Reduced Poverty, but Nobody’s Happy

You’d think when a government is able to reduce poverty, it would make positive headlines. So when the UPA government announced that poverty had fallen on

both counts, as a percentage of total population and also in absolute numbers, Montek Singh Ahluwalia was surprised by what followed. He explains what followed in Backstage.

 

First, the opposition questioned the data – fake and hoax, said Mulayam Singh Yadav. Not surprising. Second, even many Congress MP’s were unhappy about such announcements. That was surprising. It took a while for Ahluwalia to understand the reaction of the Congress MP’s – (a) They feared that their vote bank would assume that the party would reduce their focus on the poor and shift attention to other areas; and (b) They feared that parts of their vote bank who were now deemed above the poverty line would lose some of their benefits, like subsidized grains. Third, many questioned the changes to the definition of the poverty line – it is logical that the income level value has to be adjusted over time. But any change is also at risk of being called dilution of the definition of poverty just to make the government of the day look good. Fourth, TV news channels. Good news doesn’t sell, so TV channels will question everything. And TV news channels, unlike newspapers, can do very shady things e.g. they would play a segment of Ahluwalia’s claim that poverty levels had decreased in one half of the screen and simultaneously place images of the slums on the other half. See how that works? The speaker may not even realize what else is being projected onscreen, and without saying a word, the TV anchor has managed to make the speaker look like a liar without giving him a chance to answer or clarify things.

 

A sobering, depressing and enlightening experience.