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.

... contd.