The Planning Commission’s revelations about the life and times of India’s poor threaten my domestic peace. Tulsi, my cook, revered by friends and family, has just announced that she is leaving. My loss is the Planning Commission’s gain. She is joining its communications department.
“Should not the poor get some of that money that is spent in studying them? Besides, it is mighty unfair that at a time when high petrol and food prices are straining family budgets, shopping secrets of those teetering on the edge of poverty are not being shared,” she declared last week.
It all started with the buzz around counting India’s poor. There were animated discussions at home about the Planning Commission, the august body which defines the poverty line in the country on the basis of spending. One of its expert committees has recommended that a total monthly expenditure of Rs578.80 per person, or less than Rs20 per day per person, as the cut-off point for urban poverty, based on a national survey. This includes expenditure on some 24 items including food, education and health.
Snatches of overheard conversation got Tulsi thinking. As a cook and someone who has to feed five family members and a houseguest who refuses to leave, she wants to know, and tell, the story behind those figures.
To put the record straight — Tulsi is not among Delhi’s poorest of the poor. And yet, she can afford only ‘rejected’ vegetables at discounted prices at the end of the day. With this, her monthly food bill hovers between Rs5,000 and Rs7,000. Tulsi would like to know where you can buy vegetables, fruits, cooking oil, even footwear and clothes, at the rates that the experts have catalogued.
Semi-rotting tomatoes sell at Rs5 per kilo, Tulsi discovered. Even if a person were to live on semi-rotting vegetables, his/her monthly bill for veggies will still be way above Rs36.60 which the Planning Commission says isthe cap to be eligible for social benefits for the poor.
Many experts argue that the government simply cannot afford to dole out social benefits to so many poor people any more. The Supreme Court disagrees, and has ordered the government to distribute five million tonnes of food grains to the poorest districts of the country.
New surveys to count the poor are in the pipeline and some hope there will be a new poverty line.
Meanwhile, Tulsi is doing her homework. After joining the nation’s planners, she intends to ferret out their list of real estate agents. She would like to know how a city dweller in India today can rent a place, and have some leftovers for conveyance, for Rs30.68 a month. In Delhi, even a cowshed (without its original occupants) is hired out at a minimum of Rs1,000 per month.
The pavement offers possibilities but converting a patch into one’s family home would necessarily involve a deal with law enforcement agencies.Such ‘deals’ are indexed to the rate of inflation and thus chances of making one at Rs30.68 a month are slim.
Tulsi would also like to be taken on a guided tour of shops where you can get a pair of slippers within Rs6, the monthly cap for footwear for the urban poor. Back in rural Satna in Madhya Pradesh, where she comes from, Tulsi bought a hardy pair made out of car tyres for Rs10. That was 15 years ago.
As an aspiring communications professional, Tulsi is naturally excited by out-of-the-box ideas to deal with the poor who are, quite often, very hungry. Examples abound. A few years ago, a principal secretary in the Bihar government wanted to promote rat meat to deal with food shortages.
There were twin advantages to his proposal, he pointed out.First, catching and eating rats would save about half of the state’s food grain stocks. Second, by eating this protein-enriched food, poor, landless and illiterate farmers, mostly among the Musahar community, would be improving their lot.
Nothing wrong with rat meat as antidote to hunger, experts may say. After all, the Chinese love bird’s nest soup. Cambodians relish cricket, the insect. Mexican gourmets swear by ant larvae or escamoles. And lobsters, the rich man’s delicacy, was once the poor man’s food in North America.
Tulsi has got her future mapped out — a cook, a communicator, and next, a chronicler of good food for the poor, fusing expert-speak with her everyday experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment