Every time I go to Pakistan I find myself irritated by the fact that there is much more visible poverty in India than in that country. This is absurd since we have a much stronger economy, so we must be doing something wrong. We are. We have wasted, and continue to waste, hundreds of thousands of crore rupees on poverty alleviation schemes that cannot work because they are so grandiose that they inevitably leak like sieves. We must stop throwing good money after bad or we will continue to lose the war against poverty.

In the old days, when we wore our poverty like a badge of honour — we are the poorest country in the world we liked to say — it did not matter that our poverty ‘alleviation’ schemes mostly failed. Times have changed and we are now proud of the number of Indian billionaires that get into international billionaire lists. Their billions mean nothing unless we succeed in winning the war against poverty. If we want every Indian to have access to a decent standard of living we have to begin by acknowledging that poverty does not need alleviation. It must be destroyed like some hideous virus.