Human Development Report - 2000

The primary objective of the Indian Constitution is social justice. It upholds the dignity of the individual, guaranteeing citizens a fundamental right to equality before the law. It promises that they will not be discriminated against on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. It guarantees equality of opportunity in public employment, and assures personal freedoms such as the right to speech, life, liberty and religion.

The Directive Principles take this commitment a step further by instructing the state to secure a wide range of measures, including free legal aid and the citizen's right to work, education and public assistance. They also enjoin the state to ensure a living wage for all workers. Though non-enforceable, the Directive Principles declare:

The state shall…strive to minimise the inequalities in income, and endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities.

In spite of this, the World Development Reportⁱⁱ says that over 40 per cent of the population in India live below the poverty line, and nearly half are still illiterate.

The overall figures for every aspect of development, when broken down, indicate that the poor and those who face discrimination are the worst sufferers and lack access to the basics. As the World Development Report puts it, "Poor women face a double disadvantage in access to resources and voice - they are poor, and they are women". The Human Development Report 2000 found "extreme deprivation" especially among rural women of scheduled tribes.

Take the figures which measure gender inequality in key areas of economic and political participation and decision-making. According to the HDR 2000, only one in five of all professional and technical workers in India is a woman.

In its study of human poverty, the report says that 19 percent of India's population still lacks access to safe water, a quarter does not have access to health services and as much as 71 per cent lives without access to sanitation. More than half - 53 percent - of all Indian children below the age of five are underweight. There are only 0.4 telephones to every thousand Indians. The top 10 per cent of India's people account for 33.5 per cent of income or consumption. The 10 per cent at the other end of the scale account for a mere 3.5 per cent.

Although progress has been made in areas such as literacy and life expectancy, a very large number of people remain excluded from the development that others in the country enjoy.

In Reforming the Constitution (1992), Subhash Kashyap, former secretary-general of the Lok Sabha, writes: "It was, perhaps, the class character and elitist composition of the Constituent Assembly that was responsible for distribution of basic human rights into the enforceable and fundamental rights and the non-enforceable directive principles of state policy. The poor, illiterate, hungry masses had no use for most of the rights like the right to property, freedom of thought and expression, equality of opportunity in matters of public employment etc. In any case, they were in no position to claim any benefit from hunger, right to a living wage etc. All these were relegated to the non-enforceable principles."

Although the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (Art. 7) calls for all to be "equal before the law and entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law," only in the 1990s has the close relationship between poverty and the denial of human rights been placed on the agenda of the United Nations system.

The Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (June 1993) convened to consider the relationship between development, democracy and the universal enjoyment of all human rights declared that: "Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthrights of all human beings and should be treated as mutually reinforcing."

The individual was taking centrestage and discrimination was finally being recognised as a negation of the principle of equality and an affront to human dignity.

Are human rights violations in India exacerbated by, and do they often result from, the vulnerability, silence and marginalisation of huge sections of the Indian populace that are poor? Does the lack of equal opportunity perpetuate this vulnerability?

Each day the press reports any number of crimes against people who are poor. The picture that emerges is that poor people can be beaten, even killed, by those who are more privileged. They can be forced to work under inhuman conditions and without wages, and the women can be raped, often with little hope of redress. The newspaper reader who sees such stories day after day no longer knows how to react. There are just too many of them.

And one fact underlines all the reports: to be poor in India is to live without basic human rights and human dignity.

The polite term for all this is 'economic discrimination,' but it comes down to the same thing: the poor enjoy no human rights to speak of, and no equality before the law. Their rights have to be fought for - but they have neither the power nor the ability to pursue the battle for themselves. Which is where the media come in.

A front-page story in the Times of India starts by asking - Is everybody actually equal before the law?

Reporting an order to close down polluting industrial units located in non-conforming residential areas - a move which sparked off violent protests in Delhi - the story says:

Even as starvation stares in the face of petty workers, the rich and the powerful carry on with their polluting units in non-conforming areas, courtesy the government and its proverbial Nelson's eye.

The order to close thousands of small units had brought into question the survival and livelihood of thousand of small scale workers in the capital city.

The Times of India, 22.11.00

A day later, the same newspaper carried a follow-up story from Bawana, a Delhi suburb to which the polluting industrial units were to be relocated.

The story, headlined "This is our land, this is farm land," said the Delhi government began acquiring land in 1997 from villagers who had lived and farmed in Bawana for half a century.

One day, the villagers saw notices pasted outside their homes. The farmers were left with no choice but to go and collect their compensation. Nobody asked them. Nobody told them.

According to the report, the compensation given to the villagers was a fraction of the government's planned selling price. The farmers said they would rather have received land in exchange, but they had little option and no opportunity to argue their case.

Although the aim of the government has been to create conditions for the uplift of the most deprived, daily reports in the newspapers make it clear that the system is often unresponsive. A lack of accountability and corruption at all levels makes it all the more hard to push for change.

Many other stories reflect the extreme vulnerability of the poor.

Between January 1 and June 30, 2000, 184 Dalits were murdered and 169 Dalit women raped by upper caste people in U.P.

The Pioneer, 20.9.00

In the capital city, Delhi, a 40-year-old slum dweller affected by demolitions told a reporter: "The police and the MCD never gave me any time to remove my things. They just told me to get out and then broke my jhuggi. My tyres, air pump and vessels were taken away. The MCD people never informed us earlier or gave us time to remove our things."

Transparency, October 1999

A news report from Haryana said that more than 100 men from the Faridabad Municipal Corporation arrived at Mohabatabad without prior warning. With them came bulldozers and a police contingent. Giving the stone crushing workers no time to save their meagre belongings, they razed about 800 shanties and two small school buildings to the ground. The few workers who protested were arrested.

'Haryana labourers' struggle for a better life.' Hindustan Times, 16.9.00

The Supreme Court had earlier ordered the Haryana government to provide housing for the workers. Not only had the state government ignored orders from the highest court in the country but, according to the Hindustan Times, they took from these workers the bare minimum they had, and even destroyed the two small school buildings that served the children of the community. In Madhya Pradesh, a family of five was driven to committing suicide because they could not cope with their poverty.

The Statesman, 19.7.00

Nineteen children from Bihar aged 6 to 12 years, were forced to work 16 hours a day for five months without salary, during which time they were given only one meal per day.

Hindustan Times, 11.9.00

An editorial in The Pioneer commented that even the floods in Bihar did nothing to prevent the caste war carnage there.

The recent killing of six Dalits in central Bihar signals that despite the swirling waters, ultra-left militants and banned upper caste private armies continue to have a free run. Law and order has disintegrated in the state.

The editorial went on to make a powerful connection between this situation and the failure of the state government to address fundamental issues such as land reforms. In a state where the caste war has taken a vicious form, the landless, mostly Dalits, are "not only denied access to land, but are also forced to live in utterly degraded conditions. Material deprivation is made unendurable by the denial of basic human dignity."

Powerful landowners have their own army, The Pioneer said, and added: "Though it is outlawed, its leaders have complete freedom and their activists continue to assert their caste dominance over Dalits by intimidating and even killing them."

Another Carnage.

The Pioneer, 12.9.00

The World Development Report 2000-2001 noted that "Evidence from India shows that scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are among the structural poor who not only lack economic resources but whose poverty is strongly linked to social identity, as determined by caste. They also have worse social indicators."

Far from Bihar and from the caste wars that terrorise its people, a 16-year-old working at a dye shop in Delhi was "brutally beaten, strangulated and set ablaze by his employer" who found Rs 7,000 missing from his office and suspected that he had stolen the money.
Hindustan Times, 20.8.00

These stories, and many others like them, demonstrate clearly that fear - fear of threats to personal security, of torture, and other violent acts, which is high on the human rights and human development agenda - is a constant presence for many in India. Human rights campaigns tended, until recently, to focus on civil and political issues rather than economic and social ones.

Today, however, human rights and development agencies see no separation between these two sets of rights. Those who live without basic economic and social rights can rarely enjoy civil and political rights, and conversely, higher basic standards of living contribute to ensuring greater protection of human rights, sometimes unfairly so.

Money talks. If being poor means bearing the burden of insults and injuries, of injustice and unequal opportunity, then having money means enjoying privileges even when they should be denied. A Times of India editorial brought home this truth. It said:

A man remanded to jail custody spent four days in Presidency Jail, Calcutta, and had the experience of a lifetime. It was not a world of unrelieved gloom, happily, and he found that with the right kind of money and attitude, wonders could be achieved.

Inside the prison, if one pays up, it is possible to live like a VIP complete with clean linen, good toilets, and television. The alternative was to live in a large hall with 150 others in sub-human conditions. These people are called `khatniwallas' because they have to undertake manual labour while those ready to spend can relax all the time.

Editorial, Times of India, 11.9.00

The poor in urban areas have their own cross to bear.

Rakesh, the son of a sweeper, was in Class VI when his headmaster punished him by making him parade naked in the school. Traumatised, Rakesh dropped out and it took him a couple of years to pick up his books again.

His parents told the reporter covering the story "This kind of thing happens with the poor".

The Pioneer, 13.7.00

It happens at least partly because the poor are both voiceless and powerless. This incident is merely illustrative of the wider denial of rights that is taking place.
Political patronage matters and can determine access to even such basics as water.

Tikri Kalan, a village on the outskirts of Delhi, had no water for two months because it lacked patronage, unlike neighbouring villages which do have patronage and therefore water.

Times of India 30.5.00

The Constitution promises citizens an equal right to public facilities, but this is just one of the rights that economically weaker groups cannot take for granted.

The World Development Report, published in September 2000, estimated that 44 per cent of the Indian population still lives on less than $1 a day. Eighty six per cent live on less than $2 a day. Poverty figures are said to be declining but, as human rights journalist P. Sainath writes in his book Everybody loves a good drought,

There are more poor in India today than the population of the country in 1947. Yet, the government celebrates the swift decline of poverty. A good part of the media have joined it in this.

Figures cannot communicate what 'living in poverty' means or how it affects human rights and human dignity.

People who live in extreme poverty, in which the very basics of life - food, security, sanitation, healthcare, education, housing and employment - are denied, are automatically denied also the right to live without fear and want. In extreme situations, these conditions might even threaten their right to life itself.

You don't have to be a journalist to know the face of poverty in India. It surrounds us. It's simply there. But to understand that economic discrimination is responsible for the lack of human rights is another matter. And one of the big problems for journalists dealing with poverty and economic discrimination is how to report it in a way that makes a difference.

Once seen as `soft' news, human poverty was not the kind of thing most journalists wanted to cover. Politics was where you would make your mark, and poverty and economic and social discrimination were not political issues. There are signs that things have changed.

Poverty has been linked to human rights and human rights is now the big global issue. Poverty is seen to impede the progress of nations because large sections of the population remain illiterate and hungry and cannot, therefore, contribute to development and growth. A new environment is being created in which mainstream journalists may well have to rethink the content of their reporting on these issues.

The truth is that the poor have not been given much attention because of the perception that a poor person hardly exists and can only lay claim, modestly, to 'poor' rights. Such perceptions need to be changed.

Legal provisions - laws drawn up in Delhi - that say there should be adequate protection of vulnerable populations are clearly insufficient. Poverty is much more than mere lack of income. It is deprivation across many dimensions. In floods and famines, endemic to this region, it is the poor who are the most affected. In terms of physical security, it is the poor who are most often the victims of arbitrary violence. In terms of discrimination, women, children and minorities face the greatest injustices be they at the workplace, in the home or in relation to public institutions.

Poor people are particularly vulnerable to adverse events outside their control. They are often treated badly by the institutions of state and society and excluded from voice and power in those institutions.

World Development Report 2000

If poverty is a basis for the denial of human rights, where do the poor turn for protection?

An independent and strong judiciary is one of the pillars of a system of checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power. The effectiveness of the Indian judiciary is, however, limited by the fact that there are an estimated 2,000 pending cases for each judge, which slows down the process of obtaining justice.

This is what P. Sainath says about this.

I think one of the very important things is to look at what is the access of the ordinary Indian to the judicial system of this country? I visited the lowest unit of the court, Sub-Divisional Magistrate of one district in Bihar.

The first thing that happens in a court is that the advocate abuses the client because he is of the lower caste. The advocate discriminates against him at that point. He will even betray his client's interests.

The second thing is the harassment by the court clerk for a bribe...

I saw an extraordinary magistrate. In two-and-a-half hours, he passed thirty-six bail applications on crimes like murder, rape, firing on a police party! A man who confesses to firing on a police party gets a bail of Rs. 4,000 . This SDM gives you bail even in crimes in which the high court cannot give you bail.

In Search of Development Stories, Vidura, April-June1998

Whether it is the Right to Information movement (uniquely a grassroots movement which has demanded access to government records to reduce corruption), or the large number of public interest litigations whereby people's organisations are taking direct recourse to the judicial system to protect rights, there is evidence of more and more public action to bring about change.

The press can make a difference. A study carried by the World Development Report 2000-2001 (Preventing famines: the local press matters) says that "Famines are often the result of crises that affect agricultural production - floods or droughts. How quickly governments respond to such crises depends on many factors. A fundamental one is the level of democracy and the extent to which politicians are held accountable for the efficiency of programmes. A recent study in India shows that the distribution of newspapers can play a big part." The study says that the higher the circulation, the better the response of the local government. State governments were most sensitive, the study says, to high circulating newspapers in local languages read by the local electorate.

The Voices of the Poor study carried by the World Development Report 2000-2001, says: "In India, the characteristics of credit institutions can deter poor people from seeking loans. Poor people in many regions also report widespread corruption in healthcare systems. But when facing serious health conditions, they feel they have no choice but to comply with demands for bribes."

Economic inequalities coupled with social barriers make it very hard for the poor to break free of their poverty.

Once we recognise that poverty, and everything that it implies, is a fundamental denial of human rights, what can we do to fight it? The press has played an important part in bringing attention to the denial of rights to the poor in the country, not only by reporting incidents and crimes against the poor but also by exposing inefficiency, corruption and injustice. But the fight against poverty requires that cases in which the poor are finding ways to free themselves of the poverty trap must also get into the news.