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.

... contd.