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Last week I spent many hours listening to India’s richest men and most important politicians talk about poverty. While Delhi baked in weather that was hot even for an Indian summer, we debated the causes and cures of poverty in the climate-controlled halls of a nice hotel. The occasion was the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) annual meeting and Sunil Mittal pulled in an impressive crowd for his last event as CII president.

The prime minister came, and Sonia Gandhi and important cabinet ministers. Lal Krishan Advani was there, as was Narendra Modi and a gaggle of ‘young’ politicians, nearly all of whom had made it to Parliament on seats inherited from Daddyji or Mummyji. If you read the Young Turks column in this newspaper, you know what a depressing crew our future leaders are, which is why the fight against poverty is going to need the active participation of those of you who are as shamed by India’s poverty as we all should be.

This does not mean we should allow government to abdicate its responsibility, only that we cannot leave such an important matter entirely in the hands of ministers more interested in alleviating the poverty of their progeny than anything else. At the CII meeting the prime minister urged industrialists to ‘tighten their belts’, apparently without realising that this would do nothing to reduce the poverty of those who live below the poverty line. As an economist who understands exactly why India remains a poor country, he would have done better to admit publicly that if the vast majority of Indians continue to live on less than Rs 20 a day, it is because of bad economic policies and bad governance. If Rahul Gandhi discovers only this on his ‘Discovery of India’ tour, he deserves to be prime minister. There is no indication yet that he has, if we are to judge by his blind support of vast, expensive and mostly useless schemes like the national rural employment guarantee enterprise. Efforts of this kind, even when they work, serve mostly to keep people in poverty when simple alternatives can empower the poor to lift themselves out of poverty.

One simple suggestion came from Arun Shourie at the CII annual meeting. He pointed out that if we liquidated the Rs 80,000 crore we spend on poverty removal schemes annually and transfer the cash directly to the poor it would work better. He calculated that the 70 million people estimated to be living below the poverty line would each get Rs 3,500 a month, making them no longer poor by India’s wretchedly poor standards.

Another simple suggestion came in the form of the CII healthy village plan. Dr Naresh Trehan, in the presence of Sonia Gandhi, told of a village in Haryana that had been transformed in the past five years at a meagre cost of Rs 12 lakh. With this money a sewage disposal system was created, clean water was made available, drains were cleaned, public toilets built for the village school and a modern system of waste disposal installed. These measures brought infectious diseases down by 70 per cent and created a clean happy village that from the ‘before and after’ pictures no longer looks like a cesspool.

What saddened me was to hear Sonia Gandhi’s response. The patron saint of the aam aadmi praised her own government’s efforts at setting up a rural health mission without noticing that if it was working well, healthcare in rural India should have improved marginally in the past four years. If it has, the government has kept it very secret.

The only politician who had something new to say on rural development was the black sheep of us secularists. Narendra Modi. He spoke of the need to invent the concept of ‘ruburbs’ or areas that would remain rural but have the public services that urbanisation brings. Clean water, sewage systems and waste disposal. It is an important idea, because it shows that at least one of our chief ministers has understood that the fight against poverty will in the end only be won if we empower the poor to join the fight. This empowerment cannot come without decent schools, healthcare and a basic standard of living.

After the CII meeting, I happened to drive through a Delhi village less than half an hour away from where we spent two days discussing poverty and sustainable development and this is what I saw. Modernity trying to survive ancient decay. Shops selling expensive electronic goods on the edge of drains thick with slime, new clinics buzzing with flies, and all along the village high street, large mountains of rotting garbage the putrid stench of which filled the air. Few countries in the world look this bad.

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