Poverty Standards 2011

Last year I had written a blog called SpellCheck 2010 (http://let-it-rain-now.blogspot.com/2010/08/spellcheck-2010.html) after reading an article by P. Sainath who talked about a very innovative way the government of Maharashtra adopted long ago to remove famine. They just removed the word, famine!

If you are following the recent discussion in the media about the definition of poverty line, you'll see that you are poor only if your monthly spending is below Rs.781, or rather, your daily spending is below Rs. 26. Now note that this is not just for food. This spending includes everything, including what is known as non-food essentials. Utsa Patnaik, an Economics Professor of JNU, in an article in "The Hindu" today, highlights how this money is not enough even to get the basic nutrition, leave alone the non-essentials.

I am reminded of the story of a man who was walking in the forest and saw a bulls-eye on every tree, and an arrow struck right at the bulls-eye! He was amazed! Finally, I am going to meet the world's best archer! Then he saw a little boy, with a quiver full of arrows, shooting an arrow to another tree. Before the man could reach the boy, he saw the boy running to the tree, and drawing a circle around the arrow, with the arrow as the center of the bulls-eye!

Why do we do such games of cooking numbers by creating meaningless definitions? Aren't there more obvious ways of defining who poor, or is it turning out to be very difficult? New dictionaries, new standards, new arithmetics cannot solve real hunger!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

India in the past few weeks has been facing an interesting dynamics created by the great leveler of modern times - Twitter and Facebook, clubbed with a very active visual media. Many in the political framework were least prepared for this kind of an 'intrusion' into their privileges. To a large extent, even those who created the mass movement called Team Anna, were also new to this stage, and were at times doing certain embarrassing performances. They were not alone in these performances, since some from the political class also gave them company in these. Overall, on this new stage, with many performers, everyone looked quite novice - the leaders on both sides, the followers, all. Like the children who are first on stage.

However, what goes undebated is that this new stage can have a positive transition into a new equilibrium for India, if all the players accept each other, especially if the existing actors accept the new actors on the stage. The government has to perhaps have special focus on the voice of the people which is becoming very active on this stage. The senior leadership also has to accept the tweeting new leadership, whose influence on a large cross section of India is very high. The question is not whether everything that gets talked on this stage is right or wrong. What is pertinent is that there are a lot of prevalent perceptions which get debated on this stage. This cannot be ignored.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - the principle I learned in the Electronics textbook, while studying Klystron amplifiers. The emerging leadership from political classes, social sector, masses should adopt this principle, and start using the 'great leveler' as an effective tool. The technology visionaries in the administrative machinery should use data analytics tools to make sense out of this seemingly high noise on the stage. The connectors between the mainline and the social sector should dream big in effectively using analytics (speech and text, and even video) in the coming years to create the entire India as a greatly leveled stage.

All this is possible, if the leaders stop the current mud slinging, and start appreciating the fact that we are in a greatly leveled world, a highly transparent world, and then, we might as well embrace this new stage for advancements of our nation, advancement for all its people.

Jai Ho.