systems, the institutions. You might say we need to [fix the] sociology of what we do, not the technology of what we do.

Osama: It is not technology that makes you suffer, it is the unintentional flaw in the system that makes you suffer… The internet is very feminine. It is very inclusive and terribly democratic. But it is run by the male. That is the reason for its patriarchal design. And to make the internet smooth, inclusive, and democratic, it is important that its utilisation and governance rest in the hands of women.

Despite this, local communities are adapting

Osama: When we talk about how local communities use technology for their benefit, [it has] more to do with approach and contextualisation. We have [approximately] 50,000 villages that [have] no connectivity. They are in the dark zone. And yet, we know that in the last 10 years, access and connectivity have increased. We know that managing Wi-Fi connectivity and access doesn’t require [a] BTech, an MTech, or an MCA. There are barefoot wireless engineers who are managing technology [in villages], climbing towers and connecting Wi-Fi from one location to the other. The tower can be [made out] of bamboo; a small, salvaged metal pipe can become your tower on the top of your building and that can connect to somebody 10 kilometres away. We also have an unlicensed spectrum in the country [that] we can use for wireless connectivity. People are using Bluetooth to connect with each other, talk to each other, and create local networks. So these are the possibilities.

But we need stronger policies to ensure equitable access to technology

Osama: The government has created online systems [like] Aadhaar for efficiency. [However], people are [still being excluded and] not getting access to food, pensions, or their daily needs.

Both the government and corporates [have] stopped thinking [of] people as people. They think of people as consumers, as voters… A normal human being is being treated like a bot and is being targeted to spread information or misinformation.

Technology is as good as how you use it. Technology is as good as your policy.

There is not a single bad example of technological impact [on] the people [using it]. The negative example [comes from] how big systems are using technology. Whether it’s about tracking elections, [spreading] misinformation, or creating rumours using communication technology—you will see that all of them are top-down, not bottom-up. It is not the people who are misusing technology; it is the system that is underutilising technology by intention. And this is the reason that technology is as good as how you use it. Technology is as good as [your] policy. Technology is as good as [your dedication] to serve your community or citizens.

Why were 280 million children suddenly disconnected from the school and education system [during the pandemic]? [Despite the fact] that we have the technology [such as mobile phones] available in our hands to connect people, why did we not use it? [We need to] minimise the cost of hardware [and] minimise the cost of connectivity. [We need to] have [a] human rights approach to connectivity [and consider it] as basic infrastructure [for] our students.

Kiran: There are three or four specific things which I would like to touch upon as suggestions for the future. One is technology policy which must lay the framework for what we do with technology, how we use it, [for] what purpose, in what ways, and most importantly, how we use it to empower people. The second must be to create public platforms which are accessible to everybody and which can facilitate things such as easy payments, even easy credit for those who want it. And [if] there is data there, it can be analysed and shared to serve the needs of the people better.

[Third,] you can write volumes in terms of policy that takes care of market failures [when it comes to tech implementation in the country]. There’s a market failure of not serving the poor. There’s a market failure of devices which are unaffordable for children. And the last is the lack of competitiveness here. [So there is a need to] ensure competitiveness and competition, both. One is competitiveness in terms of price and delivery and reaching out to everybody—that’s part of competitiveness. Second is competition, not just for better service, but also competition on who can reach the last person.

You can listen to the full episode here.

—

Know more

• Read this article to learn more about India’s digital divide.
• Read this report to learn more about AI systems as digital public goods.
• Read this article to learn how the digital revolution is leaving women behind.

The small rice and vegetable field behind her home that supplies much of her family’s food yielded only 40% of its normal half-ton harvest after unusually heavy rains last November, well after the monsoon ended in September. The result is that the 52-year-old’s budget for groceries is suffocatingly tight, and her pantry is bare: no onions, potatoes, or any of the other staples found in most Indian kitchens. 

On days when there isn’t enough food for her household of three, Mahato will make do with what’s left after her husband and youngest daughter finish eating—a handful of rice and some water. Sometimes she asks her adult daughter, who lives in a separate household, for financial help, though this creates conflict at home.

“My husband says we will not take money from our daughter. But then we will have to die,” Mahato says.

The hunger gap between the genders had been shrinking in recent decades, but it rose dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the world, women eat less than men under tough conditions such as conflict, famine, or disasters. The World Food Programme predicts that climate change will produce economic and environmental shocks that will exacerbate this inequality, and it says this impact can already be seen in places like Mahato’s hometown. Jhargram, a district not far from the Bay of Bengal and the Sundarbans rainforest, is one of West Bengal’s many climate hot spots—areas that are especially affected by global warming. Over the past decade, agriculture here has been disrupted by intense flooding, cyclones, and sea level rise.

The hunger gap between the genders had been shrinking in recent decades, but it rose dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. CARE International, a global humanitarian organization, estimates that 150 million more women than men went hungry in 2021, compared with a difference of just 17.9 million in 2018.

Its analysis drew from several global data sets, including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s latest report on the state of food security, which found that the hunger gap grew in 2020 and 2021, fueled by widening disparities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. The U.N. attributed this to the disproportionate impact that the pandemic-triggered economic crisis has had on women, saying they were more affected by job and income losses and bore a larger caregiving burden, looking after sick family members and children out of school. 

Researchers at CARE say this should serve as a warning about the likely impacts of climate shocks on hunger levels among men and women. One shortcoming is that sex-disaggregated food indicators in major global data sets focus mainly on women’s reproductive role, such as statistics about anemia among women of childbearing age. This means policymakers can fail to detect a nutritional crisis in which men are relatively well-fed compared with women, unless it shows up in anemia statistics. It also means food crises disproportionately affecting elderly women don’t register at all.

“Yes, it’s true that women eat last and least, but what we’re trying to unpack is the root cause,” says Gregory Spira, the head of the gender, food, and climate justice programs at CARE. Not only do patriarchal norms in many vulnerable countries result in policy responses designed primarily with men’s needs in mind, he says, but they also create social pressure on women to put men’s needs ahead of their own.

“When there’s a shock or misallocation of resources, we really see women not having the power to take action. Women don’t have the power to make decisions about what they eat, when they eat. Without that decision-making power, women cannot control basic questions. As climate change advances, there is increased competition when it comes to food and everything else, and women lose out because they’re disadvantaged compared to men.”

The CARE report highlighted the problem in India, where many women and girls suffer from hunger in spite of strong economic growth that has led the International Monetary Fund to project the country will become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.

India slipped from 94th place in 2020 to 107th out of 121 countries in this year’s Global Hunger Index, a report compiled by Irish and German aid agencies. The country is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished people, according to the World Food Programme. 

Under strain from the impacts of climate change and the pandemic, the system is falling short.

The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy interviewed several women in Jhargram, including Mahato, who said they regularly eat less than their husbands and children. The impact can be glimpsed in the prevalence of anemia cases in West Bengal among females ages 15 to 49, which rose from 62.5% in 2015-2016 to 71.4% in 2019-2020, according to the latest available data from the Indian government’s National Family Health Survey. Officials in the region point to climate change as the primary factor behind the increase, with the data covering a period before the pandemic had a significant impact in India. 

The late rains last year came after Jhargram, like much of the southern part of the state of West Bengal, had already been hit by several cyclones and floods in recent years. The region is home to over 30 million people. 

“If there is drought, there is extreme drought. When there is rainfall, there is extreme rainfall,” says Joy Chakraborty, an assistant director with the local government’s department of agriculture in Jhargram. “The maximum temperatures are shooting up, and the soil is so hot that you will find it difficult to breathe.”

Most of the population here belongs to groups officially designated as marginalized tribes or castes, a population the World Food Programme says will “face the brunt” of a climate-driven rise in hunger. Chakraborty says almost everyone here relies on a system of government rations—food supplied by the government to those who live below the poverty line. 

Under strain from the impacts of climate change and the pandemic, the system is falling short. Indigenous women have staged protests over claims that they haven’t been paid for work they’ve performed under West Bengal’s guaranteed rural employment scheme, as the state budget struggles to cope with the demands placed on it. The Right to Food & Work Campaign, a network of advocacy organizations in the state, said at a news conference that the nonpayment of wages significantly affected hunger among single women and widows.

Women are increasingly becoming primary breadwinners for their homes as climate change pushes men to migrate away to find work outside their towns and villages. As agricultural production in the area suffers due to climate change, males are prioritized in terms of getting fed, leaving women and their girls so hungry they say they struggle to function and focus at work and school. Predatory behavior has also increased as local economies collapse and people become more desperate. Over the past decade, there has been a steady rise in trafficking in the Sundarbans, with young girls getting kidnapped by neighbors or sold by family members to traffickers or into early marriage.

Three out of five pregnant women in West Bengal are anemic, and their protein-poor diet will have generational impacts.

Bedani Shabar, a woman belonging to an Indigenous group who also frequently eats less than the rest of her family, says the food distribution system broke down during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. “There was a lot of distress then,” she recalls. “It was a situation where there was no food. And there were no rations. We had to survive on rice with salt.”

Then there’s the lack of protein. Families receive only rice, wheat, and whole-wheat flour from the government.

“No eggs, no milk, no lentils,” says Shabar’s 10-year-old daughter, Padmarani, when talking about her diet. Mahato’s 14-year-old daughter, Urmila, says she can’t focus at school and gets frequent headaches. She says her periods are irregular, missing one every other month—a common problem for girls who lack adequate nutrition.

Three out of five pregnant women in West Bengal are anemic, and their protein-poor diet will have generational impacts, warns Abhay Bang, a doctor and community health researcher, adding that the effect will be particularly pronounced in the area’s Indigenous communities.

“When an Indigenous girl transitions into adulthood, she has smaller body size, less height, and low weight—when she gives birth, the baby born to her will also be small in size,” he says. “The next generation will be affected, and this cycle will continue.”

Maher Sattar in New York contributed to this article.

This article was originally published by The Fuller Project and co-published with Foreign Policy.

The Oxfam report identifies education, healthcare, and finance as sectors that underwent rapid digitisation during the pandemic. Here’s a look at some of the findings from the report that bring to light how the digital divide impacted socio-economic inequalities during COVID-19 with respect to these three sectors:

1. Online education remained a challenge for many

Access to the internet through any kind of device was found to be far better in urban India at 44 percent than in rural areas at 17 percent. Across different caste groups as well, only 4 percent of students from SC and ST communities had access to a computer and the internet.  

It is important to note that the digitisation of education yielded great results for start-ups such as Byju’s, which was valued at USD 10.8 billion during the pandemic, an amount equivalent to the combined annual income of 25 million Indians at the time. In addition to this, EdTech products (instruction aids in classrooms for teachers or at home for students ) continue to remain inaccessible for many due to their high costs. The average cost of these products is estimated to be INR 20,000, while the average income of the poorest 20 percent households is INR 25,825.

2. Teachers struggled to deliver education digitally

More than 80 percent of teachers reported facing challenges in teaching online. Many of them also had issues related to data expenses and connectivity. Furthermore, 20 percent teachers reported that adequate training on delivering education digitally was not provided to them. Two out of every five teachers also claimed not to have access to the devices they needed to teach digitally.

3. Online learning came at the cost of mid-day meals

Unavailability of mid-day meals, that would be typically provided in-schools, was also a cause of concern for parents when schools shut down during COVID-19. Even though the central government in March 2020 advised all states to continue providing eligible children with meals, the delivery on-ground was lax. More than 35 percent parents reported that their children did not get mid-day meals during the pandemic.

4. Digitisation of healthcare did not improve access to it

The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), also known as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, was launched during the pandemic with the aim of building a digital health ecosystem in India. However, inadequate digital infrastructure and literacy, for both the receivers as well as the health service providers, remained a challenge for its implementation. Tools such as e-Sanjeevani—a telemedicine platform that connects rural areas with quality healthcare providers—and the maintenance of electronic health records of patients, for instance, require access to a smartphone or a computer and the internet. With over 70 percent of the population in India having poor or no connectivity to digital services, the digitisation of healthcare didn’t necessarily improve access to public health services the way it was intended to.

5. In fact, this digitisation made it harder for many

Take the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines through the CoWIN app as an example. The need to book slots online presumed literacy as well as digital literacy. Many either did not have the resources (internet, smartphone, computer) or the digital know-how to book a vaccine slot online. Neither could they download their vaccination certificates easily from the app. This caused further delays in them receiving the vaccines. According to Oxfam’s 2021 health inequality report, as of May 2021, while 30 doses were administered per 100 persons in urban India, only 12.7 were administered in rural India. CoWIN thus inadvertently created a hierarchy in vaccine accessibility and excluded the digitally disconnected.

Health experts have gone as far as to say that not having access to broadband internet will now be an additional barrier to healthcare delivery. India’s medical apps market, for instance, is estimated to reach INR 337.89 billion in the next three years. Since the pandemic, the use of healthcare apps such as 1mg and Practo and wearable devices such as blood pressure monitors and fitness bands have seen a drastic rise. However, these services only cater to the English-speaking, digitally literate class.

6. The growth of digital financial services did not guarantee financial inclusion

The Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and cashless/electronic transactions saw rapid growth during the pandemic. However, it is important to note that this growth wasn’t uniform. The richest 60 percent, for instance, are four times more likely to do a digital payment than the poorest 40 percent in India. This can be attributed to the fact that the tendency to use formal financial services, such as private or commercial banks, is low among marginalised communities such as women, youth, people living in remote rural areas, and ethnic minorities. It is lowest for ST households in rural India. Additionally, only 41 percent of small and marginal farmers use public and private sector banks. This is because most of them don’t have legal documents such as Aadhar, PAN, ration card, or voter ID, making it hard for them to access bank accounts and other financial systems.

It is evident from the findings of the report that the process of digitisation alone cannot be considered the ultimate solution for all our challenges. Without addressing the socio-economic context of the digital divide, especially in India, the ongoing digital revolution across healthcare, education, and finance, if left unchecked, will not only continue to foster inequalities, but may also worsen them.

—

Know more

• Read the complete Oxfam India Inequality Report 2022.
• Learn why EdTech in India requires stronger regulation.
• Learn how the digital divide is holding back women in India.

But when we talk about better infrastructure and better facilities, what do we mean? Who takes the decisions about what infrastructure gets prioritised, and how are these decisions taken? And, finally, what sort of infrastructure do India’s cities really need?

On our podcast On the Contrary by IDR, host Arun Maira spoke with Sheela Patel and Ireena Vittal on what it takes to plan and run a well-functioning city, where Indian cities stand, and what they need. Sheela is the director of SPARC, an Indian nonprofit that works with the urban poor so they can get access to housing and other amenities. Sheela has experience both at the grassroots level as well as at the level of national and global policy. Ireena is one of India’s most respected independent consultants and advisers on emerging markets, agriculture, and urban development.

Below is an edited transcript that provides an overview of the guests’ perspectives on the show.

What makes a city liveable?

Ireena: I think I would put the following six [factors]. The first is jobs. A city is investment meeting talent to create economic and social outcomes. So, jobs, [that is,] number of jobs, quality of jobs [is an important indicator]. [The] second is inclusion. [For instance], a city [should] have place for both sides of Gurgaon divided by the highway, for Dharavi and South Bombay. And we need inclusion not as a cool thing to talk about in nonprofit conferences, but as a recognition that the most valuable contribution to society comes from some of our most ill-paid people, whether they are sweepers, or cleaners, or biomedical waste collectors, or peons, or delivery boys.

[The] third is safety and amity. If you’re a person in India—woman or man—you value safety. Amity [is important] because, unfortunately, the whole world seems to be going through some kind of a manthan (agitation). The fourth one would be provision of basic services, whether it’s water, schools, ICU rooms, maybe now even oxygen, sanitation.

I would add two more. One of them is resilience and green…You see what’s happening even in Bombay—the number of days Bombay comes to a stop now every year because of climate change is astonishing. So we need resilience and green. And finally, culture. [It is good] if we are able to feed our stomachs, but there’s something beyond that. And culture is not Bolshoi Ballet; culture is street plays and music and Ganesh Chaturthi. And if a city doesn’t have culture, it doesn’t have soul. So, to me, these would be the six metrics that I would put for liveability in the Indian context.

Sheela: For me, the real transformation in cities that we are looking for is that, while it is a utopia to think everybody will be equal all the time everywhere, increasingly, human rights, social justice [activists are] saying that at least there should be a minimum safety net for all. And the COVID-19 crisis has shown [that this] does not exist at all, both locally [and] globally, urban and rural. But in urban areas, it is very visible. If cities are safe for women and children, if cities serve the health, education, safety, and potential nurturance for young people, then it’s a good city.

What does it take to plan and run a liveable city?

Ireena: I think the process of making a city happen starts with two or three fundamental constructs. One is that citizens don’t know what they want. I spent a day once with the original city planner of Singapore, and he was talking about the early days of how they reimagined Singapore, and he has such a fascinating story. When they were building their public housing, they had a very interesting set of planners. They [involved] urban planners, engineers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, religious people, so they represented all facets of your life and my life. But they had two choices in the way they were designing those big homes that you see in Singapore. You could [either] have all the doors opening onto the corridor or you could have them step up and step down, so it created a sense of privacy. And one of the things that they did was they would test everything…and you know how Singapore tests—it puts it out in retail spaces, and citizens come and then literally write their comments. And he said [that] every time they tested design choices or any infrastructure prioritisation choices, [they] would get 50–50, because people don’t know. So a voice is different from a vote. It’s about aligning people; it’s not necessarily about outsourcing the decision to somebody.

The second piece, in the process of running a city, is to prioritise. And I think at the heart of prioritisation is two things: the economic plan for the city (what kind of talent, jobs [exist]? What kind of quality of life do you want to deliver?) versus the spatial plan for the city (is this a series of cities where nobody will travel more than 10 minutes from home to work? Or is it a longitudinal city? Or is it a vertical city?). Those are very, very different choices.

And then the last piece is resourcing—resourcing in terms of funds, but also in terms of capacity, both to build [and] to deliver.

Indian cities: What’s missing, and what we can do better

1. Looking at the well-being of all citizens

Sheela: The urban geography is now the dominant geography, and investments that we make in cities have to anticipate not only past deficits but also future challenges. Just take the instance of infrastructure…if you know what poor people need…they need security for the place they live in. They need water sanitation, electricity, [and] transport. And they need good-quality food, and good-quality health systems, they’re all connected. Now you have cities, not only in India, but globally, [that] are not able to make the kind of investments that they need…The economic order of our global economy has pushed more and more people into cities to earn cash incomes, [and] we don’t feel responsible to ensure that they have a minimum wage…And if you look at what happened during the COVID-19 crisis, everybody realised how many migrants there are in our country when [they] saw the images of all those people who were walking back because they had lost their incomes—they didn’t even have money to recharge their phones to tell their family. They couldn’t live in the informal settlements where they rented a bed, which is all they could afford…And we are [still] not acknowledging how much the poor are contributing to [everyone’s] survival.

I believe that the proper benchmarking of what is missing, creating clarity of what communities, whether elite or poor, need to do themselves; what the city needs to do; and what the educational system needs to do today, in colleges of engineering and architecture, and planning…But minimum safety nets [for all] is critical.

Ireena: We were doing some work as part of a nonprofit in Bangalore once, at ward-level budget planning…The interesting part of the story was that we were meeting in Jayanagar once, which is a tony neighbourhood of Bangalore. Somebody decided that it had to be a representative bunch of citizens, and so we invited people [from] all sections of society into somebody’s home. What was astonishing was to see how people behaved and, more importantly, what was on top of their mind. The people who came from the slums, or who were from a lower class, sat on the ground, and the person who was leading the effort and came from a different class sat on top of the sofa. While the people sitting on the sofa, and I’m using it, not in a pejorative way, talked about green, cycling paths and better roads, the people sitting on the ground talked about electricity. They talked about safety in the night, they talked about drainage. And so, to me, what you see depends on where you stand. And I think one piece that’s missing in our whole discourse is understanding multiple constructs that live simultaneously and adjacent to each other. If you want to be successful, I think we just need to bring that mindset that we need to serve many Indians, and they all are legitimate. One is not better than the others.

2. Focusing on the execution and delivery, in addition to the planning

Ireena: I think the other point is, think of the construct of a city…You have to think through what a city needs from a long-term point of view and prioritise—should I build a road, an airport, or a power plant—because you have only this much money. You have to then design [and] resource it. Because none of our cities, maybe with the exception of Bombay, are self-sufficient. Even Bombay is not, given the amount of investment… and resourcing means property tax, collecting for water, collecting for power, raising debt, getting a rating, maintaining books of accounts, which most of our cities don’t know how to do. You’ve got to resource it, you’ve got to build it, you have to deliver it. And then you have to manage it—the politics of it, and the society of it…prioritising, designing, resourcing, building, delivering, aligning, and managing politics and social equity. [And] a lot of our conversations are about what needs to happen. We don’t have enough conversations on who will do it, and how [they] will get it done. And that is the piece, the invisible but critical infrastructure that I think our cities need.

3. Ensuring continuous dialogue between different stakeholders

Sheela: There is a need for a huge transformation in all our collective thinking. And for all of us, whether you’re in finance, you’re in business, or we, as activists, we need to reconcile to the reality that we are sharing space in the city, in this planet; we have to start talking to each other. [For instance,] I have learned to talk to business and to municipalities, not because I think that is so smart and strategic. I was forced by [the] community, by the women who are facing evictions…[They told me], ‘If they demolish our homes, you go and talk to the municipality, you go and talk to whoever it is…to the collector, to the government…and find and negotiate for an alternative where we can coexist.’ So there’s a lot of appetite for negotiations [and] dialogue. [What] we need [is] leadership, to have the guts and the courage, both in private [and] public life to listen to what others are saying…You don’t have to do magical things, you just have to make sure that those dialogues happen long before the destruction happens.

4. Enabling citizens to be actively involved in the planning and operation

Sheela: People also have to change. You can’t change other people and not change yourself. The collective nature by which we deal with crisis came up very strongly during COVID-19, in terms of support, in terms of assistance, but it’s always only in that emergency…If communities are able to identify what they need, and they make that representation, together go to the municipality, and the municipality [then] empowers its local ward officials to take this forward, the local machinery begins to work. When the local machinery begins to work, it allows those who are above that to look at the next level. Can you imagine the crisis of a commissioner who gets a phone call saying ‘my drain is clogged’ or ‘I can’t get vaccination’? If he or she looks at that, then when are they going to look at the city-level problems. So we’ve got to create a hierarchy of problems that have to be solved at each level, and they have to be monitored. What we are doing is we’re not only identifying issues, but [the] community [also] monitors them with the local officials and elected representatives, so you have a hierarchy of decision-making.

Cities have skill sets, capacities, systems—we just need to empower them to start with, then the more detailed challenges will come up.

[However], while the local is very critical, there are also things of scientific disruptions and breakthroughs that are necessary at different levels. So I don’t want to reduce their importance and value. The important thing is that it becomes a circle, that with those breakthroughs, for instance, with solar [energy] you can leapfrog the whole energy shortage. When I went to Berlin, and I heard that there were electricity and solar transfers in every household, I thought, ‘When will it come to India?’ But it’s come to India, and we could easily have it cover all the informal settlements, and that would make 30 percent of Mumbai’s energy coming from alternatives. [However, this] decision communities can’t take; [it] has to be taken at the national and at the state level.

You can listen to the full episode here.

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Know more

• Learn more about the major issues plaguing Indian cities and how urban planning can be reformed.
• Read this report to learn more about the concept of liveability and how it can be introduced to Indian policy frameworks.
• Read this report on the constraints to raising private financing for urban infrastructure in India.

“Saving lives would have been easier than fudging data,” Wilson tweeted. But fudging data on caste is hardly necessary since information on caste-based inequities barely exists.

Why does the practice of manual scavenging continue in India? Why can’t the government mechanise sewer cleaning and stop this inhuman practice, as it has indicated it aims to do? The answer lies in entrenched inequalities that are reflected in both development discourse and in data. 

Caste reproduces poverty and exclusion in ways that often cut across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, while evidence of caste discrimination is unequivocal, there is very little data to monitor progress in addressing caste-based disparities in the context of development targets. India gained independence over seven decades ago, but caste-based exclusion and inequality, both formal and informal, have continued to defy development efforts. On both international and national levels, data on caste is largely lacking.

This lack of data has real-life impacts, as we see in the example above. In an unequal world, uncounted people are not just data that is missing. A democracy failing to enumerate the vulnerable disenfranchises those who need its support the most. 

Ignoring caste impacts hundreds of millions of people

How serious is the problem? Millions of people around the world are born into pre-ordained and deeply inequitable social class or caste systems. These systems determine what opportunities they will face throughout their lifetimes. 

If they were one country, Dalits globally would be the seventh largest country in the world (or fourth if we include those who converted to Buddhism or Islam but continue to be treated as Dalits). Dalits face descent-based discrimination, including untouchability and stigmatisation from caste or caste-like systems. Similarly, denotified tribes (a term that dates back to the Criminal Tribes Act of 1971) account for around 150 million people who are primarily nomadic and largely excluded from India’s official data. 

Official data in India categorises people as either part of Scheduled Castes (lower-ranking groups including Dalits) or non-Scheduled Class (higher-ranking groups, including high-caste Hindus and Other Backward Classes). These categories gloss over considerable heterogeneity. People within “Other Backward Classes” make up over half of India’s population, and many face living conditions that are similar to Scheduled Caste members. 

A more holistic picture of poverty and inequality in India emerges through surveys conducted by private research agencies. Consumption data at the household level, which is a more robust measure of well-being than income, is obtained through the India Human Development Survey by the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, a non-profit think tank. While their data richly paint a picture of poverty and inequality, the government doesn’t accept this data for advocacy or policy change.

The impact of failing to account for caste

The lack of data on class reflects and reinforces existing inequalities. Take the example of land, a historical source of economic and social power. We do not know how caste intersects with rates of land ownership. Who acquired more lands? Who became landless in the last seven decades of Independence? 

The validity of gender as a social category is widely accepted while caste continues to be an anathema for both development practitioners and duty-bearers.

We do not know how many people within each caste have access to government welfare benefits and social security. We cannot track progress across caste stratum toward the SDGs. The limited data we do have tells us the picture is worse for people from historically marginalised classes. For example, on average, women from Scheduled Castes have life spans that are 14.6 years shorter than the national average, but we do not know whether this is worse among thousands of diverse communities grouped as Scheduled and Other Backward castes. How many child labourers come from which castes? How many homeless belong to Dalits or Scheduled Castes and denotified tribes? How do infant mortality rates pan out across caste lines? We cannot answer these questions or develop policies to address disparities without collecting more and better data. 

Denying development by ignoring caste

It’s no coincidence that the Indian government resists collecting or publishing data enumerating individual castes. What we choose to count reflects our values. The lack of a caste-informed development framework is—qualitatively and politically—different from frameworks that ignore other identity factors, like gender, for example. The validity of gender as a social category is widely accepted while caste continues to be an anathema for both development practitioners and duty-bearers.

For example, The Indian Model of SDG Localisation, prepared by the Niti Aayog (India’s policy and planning authority) and the United Nations in India, largely ignores realities of caste. In doing so, it seeks to achieve the impossible, i.e. localising development goals while ignoring caste realities. Similarly, a recent report from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights aims to raise awareness about the millions of socially vulnerable people who do not or cannot access social protection. But it fails because it ignores an intersectional lens, attempting to describe individuals who are cut off from social benefits bereft of their social locations of caste, race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. 

Globally, the lack of development has been the predominant framework to design, plan, execute and assess social development interventions. The assumption has been that development will eventually reach the people who are most marginalised—however gradually. The evidence, however, has been quite contrary. Despite the leave no one behind agenda, we have not been able to distribute development equitably. 

Systemic denial in generating granular data relevant to the majority of its people who fall into historically marginalised castes is not going to take India anywhere close to achieving the SDGs. Whether and to what extent data exists to measure caste depends on our frameworks and priorities. Often, we stumble upon data of peoples and communities who continue to be left behind systemically. To rectify, I submit we develop and use a denial of development framework. In the Indian case, it would help us foreground caste as a persistent structural reason for inequality and deprivation and drive better data design and collection on caste.

This article was originally published on The Data Values Digest.

While that article detailed the extent of discrimination faced by Muslims, Women and members of the SC/ST community under ‘normal’ circumstances, this part focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the extent of discrimination these communities face.

When the coronavirus pandemic touched down in India in March 2020, the subsequent nationwide lockdown had a devastating impact on employment. The unemployment rate in the country went from 6.8% in Jan-March, 2020 (henceforth referred to as the pre-pandemic quarter; PPQ) to 12.1% in April-June (first pandemic quarter; FPQ).

The impact was more severe in urban areas than in rural ones since lockdown measures hit urban businesses more severely. Unemployment in urban areas rose from 9% in the PPQ to 20.8% in the FPQ. However, urban areas saw a more-or-less consistent increase in unemployment across social groups; in rural areas, marginalised groups bore the brunt of the unemployment.

It should be noted that the figures mentioned above refer to employment as defined in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS); as those seeking and available for work. This definition may not paint the most accurate picture since there were some individuals in regular and self-employment who were not included under this definition, despite reporting no work or income. 

When the definition of employment is expanded to include those who reported no work during the reference week of the study, there is an alarming increase in the unemployment rate—rural unemployment under the broader definition went from 10.5% pre-pandemic to 22.2% in the FPQ and urban went from 15% to 50.3%.

Overall impact greater in urban areas; social discrimination greater in rural

Taking the broader definition of unemployment, one notices that the sharpest rise in the percentage of unemployed was for Muslims in rural areas (from 14% to 31%), whereas it rose from 11% to 22% for SC/STs in rural areas, and from 10% to 20% in the case of the general category.

The Report explains this as owing to the increased importance caste and religious identities assume in rural areas, particularly in times of crisis. People tend to function more and more within their own social groups. 

Since both SC/STs and Muslims are socio-economically vulnerable, it stands to reason that the protection they can give and seek would be poorer and thus, they would feel the effects of discrimination more severely in rural areas.

Therefore, as mentioned above, while the overall impact of the pandemic in terms of unemployment was worse in urban areas, social discrimination was less because professional identities seem to supercede social ones there.

When categories of employment are considered, casual employment suffered the most, particularly in urban areas, because of the closure of non-agricultural activities. There was also a corresponding increase in self-employment, suggesting that it was taken up by casual workers as a means of survival. The largest number of workers that went from casual work to being self-employed was from the SC/ST community and according to the report, were largely employed selling essential goods during the lockdown.

Interestingly, only a small number of Muslims switched from casual work to self-employment with the onset of the pandemic, perhaps because Muslims are less likely to be socially accepted to deal with individuals in a household scenario. Muslims, instead, moved from casual work to unpaid family labour or unemployment.

In fact, the share of Muslims, as well as SC/ST workers employed in regular/salaried work, went up in both rural and urban areas, which likely has a statistical explanation—their total share in the workforce went down.

Employment among regular/salaried workers remained more or less the same or registered a marginal decrease, perhaps because the regularity of contracts meant there was no fall in the salaried workforce, or perhaps because the total workforce shrunk. 

As suggested earlier, the highest ‘hidden unemployment’ was seen for the self-employed category since many casual workers were absorbed into it without having enough opportunities to work. 

While 4.3% of self-employed people in rural areas reported not working in the PPQ, this number went up to 11.3% in the reference week of the FPQ. In urban areas, the share went from 7.5% to 39.8%.

Mixed findings on gender discrimination but women still worse off

As observed earlier, inequalities among groups vis-a-vis employment were relatively small in urban areas and this is the case for inequalities between genders too. The impact of the pandemic on unemployment figures were similar for men and women in urban areas, by both the PLFS and the expanded definitions of unemployment.

Women in urban areas, however, saw no increase in self-employment with the fall in the share of casual employment from PPQ to FPQ. While this was observed to a small extent in rural areas, even here, this trend was greater in men.

In rural areas, women recorded a lower drop in employment in the FPQ. This is likely because a large share of women in the rural workforce is employed in agriculture and household activities, both of which suffered relatively less disruption with the onset of the national lockdown.

When it comes to self-employed people who reported no work in the reference week of the pandemic, the share was higher for men than for women, as was the increase in this share from PPQ to FPQ. This follows from the previous point; that more men were absorbed into self-employment. 

However, when it comes to regular employment, more women reported having no work in the reference week than men. While these results paint a mixed picture about the extent of gender discrimination during the pandemic, the Report notes, by and large, that individual indicators were more unfavourable to women.

Regular employment naturally affords more protections to employees. For instance, self-employed women who reported earning no money in the reference week went from 48% PPQ to 74% FPQ in rural areas and from 23% to 61% in urban areas. When the same figure is calculated for regular employment, however, it is found to be much lower because the legal system prevents employers from non-payment of salaries.

In fact, in rural areas among regular workers, this figure was higher for men—in the FPQ, 24% men in rural areas didn’t receive salaries while it was 14% for women. In urban areas, these figures stood at 29% and 22% respectively.

Impact of the pandemic on wages

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic saw a decrease in wages earned across the board in the FPQ—for all social identities and for all kinds of employment. What’s more, both rural and urban areas saw similar patterns.

Caste and religion perspective

In rural areas, overall average wages in the FPQ were 9% lower than average earnings for the preceding year (2019-20). The greatest decrease was recorded for Muslims, who saw a 13% decline in wages from pre-pandemic levels. 

Interestingly, SC/STs saw the smallest decrease in average wages in the FPQ (10%), even lower than the general category, which saw an 11% decrease. This is because a large section of the SC/ST individuals is employed in essential services which, by their very nature, cannot afford to be disrupted and are low paying in any case.

While self-employed Muslims saw an 18% fall in average monthly wages, the same for regular employment was greater at 24%. These figures for SC/ST communities stood at 10% for both self-employed and regular employment categories.

The fall in the earnings of Muslims confirms that their increase in the share of employment was not a result of improvements in their conditions in the labour market; rather, it was a statistical occurrence due to the fall in the size of the total workforce.

Corresponding with the increase in unemployment (40%), average wages were the worst hit for self-employed persons, falling by one-third for all social groups. Conversely, the fall was lowest in regular work due to compliance with labour laws.

Casual work is the only category of work where Muslims and others didn’t see a significant fall in earnings. Despite the number of casual workers falling sharply from PPQ to FPQ, the wages for those employed in casual work did not suffer significantly.

The gender angle

In rural areas, women did not see a significant decline in their wages. In fact, women in regular and casual work actually saw a 2% increase in their wages while men saw a modest decline.

In urban areas, however, the wages of both men and women saw a steep decline in the FPQ. Self-employed men saw earnings decline by 36% from PPQ to FPQ while the same figure for women was 26%. 

This figure was negligible for regular workers due to labour laws, as mentioned earlier as well, and for casual workers, both men and women saw a 10% decline in earnings.

While women suffered employment losses in urban areas because of the impact the lockdown had on their mobility and other factors, their earnings losses were mitigated to some extent because women in urban areas were often employed as domestic help and played an important role during the pandemic.

Gender discrimination in India’s labour market is structural. As noted in the previous article in this series, men earn considerably more than women on average in normal circumstances. What is interesting, however, is that these earning ratios saw no real change with the onset of the pandemic—the inequalities between the genders in terms of earnings are large, but they were large in normal circumstances as well and the pandemic did not do much to worsen it.

Recommended interventions

The Oxfam India Discrimination Report 2022 recommends a number of interventions to bridge the gaps in labour market outcomes between social groups, unearthed and quantified by the study; both particular to the pandemic as well as in ‘normal’ circumstances, as discussed in the previous article.

Women emerged as the ‘biggest losers’ when it comes to the extent of discrimination—they had fewer employment opportunities and earned far less than men, so much so that the added caste- and religion-based differences were relatively small among women.

What must be remembered, however, is that discrimination against women in the labour market as measured in the Report is not solely discrimination from employers but a sum total of discrimination they face through historical factors, gender roles and expectations, and household and other responsibilities.

As such, the Report recommends active incentivisation of women’s participation in the workforce, enforced through enhancements in pay, reservation in jobs, upskilling programmes and so on.

Further, measures should be instituted to mitigate the factors of womanhood that employers see as reducing the strength of their endowments, for example, maternity. Women should be provided with easy return-to-work options after motherhood or be allowed to work from home, wherever possible. 

Another step in this direction would be to strengthen the engagement of civil society in ensuring a more equitable distribution of parental responsibilities between men and women.

As for SC/ST identities, the Report showed how a greater extent of discrimination was found due to the improvements in endowments brought about through affirmative action programmes. Such a focus on building capabilities across groups, in terms of education and health, particularly for poor and vulnerable groups, is imperative.

Finally, the relatively low levels of discrimination in regular work, enforced through labour laws, need to be brought into the other categories of employment as well. Working to formalise contractual labour and casual work, enforcing “living wages” instead of minimum wages for unorganised sector employees and so on will work to reduce the prevalence of discrimination across India’s labour force.

This article was originally published on The Wire.

“We get chana now [since the lockdown], but just 1 kg in a month. Everything else (dal, oil, spices) we buy from the shops here,” she told IndiaSpend. The family prefers rice to rotis, and occasionally eats pulses, meat and vegetables, “when we can afford it,” Chandni said.

Not counting the two toddlers in the household, 45 kg of rice for the seven adult members in a month translates to 214 grams of cereal per day which is less than the 345 grams recommended by the Indian Council of Medical Research. The family lives in a three-room dwelling with mudwalls, and their chief source of income is from Chandni’s father’s cycle rickshaw, and is complemented by Chandni’s job as a domestic worker. Would Chandni’s family be among India’s officially poor?

There are 269.3 million people living below the poverty line in the country, as per official estimates. They are entitled to a range of benefits, such as subsidised food grain, housing and credit schemes. An accurate estimate of the number of poor is required not just for deciding the number of beneficiaries for welfare schemes but also for determining the minimum wage, said Manjula M., an economist at the Azim Premji University in Bengaluru.

Income, consumption or lack of “capabilities”: What makes a person poor in India?

Chandni, who works as a domestic help in Prayagraj, makes Rs 8,000 in a month. Her father earns Rs 10,000-Rs 15,000, while her three brothers bring in Rs 10,000 to Rs 11,000 between them.

While they do get subsidised grain from the Uttar Pradesh government (the criteria for identifying the urban poor vary from state to state as we explain below), the family’s earnings in a good month are sufficient to keep them above the official poverty line, as calculated by the Tendulkar Committee. The line is fixed at Rs 816 per person per month in rural areas and Rs 1,000 per person per month in urban areas. However, this statistical fact has very little bearing on their life.

None of Chandni’s siblings can read or have gone to school. When they need medical attention, her family has to choose between forgoing a day’s wages and queuing outside the Motilal Nehru Divisional district hospital in Prayagraj, or going to a private clinic a short distance from where she lives. Unless the disease is serious (like the myolipoma, a benign tumour made of fat stored in muscular tissue, that Chandni has), the family prefers the neighbourhood clinic. Chandni’s daughter was born at home in the presence of a midwife, as were the children of her brother. The city’s famous schools do not admit residents of their neighbourhood, and the ones nearby are prohibitively expensive, said Chandni, so her daughter and nephew attend classes at the mosque like their parents did before them.

The poverty line is based on the expenditure required to maintain a minimum level of health, education and nutritional outcome, an improvement over the older methodology that relied solely on the calories consumed. However, it does not consider if amenities, such as good quality education and healthcare, are available to all, a problem that Chandni’s family faces.

The poverty line is not about access.

“The poverty line is not about access. The rupee value of the minimum expenditure on food, education, health, etc. required to maintain the minimum acceptable standard of living is calculated using the NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) data on consumer expenditure. Access comes into the picture when we talk about deprivation,” explained Manjula.

Urban deprivation criteria still not defined: Experts

The Tendulkar poverty line, although official, is not the only criterion used to identify beneficiaries for welfare schemes.

“Beneficiaries for welfare schemes that have a target for the number of beneficiaries (like the Public Distribution System, Ayushman Bharat, etc.) are decided based on the resources allocated to them, which is why the criteria differ for each scheme, resulting in different numbers of beneficiaries,” explained N.C. Saxena, former member of the Planning Commission of India and chairman of the committee on the Below Poverty Line Census for rural areas which determined the conditions that make a person poor in rural areas. The Public Distribution System for food covers nearly 67% of the population, we had reported in March 2022.

Households are included in the category of deprived or vulnerable if they fulfil certain conditions called the deprivation criteria. These criteria were determined separately for rural and urban areas.

The Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (formerly Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation) conducted separate exercises in 2010 and 2012, respectively, to determine the conditions that make a person poor in rural and urban areas. The rural Socio-Economic Caste Census found that 107.4 million of the 179.7 million rural households (or 59.76% of them) were deprived, based on the criteria defined by the Saxena committee.

The urban poor were to be identified by the S.R. Hashim Committee, which submitted its report in 2012 but the report was put in cold storage, said Pronab Sen, one of the members of the committee.

The criteria for identifying the urban poor were never specified.

“The criteria for identifying the urban poor were never specified. Because of this, what is happening in the urban areas is that we have a very fuzzy picture of poverty on the basis of which ration cards are issued,” he said.

Effectively, the conditions for including an urban family like Chandni’s, which depends on her earnings as a domestic worker and her father’s earnings as a rickshaw puller, as poor, are not specified.

IndiaSpend wrote to the housing and urban affairs ministry, but has not received a response. This story will be updated when they respond.

The Hashim committee report lists three kinds of vulnerabilities: occupational, residential and social. A family like Chandni’s who lives in a slum and performs low-productivity jobs that do not pay enough would qualify as “vulnerable” as per these criteria.

How many Indians are poor?

Estimates of the number of poor people differ by methodology.

Based on the Tendulkar poverty line, there were 269.3 million poor people in 2011-12 (down from 407 million in 2004-05) in India, of which 216.5 million are in rural areas (down from 326.3 million in 2004-05) and the remaining 52.8 million in urban areas (compared to 80.8 million in 2004-05). Poverty declined at a pace of 2% every year in the seven-year period, as measured by the Tendulkar committee.

An expert committee headed by former Reserve Bank of India governor C. Rangarajan revised the poverty line and put the number of poor people at 363 million in the same year, with 260.5 million in rural areas and 102.5 million in urban areas. The committee also increased the poverty line to Rs 972 in rural areas and Rs 1,407 in urban areas. The Rangarajan committee’s findings were not adopted as the official poverty line.

Both these expert groups’ recommendations were based on the minimum expenditure required per month to eat a specific number of calories; buy clothes, books, etc.; pay rent and attend school or college.

The latest consumer expenditure survey results were held back by the government in 2018-19. Until the next round’s data are available, the poverty line cannot be revised.

The NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index (MDPI) estimates that a quarter of the Indian population (322.5 million of the projected population in 2016) was “multidimensionally” poor in 2015-16. This index considers outcomes (has the person completed six years of schooling, do they have access to drinking water, do they own assets, etc.) rather than expenditures on nutrition, health and education.

Consumption-based, socio-economic census or multidimensional poverty?

An income or consumption-based poverty line serves the purpose of tracking decline in poverty. It does not convey any information about how vulnerable the people just above the poverty line are.

The rural and urban socioeconomic censuses were meant to identify the conditions that make a person poor, whereas the MDPI is a statistic calculated to tell us how many poor people there are in India and how poor they are.

“The MDPI is a satisfactory indicator of poverty because it takes into account consumption, access to health and educational facilities and the availability of a shelter. A consumption-based poverty line is also acceptable for rural areas but not for urban areas as there is limited access to health and education facilities and housing in cities,” explained Saxena.

If an alternative definition of poverty is adopted, Chandni’s family—who are deprived as per the criteria for deprivation given by the Hashim committee, and poor on 10 of the 12 dimensions of the MDPI—would be included in the poverty numbers.

This article was originally published on IndiaSpend, a data-driven, public-interest journalism nonprofit. 

The myth of development by privatisation

Why does the wealth of a few continue to grow against this backdrop? One reason is privatisation. This article specifically looks at the deteriorating state of basic services and state-owned utilities—including education and healthcare—due to privatisation.  Take for example the Aatmanirbhar Bharat package and the four-year national monetisation pipeline. Such policies reduce state ownership and control by selling central public sector enterprises to private sector businesses. This results in the state relinquishing decision-making roles (as it no longer holds majority share), abandoning price control, the social mandate of employing the masses, and operating in areas and sectors in which the private sector is unwilling.

One frequently cited motivation to privatise is efficiency—the quality of services offered and the government’s fiscal resources to expand public expenditure are expected to improve. However, this assumption is flawed on two counts: private services are as much liable to be misapplied as public-funded services, and they’re prone to applying commercial value on social services, leading to exclusion of the ‘have-nots’. For instance, while globally the ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fell; and the richest 98 Indians own the same wealth as the bottom 55.2 crore Indian citizens. This gap has increased over the last decade, as the bottom 50 percent, that held 8 percent of the wealth in 2012, had a mere 6 percent in 2021.

Recourse to private healthcare as the ‘last resort’

India has one of the highest levels of out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) on health services in the world and the lowest public health spending. OOPE is a major financial burden on Indian households, which spend 43 percent of their total expenditure on pharmacies, 28 percent on private general hospitals, and 7.42 percent on government hospitals. And the private sector dominates healthcare provision, with around 74 percent of outpatient care and 65 percent of hospitalisation care in urban India.  

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which encouraged states to incentivise private/philanthropic activity, failed to crowd out the private sector.

As we saw during the second wave of COVID-19, India’s public health system fell short due to issues of governance and regulatory failure, such as shutdown of elective and outpatient services or indefinite deferring of routine check-ups. In fact, the public hospital systems in many states were overrun during COVID-19. Those who turned to private hospitals faced problems ranging from non-treatment to swindling. The private health market also carries the risk of overprescription and unchecked selling of drugs, which promotes unnecessary drug use. In response, the government enforced price capping, allotment of beds and so on, but the issues persisted nevertheless. The inaccessibility to public services caused OOPE to increase further, leaving many people untreated because costs and lack of health insurance rendered both private and public healthcare inaccessible.

The quandary of education

India has both private and public education providers. In fact, private schools continue to grow as income levels go up. The pandemic saw private schools impose arbitrary fee hikes and grossly overcharge students, with some enrolling in unrecognised institutions. The report notes that in tertiary education, private institutions are almost twice that of government institutions, and in higher education, public-funded education sees only 32 percent enrolment whereas its private counterparts see 68 percent enrolment.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which encouraged states to incentivise private/philanthropic activity, proved redundant, as it failed to crowd out the private sector. The report iterates that 35 percent children still couldn’t continue their education over non-payment of fees and 57 percent parents paid additional charges that were not part of the official break-up.

Privatisation also results in the exclusion of marginalised communities, Dalits, Adivasis, and girls because private schools are generally established in places that have good public infrastructure. When society is fractured along different social identities of caste, gender, geography, and religion, marketisation of education widens these gaps.

Privatising public goods

India’s expenditure on social security schemes for workers is already low at 0.6 percent of the total union budget. These schemes cover a diverse workforce in the organised and informal sectors. The pandemic affected informal and migrant workers most severely, and the absence of social security for them was more glaring than ever. By privatising public goods such as education, healthcare, social safety, food, and drinking water, the precarities that certain segments face are deepened.

With privatisation, the state eventually loses ownership and control, making the question of public interest non-existent.

Even as the extent of public crowdsourcing of financial support and information on oxygen, hospitals, and doctors on social media was exemplary during the pandemic, this temporary social vine was born out of the absence and abandonment of state infrastructure. A significant population of this country undertook medical debt, suffered from loss of loved ones, reported lower intake of food than before the pandemic, walked the length and breadth of the country to feel ‘at home’, and lost their livelihoods. The private sector functions on a rationalising mechanism that demands value for its services, in contrast to well-being and welfare as outcomes.

The way forward

As we’ve already emphasised, public financing cannot be supported by increasing privatisation of state enterprises. Here are some ways to pursue more equitable development.

1. Increase state expenditure

With privatisation, the state eventually loses ownership and control, making the question of public interest non-existent. Taking the example of health, the report, following the Economic Survey 2020-21 argues for an increase in public spend from 1 percent (global average of spending is 10 percent) to 2.5–3 percent of GDP, which can decrease the OOPE from 65 percent to 30 percent of overall healthcare spend. In case of basic rights like education, healthcare, and food security, and given the current disparities, the state needs to strengthen its control and simultaneously recalibrate its relation with the private players to integrate social goals. This can be achieved by introducing more regulations so that these services are not delivered for profits alone.

2. A more balanced private–public role in service provision

Following the recommendation made above, the argument remains that for universal and mass literacy state-funded educational facilities need to continue in India. At the same time, the private players can certainly complement the public school system (as in Bangladesh, Chile, and Colombia) in different ways to not just attain literacy but also an education and skill set that improves employability. The agenda of private education or healthcare can work in tandem with or bolster public services to recast their developmental purpose.

3. Progressive taxation

The government needs to change the tax regime such that the incessantly growing rich of the country pay taxes progressively. Progressive taxation ensures that the tax burden is higher for the wealthy. Through taxes and strong state provisioning, a basic standard of living for lower-income families can be ensured, which will take care of fundamental needs such as shelter, food, health, education, and transportation. The rationale for this system of taxation is rooted in an unequal growth rate of income.¹

4. Review and update existing schemes

The case for public provisioning can be strengthened by reviewing the status of schemes where access needs to be improved. For example, the vicious cycle of low income and high OOPE will continue to cause a rift in health inequity if left unchecked and unregulated. The flagship, Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana—dubbed the world’s largest health insurance plan offering financial risk protection against catastrophic health expenditure to approximately 40 percent of the population—hasn’t provided effectively improved access to health care. Similarly, the debate on living wages needs to be revisited to improve human capital rather than support bare sustenance and increase demand-driven growth.

5. Measure inequality

India needs a more rigorous data base to measure incomes and consumptions levels as well as continuous data collection by the income tax department on tax payers and gross and returned income. This transparency will then facilitate a more democratic dialogue on tax structures for the super-rich, such as a wealth tax, instead of burdening the population with indirect taxes such as GST.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are personal.

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Footnotes:

1. According to a working paper by Chancel and Picketty, ‘income growth rates in India over the 1980–2015 period substantially increase as we progress upwards through the distribution of income. The bottom 50 percent of earners experiences a growth rate of 90 percent over the period, while the top 10 percent saw a 435 percent increase in their incomes.’

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Know more

• Read this policy brief that makes recommendations for NEP 2020 implementation.
• Read Oxfam India’s second rapid survey of government and private schools that captures the experiences teachers, parents, and children.
• Read this article and watch this IG Live to learn more about inequality in India.

In a crisis such as this, gender responsive budgeting (GRB) can be an effective instrument to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment through fiscal policy. Gender budgeting requires the earmarking of government expenditure against targets to incentivise gender-sensitive actions. 

Evolution of gender budgeting in India

Today, India counts among the over 90 countries practicing gender responsive budgeting. India has been consistently releasing a Gender Budget Statement (GBS) along with its Union Budget since 2005–06, and it has been recognised as one of the most streamlined and detailed gender-responsive budgeting documents in Asia. Released as Statement 13 of the Expenditure Profile, it presents the portion of budgetary expenditure earmarked by Central ministries to alleviate gender-specific barriers across schemes. 

A charter issued in 2007 mandated the formation of gender budget cells across ministries for this kind of budgeting, and currently these exist across 57 Central ministries and 16 state governments. The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) developed a comprehensive Gender Budgeting Handbook in 2015.

Still at 1% of India’s GDP

Analysing the FY23 Gender Budget against its 16 predecessors shows that this Budget continued several existing trends and introduced a few new elements. We enumerate these trends: 

1. In line with the pattern of the last 16 years, it remains below 5% of total expenditure and at 1% of India’s GDP

The overall size of the Gender Budget grew from Rs 1.66 lakh crore in FY22 to Rs 1.71 lakh crore in FY23, an increase of only about 3% compared to the 4.6% hike seen in the overall government expenditure. Despite this increase, the Gender Budget has actually declined as a proportion of the total expenditure—from 4.4% in FY22 to 4.3% in FY23—and also when compared to the GDP—from 0.72% to 0.66%. An analysis of the data between 2005–06 and 2021–22 reveals that the Gender Budget has hardly ever crossed 5% of total expenditure or 1% of GDP. 

2. About 90% of the gender budget allocations remain concentrated in five ministries, with just over half even reporting allocations to it 

In FY23, allocations to just five ministries comprised 91.3% of the gender budget statement—rural development, women and child development (WCD), housing and urban affairs, health and family welfare and education. Only 40 of the over 70 central ministries and departments even reported gender budgeting in FY23, as per the GBS.

This trend is not new: between 2005–06 and 2019–20, almost 90% of the Gender Budget was focussed on rural development, WCD, agriculture, health and education. Since FY22, the increase in allocations for the Prime Minister Awas Yojana (Urban) resulted in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs superseding the Ministry of Agriculture in the top five ministries.

With the exception of the MWCD, which delineates 64% of its overall budget as Gender Budget, only 30–40% of each ministry’s overall expenditure can be counted as gender-centric allocations.

3. About 80% of the FY23 GBS allocations are clustered into just 10 schemes

The PMAY (Rural and Urban) and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) alone form 25.1% and 15.2% of the FY23 GBS. The top 10 schemes constitute almost 80% of the allocations in FY23, a decline over the last two years—the figure was about 81-83% for FY21–22.

4. Allocations in 100% women-focussed schemes have declined 

There are two kinds of allocations in gender budgeting in India: Part A comprises women-specific schemes (100% allocation for women), and Part B for pro-women schemes (30–99% allocation for women). While allocations for the Gender Budget are dominated by schemes in Part B, this skew has worsened in the last five years with the proportion of schemes in Part A declining from 31% in FY18 to 16% in FY23. 

Major schemes in Part A of the FY23 Gender Budget include the PMAY (Rural), the Samarthya scheme (MWCD’s umbrella programme on women’s welfare) and the Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme. The Ministry of Rural Development, along with the MWCD, are the highest contributors to women-specific schemes. Part B of the Gender Budget has a wider distribution, with PMAY (Urban), MGNREGS, Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 and Samagra Shiksha being the major schemes. 

5. Not responsive to emerging post COVID-19 priorities 

Expenditures on five post-COVID-19 priority areas—social protection, (including income support, food and fuel transfers), prevention of domestic violence, skill training, public transport and digital literacy—rose to 28.4% of the Gender Budget 2020–21, but have since declined to 1.5% in FY22 and 1.7% in FY23. 

In FY21, this COVID-19 responsive expenditure principally focused on social protection with direct benefit transfers of Rs 500 for 200 million PM Jan Dhan Yojana women account-holders and LPG connections through Ujjwala Yojana. However, with these schemes having been discontinued, the allocation for social protection fell to about 1% of the GBS in FY22.

The spending on schemes for digital literacy, public transport, prevention of domestic violence and skill training also remains low. A small allocation of Rs 120 crore was made for rural digital literacy under the PM Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan in FY22, which declined by 17% to Rs 100 crore in FY23. The expenditure on public transport was driven by the sole scheme for Safety of Women on Public Road Transport, whose allocation fell by 86%, from Rs 139.3 crore in FY21 to Rs 20 crore in FY23. However, allocations for the Sambal scheme (for violence prevention) more than doubled, from Rs 258 crore in FY22 to Rs 562 crore in FY23.

Way forward

Between 2005–06 and today, India has made significant gains on gender budgeting, and accounting of gender-related expenditure has improved. The number of ministries reporting gender budgeting has increased from 14 to 40. But this momentum has to be strengthened across ministries, departments, and schemes.

There is a need to enhance efforts for gender empowering programming across schemes. A gender-needs assessment can be undertaken to identify new policies and schemes to deal with emerging priority areas post COVID-19. For instance, this could include mainstream digital literacy initiatives for girls and support-targeted wages subsidies for employment creation in sectors that employ a large number of women and are still reeling under the impact of the pandemic. This includes enterprises related to textiles, handlooms, handicrafts, food processing, retail, hospitality and so on.  

The collection of gender-disaggregated data should be a standard practice, especially for centrally sponsored schemes. 

Regular gender audits of centrally sponsored schemes and flagship programmes such as the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan can emphasise the importance of reporting and ensuring gender-balanced distribution of scheme benefits. The collection of gender-disaggregated data should be a standard practice, especially for centrally sponsored schemes. Further, provisions should be made for the Gender Budget to report progress along outcome and output indicators, as done in the Union Budget. 

Regular training is crucial to enhance the capacities of gender based cells. Technical support and additional capacity building measures should be provided to Central ministries and states that are yet to adopt gender budgeting. The MWCD can play a leading role in understanding and bridging knowledge gaps by organising inter-ministerial dialogues to understand the barriers keeping ministries from reporting Gender Budgets.

Finally, NITI Aayog and MWCD can partner to develop a monitoring initiative and web portal so that ministries can openly observe the quality, results, and impacts of their Gender Budgets.

(With research assistance from Geetika Malhotra, Seher Jain and Shrushti Singh)

This article was originally published on BehanBox.