Dilip D’Souza, bleeding-heart liberal recounts his experiences on a train journey where he saw only poverty. And says that 15 years of liberalisation has not helped reduce Indian poverty; that claims to the contrary are mere figures invented quoted by the proponents of free market capitalism.
And if you look at their figures, you will indeed be persuaded. Figures are like that.
Yeah, and by implication this means they’re mere figures. There’s no truth in that. So the proponents of liberalisation are all liars but very adept ones because they have an arsenal of figures to make the rest shut up. But wait. To prove his point, he goes further.
Then again, the reforms have been in place nearly 15 years. That’s over a third of the time from 1947 till liberalisation began. By any standards, that hardly qualifies as “overnight” any more. By any standards, after 15 years during which droves of people escaped from being poor, I should see around me some perceptible decrease in poverty.
On this trip, I didn’t.
Dilip’s piece of logic is really commendable. Does he seriously feel that the ill-effects of 43 years of communism socialism can be wiped out in just 15 years? Dilip conveniently forgets to mention that Nehru’s socialist pattern of society merely perpetuated and added more weight to an alien bureaucracy whose original purpose was to keep the native population enslaved–politically and economically. Indira Gandhi further strengthened this bureaucracy with dictatorial laws like the MRTP and the FERA, her vision of economic progress! The result: an all-powerful body of bureaucrats who immensely contributed to retarding India’s economic progress. This body, having enjoyed the fruits of socialism naturally doesn’t want things to change. As MadMan says, anybody who thinks that the Licence Raj is dead should think twice.
Firstly, those who tell you that the Licence Raj is behind us have never run a company that needs a thousand and one licences to actually get it off the ground. And of course each department wants its share of “performance incentive” fees to get things done. So I have been exposed to the ugly and sleazy part of running a business in India…
The singular reason why so many Indians are poor is because we have spawned a culture where looting your neighbour has become institutionalized. If a farmer, who as in this case, has lost his land to land sharks, wants justice, the bureaucrat will make him wait for years and years on the pretext of rules and sections and clauses. Fed up and hopeless, the farmer lets go of the land that rightfully belongs to him and moves to the city and ekes out, living in the slums; or worse, takes to begging.
Returning to Dilip, I’m really amazed, as I said, at his logic. One trip, just one second-class train journey, has convinced him that there’s no decrease in national poverty! I won’t bother telling him that in the same 15 year-period, poverty levels have come down because the shrewd logician he is, he has preempted lesser mortals like me by saying that they are all mere “figures.” However, it turns out that Dilip actually relies on”figures” as evidence when it suits him. On the one hand he says,
Absurd, of course. By themselves, figures mean nothing. The anecdotal evidence gives them heft and credibility.
Immediately, he says
Again, look at it this way: If I never had seen Indians defecating on the tracks, on the rocks at low tide, by the side of the road — yes, if I never had seen such sights, it would be difficult to believe the troubling statistic that nearly seven of every 10 Indians lack access to reasonable sanitation. But I have seen them. That’s why I have a sense that the figure is likely to be true. What’s more, it’s the only way I have of judging the truth in the figure.
So there. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in what he says. He has seen with his own eyes all the poor people shitting in public and therefore, when the list of shitters is compiled and put out as “figures” or statistics, there’s reasonable ground to believe it. But when Fareed Zakaria says
First, there’s the small matter that India’s economic reforms have not left behind the rural poor. Over the last 15 years, poverty has declined from 39.1 percent to 24.1 percent in cities and from 39.4 percent to 26.4 percent in rural areas.
Dilip dubs them as “figures” because his single train journey makes him see otherwise. But when you get to the end of his article, you see more clearly what his definition of poverty is; rather what his definition of poor people is. And then it is easy to see the reason his logic is flawed.
In much the same way, our encounters with poor Indians are the anecdotal evidence that allows us to judge the truth about levels of poverty; about claims that those levels have decreased. What’s more, they are the only way we have to judge those claims.
There’s no doubt in my mind: reforms must happen. But 15 years after the process began, I can’t help feeling that something is wrong about the way we are pursuing them. For I am yet to see the one effect they must have, first and above all: a visible lessening in the level of Indian poverty. Fewer poor Indians around us. I can’t see that.
Dilip’s definition of poor people includes only beggars, and people shitting in public places. The rest are supposedly gloriously rich. For a first hand experience of the “visible lessening in the level of Indian poverty,” I shall present my own life as example. I grew up in a lower-middle class family, the sort that prefers to walk to the next bus stop because the fare costs a rupee less from there. Putting it very modestly, I today own a fairly large house and I have enough to spend and save after deducting all my expenditure. Does this indicate a visible lessening in my level of poverty? Or the case of a roadside cobbler in the locality where I previously used to live. This venerable old man today owns a decent shop and stocks only branded footwear. Or the dhobi who today has the state-of-art “laundry, dyeing and darning” shop with branches at 6 prime localities in Bangalore. If beggars and shitters constitute anecdotal evidence of poverty to Dilip, these examples equally constitute ancedotal evidence of its reduction.
Dilip and many bleeding-heart liberals of his ilk only allow–and try to reinforce–one definition of India. The classic (western) “caste, cow, curry and beggars” definition. And so they say, in a romantically perverse fashion that the only way to understand the real India is to
I’ve travelled second-class for over 35 years now: short journeys, long ones, in every part of the country. For the sense it gives you of what India is about, it is indisputably the best way to travel.
And find that India in circa 2005 remains
It occurred to me that on none of those journeys, over all those years, did I see so many beggars, so much poverty. All of which, like always, gave me a sense of what my country is about, circa 2005.
Much to his relief. A strong and developed India would put writers like Dilip out of business.
Tags: Commentary, Society & Culture
On 04.27.05 ABC says:
Looks like the brown-saheb gutter inspector got on to a train.
On 04.27.05 Sandeep says:
LOl, ABC!
On 04.27.05 Gaurav says:
Nice one, Sandeep.
To all those bleeding hearts who point to beggars and question liberalisation, my answer starts with “YOU IDIOT!!!”. they are questioning the very medicine that offers the cure.. If reforms have not helped eradicate poverty, it is because they are too few. Reducing the number of clearances from 1000 to 100 does not qualify as “reform”.
The reform hasn’t touched the beggar class, because the reforms that will touch them have not been brought about. Instead of pointing fingers at the middle class which has benefitted from reforms, and using warped logic to say “they have stolen the spoils of reforms”, we should say “see how reforms have helped the middle class? more reforms will help everyone”.
Want to help the poorest of the poor? Make it possible for them to earn an honest living instead of leaving them no option but begging in trains.
Dilip here makes the mistake of hating….or rather being disgusted by… the poor, rather than poverty.
On 04.27.05 Sandeep says:
Very perceptive, Gaurav! (Salutes). If my previous exchanges with DDD is any indicator, he’ll not comment on this entry.
On 04.27.05 ABC says:
In response to Gaurav:
Actually, D’Souza’s arguments are downright false. The dude is doing what he always does: laying it on thick. I’m an avid traveller too, and I’m on the road once every few weeks. I also like to go to far-flung, little known places in the country-side where media doesn’t go, and in a few cases not even government does. And I have been doing this for the last 11 years. My observation is that while rural poverty has certainly not been eradicated, abject poverty has definitely come down drastically. People don’t look starved. Their tenements, even when no more than one-room huts, look better tended to than ever. I was surprised to find many of them sporting TV sets. Laughing, barefoot children going to and returning from school is a familiar sight even in the deep interiors.
VS Naipaul noticed the gradual disappearance of acute poverty as far back as 1988. For his “Million Mutinies”, he travelled to the same places he did 25 years ago for his “Area of Darkness.” And he found that people had more money, that the countryside was, in his words, “almost beautiful”. This was the result of Green Revolution, which revolution, was, by the way, heckled by the usual bunch of perpetually-whinining Marxist loonies when it was embarked upon. Just as, years later, the same bunch was to whine about economic liberalization. Never mind that their doomsday predictions never come right, and that far from being ashamed of themselves, on this count, they just plough ahead with their next cycle of whining, brazenly disregarding the fact that they have been proved wrong on the previous cycle of whining. But I digress.
It appears from his mention of Tamil conversations in trains he was traveling in the south. That makes his observations all the more suspect, which would have had at least some measure of credibility if gathered from that secular la-la land, Lalu’s Bihar. The south, and espcially Tamilnadu, has been far more successful at poverty-alleviation than most other states.
Finally, even if he weren’t laying it on thick, a second class train car is hardly the place to look for evidence of reforms’ success. Any more than some squalid, innercity areas in the US are proof of the “failure” of American economic model.
On 04.27.05 Murali says:
Dilip’s arguments contain more fallacy - look at his analogy of the muck heap. He assumes that ALL the poverty occured in the last 50 years and 15 years constitute one-third of that. The fact is that the impoverisation of India started long before, with colonization, perhaps even before. Maybe India never was rich, for all we know. If his analogy was like ‘my great great grand father started accumulating the muck when he was young..’ it would make better sense. Another fallacious assumption of Dilip’s is that creation and eradication of poverty are symmetric processes. It is possible to create abject poverty in a few years - Idi Amin and Pol Pot will vouch for that. Reducing poverty is a much more difficult task. So, even if all the povety in India is the result of the last 50 years, 15 years is too short a time to eradicate even one-third of that. However, I feel we have done pretty well in terms of poverty reduction, struggling as we are against heavy odds.
On 04.28.05 uspeed says:
Excerpt from the linked article.
>> There’s no doubt in my mind: reforms must happen. But 15 years after the process began, I can’t help feeling that something is wrong about the way we are pursuing them. For I am yet to see the one effect they must have, first and above all: a visible lessening in the level of Indian poverty. Fewer poor Indians around us. I can’t see that.
I dont think he is arguing against reforms per se, deap within, he knows that that debate is already over. I think he is arguing for a more vigorous reforms program, and a stronger investment in the social sector (mid day meals, primary health care, stronger investment in education) and so on. Personally, I find this unexceptionable. But he does have a round about way of saying things..
On 04.28.05 uspeed says:
One can cite figures that a lot fewer Indians are sleeping on an empty stomach today as compared to 15 years ago, but there have been other negatives: pollution, big ticket corruption, .. And a (usually) full stomach is hardly the thing that can enable the poor to participate fully in a global economy. In the absence of this, the only thing the poor shall get is the crumbs via a trickle down of the economic prosperity, nothing more.
Perhaps, a better distribution of investment could have yielded better returns. For instance, what do you need first, better highways or better schools ? Its not the answer here that matters, but its a matter of concern that questions like this are not even asked in India today. Just as we were asked to believe in the Socialist credo earlier, we are being blasted with propoganda of a different kind today.
For e.g. the expenditure on education, health care appears to have stagnated, or at least its not very *visible* in the same way that IT/Bangalore, 100 million phones, 1 million cars an year etc are visible.
Dilip of course is a fool to ignore all the visible changes that have happened, but so are we, if we ignore the things that have not changed yet, and will need substantial effort/investment/time to change.
On 04.28.05 ABC says:
Uspeed, I thought the argument is whether the lot of the poor has improved, not whether the pace of improvement is good enough. Of course, what pace of improvement can be good enough?
You are trying to read in the D’Souza piffle arguments he does not make. The D’Souza argument almost always rests on redefining words to mean the opposite of what they conventionally mean. Don’t jump up in joy when he says that “reforms must happen”. Let him spell out what those reforms are, and whether the current set of reforms militate against them.
On 04.28.05 uspeed says:
>> Don’t jump up in joy when he says that “reforms must happen”. Let him spell out what those reforms are, and whether the current set of reforms militate against them.
Hey, cut the guy some slack
that would be too much work 
On 04.29.05 Sandeep says:
Right. For a multi-talented guy like DDD, trying to be liberal, politically-correct, minority-rights-upholder, anti-riot crusader, economist… phew! it’s asking for too much. Right on spot, uspeed. BTW, I visit your blog quite often nowadays. Why don’t you get your own domain?
On 04.30.05 uspeed says:
>> Why don’t you get your own domain?
That would be too much work for me
On 05.02.05 Yazad says:
Your piece inspired me to respond to Dilip on rediff. Read it here. And thanks!
On 03.24.06 Voice From a 2.5-World Country » Blog Archive » I’m leaving…. says:
[...] Here [...]
On 06.25.08 Seriously Sandeep » Archive » Recalling a Train Journey says:
[...] About three years ago, Dilip D’Souza concluded that liberalization had done little to improve India’s economy. I had pointed out that his conclusion was fantastic because it was based on just one train journey and a few anecdotal evidences. [...]