Can we eliminate the poverty by law!

Poverty of Indians must be studied with a significantly different perspective than the poverty of other societies due to the deep religious faiths of her people. Sadhus such as Nagas may be poor by the Western definitions, but for them, it is a chosen way of life, which is infinitely richer. Many of the beggars in India do so to follow family traditions, and to fulfill vows made to a deity.

While colorful literature is available on past glories of a great land but in contemporary India, of whom the poverty remains a Himalayan problem. Most will agree with this that we haven’t been able to solve this problem for more than 5 decades now. Although, lot of research has been done to understand poverty and researchers have come up complex plans and schemes to eliminate poverty. But one has succeeded so for because people forget the fundamental fact of economics essentially saying “You can’t legislate poverty away!!” The one very naïve idea is, why not raise the minimum wage high enough to put everybody above the poverty line? It sounds so simple, elegant and painless. Alas, it will not work because of the law of unintended consequences, if eradicating poverty was so simple, people would surely have done this centuries ago? There is an interesting tale teaching the same thing. The Emperor Tughlak tried something of the sort by decreeing that silver was equal in value to copper. He thought poor people holding copper coins would instantly become as rich as those having silver. Instead rich quickly submitted copper coins to the treasury and demanded silver in return. Soon the treasury was empty of silver, the rich had got richer and the poor were as badly off as ever. Tughlak had not thought through the unintended consequences of his decree. He failed to realize that the fundamental economic fact - that silver is relatively scarce and copper relatively abundant - cannot be changed by mere legislation (this parable is taken from Swaminathan's original article in TOI 2003).

Many of the policies implemented so far in India suffered from the same disease, they lacked the vision and were merely focused on legislating poverty away, farm-subsidies, loan Melas, controlled rates and rationing of food grains and kerosene and many more, all of them actually benefit the rich and marginalize the poor, for the simple reason that by the time poor recognize the benefits (intended for them only) in a policy it turns out that our “rich-poors” have already tapped all the potential and policy has becomes a fiasco.

It’s been a while, since we have seen a new idea coming up to eradicate poverty, seems that we have actually ran out our think tank and waiting for a miracle. Remember! Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Poverty is but the worst form of violence." Yes! It is. Everybody needs to contribute to solve this problem otherwise you are actually ignoring the violence that is happening around you. Start thinking today.