DR FAISAL BARI

The man is relatively old, blind and not able to work. His wife is also quite old and has never worked outside of the house in her life. They have two young daughters, but they are almost illiterate and they too have not worked outside of their house in their life. Not that there is any work for them to do in the village anyway.

This is a real household in a small village in a relatively developed part of rural Punjab. The household has always been poor, but their current condition is nothing less than critical. They survive on the help that they receive from neighbours and some of the richer households in the village. But this help is barely enough to keep them out of complete starvation. It does not prevent major health issues, malnutrition issues and even issues regarding having decent clothing and so on.

When the old man could work, he used to be a muzdoor. He would work in the fields or would go to the nearby city to work as a labourer in construction industry. Even then the household was living in rather constrained conditions. But since he has gone blind, he has seen levels of poverty and deprivation that are hard to even write about. It is difficult to believe that a household can survive in such conditions.

It goes without saying that the state apparatus does not even know that such a household exists. No Zakat, Bait ul Maal, Prime Minister or Chief Minister programme has ever reached them. And his ability to go look for these programmes is very limited: limited by his lack of resources, his lack of literacy and his lack of ability to move around.

The old man comes from a caste whose members are, on average, also not very well off. Most of the people in this caste, spread over rural Punjab, are poor, lack skills, lack education and though most of them are connected to agriculture, do not own land and most of the time do not even own their homes.

But the story is much worse. Some of the research shows that most of the people from this and similar castes have not even been able to break the circle of poverty and deprivation over generations as well. Their fathers and grandfathers were as poor as they are and they expect that their children will be as poor, as deprived and as powerless as they are (interestingly, the only bright spot in their lives, from the perspective of some hope, was Bhutto's rule of the 1970s, but that is another story for another article). So, the story is not of poverty alone, it is a story of denial of rights, denial of inclusion, and denial of effective enfranchisement.

Current generation is poor as it has no education, no skills, no fixed assets (land or other holdings), no savings and very limited ability to raise credit. He/she is forced to live as a daily wage worker, or as a unskilled worker on the fields of the landlords or in the households of the richer village people. But this gives her barely enough to feed her children. She cannot afford to send her children to private schools of course.

The state has been unable to provide quality education and health services in the village and so her children cannot get education or decent health care. But even if there is a decent public school available in the area, her children are usually excluded from being able to avail the services of that school.

This exclusion, from state provided services, for some castes, has not been studied a lot, but it has been pointed out in some other research work too. It points to a very significant failure of the state. State institutions are unable to treat citizens equally and fairly: they are unable to extend the same quality of services to all irrespective of their caste, creed, religion and level of income.

There is an even more important failure here. If the state knows that certain sections of the society, castes and creeds are not being able to access state provided services, are being excluded and to the extent that they cannot even have a decent though basic life (and how can the state not know this about these castes from across Pakistan), the state should have focused their energies on bringing these castes into the mainstream and it should have made extra efforts to ensure that the excluded groups are given their fair share and more in the resources of the state, that they are able to access state provided services and are able to break the vicious circles of poverty and deprivation that they are locked into.

The failure gets more exasperating and even more exclusionary when the other organs of the state reinforce the initial failure. The local administration, the canal water official, the patwari, the local policeman, the local tax official and even the local judicial officer all support the local notables and major land holders. They feel that they would be more successful in their job and careers if they have good working relationships with the local notables.

The notables reciprocate the feeling. So the local state institutions get aligned with the interests of the local notables and landlords and the excluded castes become even more excluded. A better state would make sure that its local representatives would try to go in the opposite direction. It would try to ensure that all people, landed or not, are treated fairly and equally, and if any are being discriminated against, it would ensure that the state institutions bend backwards to ensure that any initial inequality is redressed.

But the opposite actually happens. In a village I know fairly well, a girl from a poor household and from one of the excluded castes was raped by the landlord's son and then burnt alive. Before she died she even identified the culprit. But the local police, the local administration, and the local setup made the life of the parents so difficult that they had to settle with the landlord out of court. At that time, this happened quite a few years back, the parents were forced to accept something like Rs 10,000 and shut up for good. So much for state institutions trying to level the playing field.

To address the above, the state has to ensure that its service delivery mechanisms and local level institutions are able to divorce themselves from local politics and are able to extend the same level of services to all, irrespective of their caste and income. The state has to ensure that its local representatives are able to ensure effective participation from the excluded castes and people. But this is not going to be easy for an elitist and non-representative setup to achieve.

One possible and relatively easy way to address this type of exclusion and inequality would be through giving rights over land to the excluded classes. This would give them assets to break the poverty cycle with, it would guarantee certain level of income for them, and it would give them some power vis a vis the local landed elites. It would give them some power and respectability in the eyes of local state representatives as well.

It is important to note here that I am not arguing for land reform from the perspective of raising agricultural productivity: the traditional reason for talking about land reform. But it is to allow some balance in how power is distributed in rural areas and to allow excluded people and castes to re-enter the mainstream that I am arguing for land re-distribution. This is again a larger topic and one that deserves detailed thinking and arguing. We will come back to this issue in a later article.

Poverty can be perpetuated in many different ways. And it can be killing, quite literally. Some of its faces are given above. The state has a responsibility to eradicate poverty, but its current efforts are limited and sometimes even counterproductive, and with significant consequences for many. How we handle this issue will determine the fate of millions of people existing today and many millions who will be born in the years to come.

(The Nation: May 7, 2007)

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