Quoting telltale figures, T N Ninan exposed the hypocrisy of opposition parties in shedding crocodile tears on the “insensitivity” of the government in defining poverty (“Parliamentary chutzpah,” March 24). Essentially, by now, it has become an established strategy of all political parties to focus on trivialities surrounding a grave issue instead of dealing with the issue itself. Thus, without crying hoarse on deciding “who is poor”, politicians could have recognised that even by the government-given definition, there are 354 million poor in India who earn just about Rs 30 a day and then done some intellectual analysis to identify the causes of such indigence to suggest course correction.
For example, how much of higher reduction of poverty level in rural areas (eight per cent) in comparison to urban (four per cent) is real and not caused by migration to towns? How much of alleviation of poverty resulted from inclusive growth and not from welfare programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act? How much more poverty could have been reduced if the mechanism to deliver poverty mitigation measures were free from corruption?
It is not that our elected representatives lack wisdom, but are unable to get rid of indolent thinking unless given a jolt by the electorate.
Y G Chouksey Pune
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