Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

Timeless, Or Are Times Changing?

It's one of those timeless scenes of rural India, I found myself thinking. You'll excuse my appropriation of the phrase, but when I've seen words to that effect, they usually go on to describe something like this. A woman walks along a path near a village somewhere in the interiors of India. She wears a colourful sari and has several large metal pots balanced on her head. Behind her, the sun goes down in a blaze of orange; an occasional gentle mooing from a cow is the only sound you can hear.

Except this scene in front of me was not quite like that. It was the middle of a hot, dusty morning some days ago. My train had stopped for the umpteenth time at still another tiny station somewhere in the heart of Madhya Pradesh. It was already 4 hours late and would hit 7 by the time we reached Bombay early the next morning. I stood at the door of my compartment and wiped my brow, wondering when we would start and roll on to our next unscheduled halt.

I noticed a small cluster of women and children at one of those water pumps you see everywhere in rural India. Nothing else was interesting, so I watched them for the next half hour or so.

Each woman had a pot. Taking turns, each would put hers under the tap. When it was positioned, one of the little girls went to work. She would leap up and grab the end of the pump's long handle. Her puny weight, hanging from the rod, was just enough to bring it down slowly. Water flowed out of the tap into the pot. When it stopped, the child leaped up again, hung from the rod again, brought it down again. Water flowed again. On and on it went: leap, hang, lower, flow; leap, hang, lower, flow. Timeless.

Seven hours later than I would have liked, at home in Bombay the next morning, I switched on the geyser, turned the tap anti-clockwise and had a much-needed shower.

Later, I pulled out the newspapers and began catching up with the two weeks worth of news I had missed. Here's a not-so-random sampling of what I found.

First, there was the widespread exhilaration about the Budget. 'Growth-oriented,' The Times of India described it; its editorial said there was 'Relief All Round' 'Chidambaram leaves critics dumbstruck' was the headline for an inside-page article. Computers, mobile phones, cameras and icecream will all cost less, as vendors of some of these lost no time announcing via prominent advertisements. The stock market boomed, Nani Palkhivala applauded and all was just peachy with the world. Because in a lot of ways, this was the Best budget the country has ever had.

But I did my usual post-Budget exercise anyway: I looked for what will be spent on defence. Rs 356.2 billion it is, with a 'solemn undertaking' to the country from Mr Chidambaram that he will 'adequately provide for any additional requirement.' Then I went hunting for the spending on education, drinking water, health, mundane stuff like that. What's called 'basic minimum services' will get Rs 33 billion this year (including, incidentally, Rs 13 billion on rural water supplies). Public health and family welfare spending will be Rs 15.4 billion. Education gets Rs 52.3 billion, of which nearly half, or Rs 25.4 billion, is for elementary education.

As far as I can tell, the central government plans to spend about three-and-a-half times as much on defence as on education, health, family welfare and 'basic minimum services' combined. Now we are told that the government is committed to making free elementary education a fundamental right. We are also told that the government itself estimates that an 'additional' Rs 400 billion will have to be spent over the next five years to actually accomplish that: just slightly more than defence will cost us this year. Rs 25.4 billion for elementary education this year seems a stuttering start to that effort, but there it is.

One last note about the Budget. The increase in defence spending from last year, reports say, conforms to the 'generally accepted norm of the prevailing inflation rate plus an increase of five to six per cent.' Why this is a norm and how it is generally accepted, I couldn't divine. But defence gets more money. As it does, year after year. Changeless.

Next, I found that on one balmy March day, the number of people in the country 'recognised as poor' by the government suddenly doubled. This was because a new method, taking into account the declining purchasing power of the rupee, was used to estimate the number of poor. Armed with it, the government decided that 36 per cent of India, or 320 million Indians, fell below the poverty line.

New calculation or old, it takes only a look around, nearly anywhere in India, to know that well above one Indian in three is desperately poor. In fact, last year the UNDP's Human Development Report estimated that 61.5 per cent of Indians, or 550 million, are 'capability poor.' That is, that many people lead lives fundamentally deprived on various counts. Regardless of the poverty line.

Whichever way you count them, the sheer numbers of poor in the country go up steadily, inexorably. Timeless, again.

We in the middle and upper classes, not forgetting our brethren in politics, don't really like being reminded about those numbers, those people. For our concerns are quite different. Like these: Why has VSNL raised its Internet access charges? Why should we sign the CTBT, be dictated to by the West? What intersection, street, city or district is left that, 'fulfilling the aspirations of the people', can be renamed?

When we do think of the poor, it is only to wonder how we can get them off our city streets. Which brings me to my third finding: a news report from Vijayawada. It's about a Thomas Koshy, who won the National Award for Children's Welfare last year and runs an organisation for street children in that city. Koshy is quoted: 'Conditions in village schools, poverty.... drive rural children from their homes to urban streets.'

Of course, it's not as if we didn't know this, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded. The process of turning rural poor into urban destitute goes on, as it has for decades. On and on.

Let me draw all this together. As a country, we continue to deprive hundreds of millions of the simple ability to live ordinary lives. That drives them into ever more miserable conditions. The number of poor people in India has never stopped increasing. The amount we spend on the poor has consistently been just a fraction of defence spending, which has also never stopped increasing. Those of us fortunate to be educated and articulate enough to speak out about this are distracted instead by other passions. Governments come and go, but these truths remain. Constant.

But today, we at least have a Budget that offers many reasons for optimism.

I stood at that door on the train for a long time, watching the pump, almost mesmerised. I lost count of the number of athletic leaps the small girl executed. When the train finally jolted into motion, she was still at it. For all I know, she is probably still at it as I write this. As you read this. Timeless.

Timeless, because I know those women and children have had to get their water in precisely the same way, from that one source in their village, for years. Timeless, because I used to be confident that when I passed that way again, I would see the same scene again. The little girl will have grown up to be one of the women with the pots, but perhaps her skinny daughter will be the one leaping, hanging, lowering.

Yes, I always thought it would remain one of those timeless Indian scenes. So is it because of the Budget that I now nurse a small hope it will change one day?

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