A Walk Through Poverty and Development

On a Walk

Six years ago, I stayed at the Divyansh Guest House and would take a back route to the Kalachakra grounds through a small village and around to the grounds' entry. I went for a nice stroll and decided to go again to check out the route and see if anything had changed. In fact, yes. Some things had.

As I walked past Tergar Monastery down Sujata By-pass Road, there’s another guest house, across from which is more pronounced development; the ponds look like they have been dredged of waste (at least of the overtly physical sort) and there is evidence of other refuse, perhaps storage shacks, etc., making way for more building. At a distance, the area still preserves its rustic beauty, but if you didn’t know the area, you wouldn’t know how much building has gone up. I strolled around one of the ponds and recorded mostly bucolic beauty, but noted that once I got back onto the by-pass, a newer building and the some in the distance that weren’t familiar to me.

Above, pictuesque views of wetlands and marsh. This pond, in particular, is far more pristine than when I was here last.

Below a stretch of road where it appears there's been some clearing done (and enough to ash to lead me to assume that much of what was removed was burned).

As I walked down the old path, it became immediately noticeable that the one pond I’d walked past six years ago was still overlaid with duckweed and moss, but it looks as though additional vegetation is growing there. The garbage seems less, but I’m not sure if that’s wishful thinking on my part or not.

It also appears some land has been cleared for more construction.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a stroll through a village without kids coming up wanting a selfie or a photo. I snapped these guys and they’re all asking for one more (“Ek! Ek! Ek!”) to which I said, “hmm, yeh teen hai” and took three more snaps. Then the ring-leader asked for one rupee. Uh-uh! He’s selling the effort so short! I gave him twenty rupees and those kids acted like I gave them gold! Twenty rupees Indian? About 31 cents.

I have to check myself on several points and it is, perhaps, something many of us with our privilege should similarly be aware of. It’s tempting to say that areas like this should be preserved, “they’re so picturesque”, “it’s so beautiful how they’re [note the “they”] able to rely on so few things and yet have these simple, wonderful lives” (variations of this have been overheard more than once and spoken directly to me). To be sure, in photos like these, I’m tempted to sigh and say, “yes, this is lovely…” But it doesn’t take to long to reflect that those kids were overjoyed with a literal pittance.

Then you reflect further; development does come with risks, with possible gentrification, with families being moved from one place to another, though I get the sense that the displacement isn’t the issue here. I am cognizant that in this case, we’re looking at new housing and I’m going out on a limb to seeing in the pond clean-up, something like an improvement that isn’t going to immediately minimize the local biosphere. It seems like someone is actually preserving the surroundings (a lot of this area is marshland/wetlands and agriculture).

When people opine about how wonderful it is to seeing people live so simply on so little, I don’t think they’re aware that they’re valorizing poverty and validating an attitude that can lead to laissez-faire patronization. I’ll be honest; it absolutely did not make me happy to see those kids run off with 31 cents so happily when I put it in the larger context.

Many greetings and social exchanges in the area are transactional. From kids expecting a couple of rupees for saying “Hello, how are you” to random approaches for visiting a store, or would you like to see my village (which eventually leads to strangers asking you if you could sponsor them). Poverty is not a joke here in Bihar or indeed, in much of India, and with it, the continuing struggle to eradicate pollution that leeches into the soil and aquifers, that hovers in the air and contributes to health issues and their attendant repercussions.

Reflections on Poverty and Development

Development in areas like Bihar is not a “cruel necessity”; it’s simply a necessity. India is not monolithic. She is vast and diverse and while she is fighting and winning the spread of poverty, there are many years to go before the fight is over.

All of this said, there are fluctuations in poverty from state to state; Bihar was the poorest state when I visited last six years ago. This is no longer the case (https://web.archive.org/web/20140407102043/http://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/PublicationsView.aspx?id=15283). That said, Bihar is still well above all India’s 21.92% of the population living below the poverty level (around 33% for the state).

Given the starts and stop to the greater Indian economy, I’m not so pessimistic about the track the country as a whole is on, but seeing up front the rather odd systems of taxation against various prohibitions that cut into revenues, it’s unlikely to find a linear ascent.

Moreover, what I see on the ground is heartening. There are more schools and more NGOs pitching in. To be sure, not all are legitimate, but with an overall increase, I’ll take the bad with the good. Statistically, I think the trends look good; but there is still very much more to be done.

I’ll come back to this issue later, probably when I’m back in Kathmandu, for comparison studies. There are dimensions to studying poverty, particularly with India, that make any reduction to a simple yes/no or quantitative statement complicated. The country is extremely diverse, in terms of cultures, societies and social structures, government at all levels, and geographically. All of these make a simple statement a little too simplistic.

For the interested reader, a quick start, believe it or not is with the Wikipedia page “Poverty in India”; the article itself is worthwhile, but it’s the sources and links that are most valuable for arriving at some idea of the complexity of the situation that besets Bharat.

If you want to drill down further, I would suggest signing up for an account at PPI (https://www.povertyindex.org). This is a much more granular approach but/and offers a large body of data in a variety of levels of scale. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at different contexts of poverty between India and Nepal and hopefully, helping people get a handle on the interlocking elements that exacerbate poverty on the one hand and help reverse it on the other.