Jeremy Seabrook has a nice OPED in the Guardian (also reproduced in The Hindu) entitled ‘In a world of wealth, poverty has become a necessity’. This is a relevant critique of existing development models, billionaire-philanthrophist poverty elimination programs and government programs. As Seabrook concludes:
The most damning critique of the existing development paradigm is not so much that it is unable to “cure” poverty, damning though that is; it is rather that out of the very abundance of its ability to produce, it manages to create new forms of poverty. Poverty is not a question of the laggards and the left-behind of globalisation, but remains an inescapable structural necessity - required to justify continued growth and expansion beyond sufficiency. Natural scarcity gives way to human-made impoverishments: this is recognised in the word “deprivation” which, like many terms in the lexicon of poverty, betrays its meaning. “Deprivation” means something is taken away from people, in order to maintain them in a state of poverty to which they will never become accustomed; thereby justifying a system that lays waste a world without meeting more than a fraction of human need.
Will we ever be honest about the necessity of poverty for our first ‘world existence and lifestyles’, be it in Bangalore or Boston?
2 Comments
It is true that only with a slum nearby I can feel the security of my middle claas home to be worth it. And of course for my middle claas life to go on I need a few poor maids and servants around. SO in India, no city can ever dream of fully eradicating poverty. If they do, who would do the dishes? Where would the istriwallah come from? and the raddiwalla (as i need to make a few bucks out of the raddi also). I remember Ashis Nandy once quoting an urban architect saying that every city has a slum in its unconscious blue print.
I think the question to ask is about the efficacy of the discursive modes we employ to understand poverty, steeped as these are in the value coded ideas of economy, development, social welfare and so on. Our very means of making sense of poverty is a product of our class bias and shapes and is shaped by the class values. It is not only that the development paradigm serves the haves, but more fundamentally our very tools of understanding economy (poverty 4 eg) is generated by the values and needs of the haves. THese can only show us pictures that suit us.
However, presently the available ideas for sustainable development are based more on asceticism and face the danger of easily succumbing to pre-modern social evils as caste in India. Challenge for critiques of modernity still lies in mediating abundance of living opportunities with equity.
Man, I didn’t add 8 and 3 in the box above and I lost all my comments. that sucks…..
Let me try, I am bored to write the whole thing again, though.
I wonder what would Amartya Sen say.
I guess it’s better if the society (and thus the government) stops saying “We will eradicate poverty”. A better approach is for our Rajas to say “Let’s improve the lifestyle of every human being”.
communis never worked, will never work. All men are NOT created equal.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have goals and aims in life. They should be variables in an equation which involves only us, not others.
Well, I guess I am digressing, let me stop here.
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