Falling Poverty, Rising Privations: Trends over a Quarter Century in a Slum and a Village near Delhi
| Author | Devesh Vijay |
| DOI | 10.1177/0019556117726823 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
63(4) 595–615
© 2017 IIPA
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0019556117726823
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ipa
1 ICSSR, Senior Fellow, Political Sociology, Centre for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Devesh Vijay, Flat 5, D-14-A-2, Model Town-III, Delhi 110009, India.
E-mail: deveshvij@gmail.com
Falling Poverty, Rising
Privations: Trends
over a Quarter Century
in a Slum and a Village
near Delhi
Devesh Vijay1
Abstract
The need to track multi-dimensional poverty in place of just subsistence is
being widely recognised by policy makers. However, the challenge of quantifying
deficits in housing and sanitation as well as ‘freedoms’ is immense and a number
of dearths that bring maximum suffering to people (like risks spawned by
contaminated water and food supplies) remain uncharted in common counts of
‘poverties’ and deprivations.
In this context, long-term, multi-disciplinary accounts of urban and rural
poverty in a range of communities can be of help. As a contribution, this article
offers an analysis of changing indices of material poverty as well as ‘privations’
like the worsening health environment, in the microcosm of a village and a slum
from Delhi’s periphery, observed over a quarter century through observations,
surveys, group discussions and semi-structured interviews.
The study shows that ‘absolute poverty’ has declined, in both the sites, since
late 1980s but ‘privations’ have risen on many fronts.
Keywords
Privations, poverty, India, liberalisation, morbidity, crime
Despite witnessing a rapid fall in poverty over recent decades, a number of regions
continue to suffer extreme privations and poor human indices arising from rising
pollution, violence and contaminated water and food chains, etc. Parts of north
India (including poorly governed states like Uttar Pradesh) illustrate this emerging
596 Indian Journal of Public Administration 63(4)
paradox well. While, on one hand, the World Bank has claimed that the proportion
of the poor consuming less than US$1.9, per day, has fallen to just 20 per cent in
India now, the Human Development Rank of the country published by UNDP,
in December 2015, remains low at 130 among 190 countries (Panagariya &
Mukim, 2013).
The steep fall in poverty estimated for India by the World Bank has been
disputed by some scholars but noticeable decline in extreme poverty since the
1990s is being widely acknowledged now.1 Despite a convergence of views on
reduced poverty in India, the basis of this limited decline has remained contro-
versial. While some reports claim that the improvement has come mainly from
higher welfare spending by the centre, in preceding decades, others have argued
that acute poverty had started declining from the 1980s, mainly because of eco-
nomic liberalisation and the expansion of the middle class, which in turn, has
spurred demand for more labour and resultant wage increase (at about 2 per
cent, per annum, on average) through past two and a half decades (see Sharma
et al., 2014; Sundaram & Tendulkar, 2005).
The Studied Field
In light of these differences, the call given by several scholars for a deeper engage-
ment between economics and anthropology seems highly pertinent (see Banerjee
& Dufflo, 2011; Bardhan, 1989). As a small contribution, this article has tracked
changes in the scale and nature of poverty in two working class communities on
the margins of Delhi that were first surveyed by me in 1988–1989 (for an MPhil
dissertation) and revisited (to track different indices in 2004–2005, 2009, 2011 and
2014).
The names of these habitats are Dhantala and Aradhaknagar. While the former
is a village of about 2,600 persons, 90 kilometres east of central Delhi, in Meerut
district of Western Uttar Pradesh, the latter is a slum of about 1,700 residents situ-
ated on the Delhi–UP border along the Grand Trunk Road. Both are multi-caste
communities though Aradhaknagar has a preponderance of dalits while Dhantala
has 55 per cent middle castes, such as Gurjars and Kumhars.2 Upper castes have
moved out of the latter completely but constitute 10 per cent of the former.
Conceptualising Poverty
Before embarking on a review of material transitions in Dhantala and Aradhaknagar
since 1988, it would be useful to elucidate our conception of key categories such
as ‘privations’ and poverty here. While ‘privations’ has had few references in
existing literature on underdevelopment, the term ‘poverty’, on the other hand,
has had multiple referents. Standing generally for an acute lack of essentials, the
concept can be expanded to refer to a variety of dearths—cultural or material.
Material poverty itself may be relative (assessed with reference to the average or
median income in a country) or absolute (calculated with reference to the money
value of minimum food and other basic requirements). Absolute poverty has again
been assessed on the basis of different subsistence levels from US$1 per capita,
per day to US$2, per day, by UNO and other organisations.
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