In the week that we learned that four of the ten richest men in the world are Indian and that we have more billionaires than China and Brazil, I have to, alas, play spoilsport. It happens that just before Forbes magazine came out with its annual list, I was in rural Rajasthan amid the marginal farmers this prime minister seems so keen to help.

While our billionaires regularly make it to front pages across the country, our marginal people live such bleak lives that we prefer to forget about them. This is one reason why governments get away with expensive, elaborate anti-poverty measures that make marginal difference if any. It is my view that the Rs 60,000 crore that the finance minister just wrote off in the Budget to exempt marginal farmers from paying back their loans falls into this category. But, first let me give you a glimpse of life on the margins.

To get to the village of Ushaan, 40 km from Udaipur, we drove along a narrow, bumpy road that got narrower and bumpier as we climbed through a wasteland of barren hills. The village consisted of windowless huts made of stone and bereft of belongings of any kind. The people were all malnourished, illiterate and mired in hopeless, grinding poverty. They subsist on the one crop they grow in a year and their children rarely get a meal that includes anything more than dry makki-ki-roti (cornbread). Children grow up not just without food but without a childhood. Their parents have no choice but to send children as young as ten off with contractors who take them as virtual slave labour to the factories of Gujarat. The Rs 500 a child earns in a month is more important than the childhood he loses working 12 hours a day.

... contd.