No poor In India’s malls ?

No poor In India’s malls ?
As a member of the IT community in India , I (like a million others) am forever striving to save a few million dollars for our (mainly western) clients. TO do this we often tweak processes and formulae to the 4th decimal place. It was while I was doing this some months back that I realized that educated India has banished the Indian poor to statistics.

There are often “heated” debates on TV and in parliament on what exactly is poor and how many people are below the poverty line in India. It suits the government of the day to put a low figure for a “survival” income. Some months back Montek Singh Ahluwalia drew a lot of flak when he suggested the threshold of poverty to be Rs 32 per per person per day in urban India and a lower figure of 26 for rural areas. Even with this appallingly low figure, the poor in India have been estimated to be 407 million. The opposition parties felt that the figure is too low.. meaning that the number of poor people is significantly higher. While estimates and opinions vary, I have not seen ANY source quoting a figure below 25%.. which in terms of current population means about 275 million ! Now that’s avry large number of people.. nearly equal to the population of the United States.

Interestingly, while we probably have the world’s largest population of the poor (China is a strong contender), they are rarely present in the public consciousness. There was a time (till the 70’s I think) when Indian film makers produced films involving the poor but none are produced now. Bollywood has (and why blame them) gone the “market forces” way. It would take exceptional creativity to make money out of a story on the poor.. and Bollywood is not high on creativity. And the middle class market is anyway large enough to buy escapist fare.. so why dirty your hands ?

And what is true of Bollywood is true or books, newspapers and TV… one rarely sees any coverage on poverty. Now here is the catch.. On the international scene , in the last few years there was 1 film (Slumdog Millionaire) and 1 book (Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger) which focused on the poor in India and were both successful and critically acclaimed.

Finally, an example closer home. Most Indian large cities have at least a coupe of malls. These are usually expensively-constructed, well-maintained and air-conditioned buildings. There is no entry fee. Yet have you ever seen any poor people there ?… although the mall may be a stones’ throw away from a slum ? It is as if the poor have given up on the rest of us and decided to stay away.