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Interviews | Prof. Jan Breman, Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, interviewed by G Sampath
Prof. Jan Breman, Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, interviewed by G Sampath

Prof. Jan Breman, Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, interviewed by G Sampath

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published Published on Feb 21, 2016   modified Modified on Feb 21, 2016
-The Hindu

Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century.

Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in 2014 as well — that’s more than half a century of field work. In his latest book, On Pauperism In Present and Past, published last month, Professor Breman, 79, argues that what is being ‘Made in India’ right now at an impressive rate are paupers. Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, Prof. Breman was in Delhi recently, and in a freewheeling interview discussed, among other things, pauperism, the Gujarat model, and the return of social Darwinism to mainstream discourse. Excerpts:

* Where is the need for terms such as ‘pauper' and ‘pauperism’ as analytical categories, when we already have ‘poverty’?

There is a difference between poverty and destitution, or what I call pauperism. In poverty, it is difficult to make ends meet. You somehow cope, do your level best to add to your income. So you also have your wife and children working along. In destitution, you are simply unable to cope. You are so utterly poor that it is difficult to even survive. And if you survive, you need outside support. Unfortunately, the poverty debate in India has more or less been appropriated by economists. So we look at income or consumption or employment levels, and not at the social or political dimension of poverty. A category such as ‘pauperism’ is needed to capture these non-economic aspects as well.

* You argue in your book that India’s poverty line is a destitution line. Are you saying that those below poverty line in India are not poor but destitute?

Not all but a good number are. According to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), the poverty line fixed by the Planning Commission is a joke: 76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty. If you have such a vast mass of poor, you have to differentiate between levels of poverty. Certainly a big number is close to the poverty line. But in my estimate, about 25 per cent of India’s poor are destitute, or paupers.

* So who is a pauper, in sociological terms?

In the first place, the paupers are the non-labouring poor, those who have no earning capacity. They never had or have lost their labour power and therefore can’t make a living. These include the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, but also widows with small children, divorcees without any support from others. Basically, in order to survive in poverty, you need a household. You cannot manage on your own because the flow of income varies with the seasons. You need to pull the household together to bring in the income — this is why you have child labour in India, isn’t it? But paupers also include the labouring poor, especially those whose income and employment are erratic or seasonal.

* But Indian economists don’t believe in terms like ‘pauper’.

That’s true. It was only Gandhi who wrote about paupers in an article published in Young India in 1928, when he was in south Gujarat. He argued that we cannot fight colonialism if we do not fight colonialism in our own society. He pointed out that paupers had been around in India for a long time. I use the term pauper to evoke the conditions in Victorian England, where the casual poor were driven out of the countryside to work in the mills during the industrial revolution. In the same way, the casual poor are being driven out of the countryside in 21st century India.

* England amended its Poor Laws in 1834 to pauperise the rural labour and drive them to the cities. What is India doing to create an exodus from the countryside?

Your agrarian crisis. Agriculture is not able to provide livelihood for the land-poor and the landless classes, who have lived in the villages from time immemorial. So they are forced to leave the villages. But the city doesn’t want them either.

* How can you say the city doesn’t want them? India is building a hundred smart cities. Who will live in them if not migrants?

Talk to policymakers, talk to municipal officials of any city. They will tell you they don’t want the poor around, that they are a burden on our modern, beautified, smart cities. The policy of the municipality in every Indian city has been to periodically evict the poor. I have studied this phenomenon closely in Ahmedabad, where the poor are evicted from their homes that are close to their worksites and displaced to the outskirts of the city where no work is available. They try desperately to find employment but are unable to establish themselves even in the slums. They hang around in the labour chowks, they become pavement dwellers because there is no shelter for them in the night. When weeks pass by without any work at all, they go back to the villages. I use the term ‘circular migration’ to describe this movement — from villages to cities and back to villages, in an endless cycle. This is widespread in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu. But you find it in every State.

* Do you see the Gujarat model being successfully implemented across the entire nation?

That is clearly the agenda of the National Democratic Alliance government. Is it possible to do it? We’ll have to see. Maybe some concessions will be made, but they will never be adequate because the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology does not permit pro-poor policies.

* But the BJP government has an ambitious skill development programme to make the poor employable.

The stated emphasis may be on skill development but what investment is there on skill development? The BJP has cut the public education budget. What I see, among the people living in the slums, is not skilling but deskilling. In Ahmedabad, I meet workers dismissed from the mills where they used to be skilled weavers. They have lost not only their job, wages and the benefits of belonging to the formal economy but also their skills. They are now looking for employment as casual, unskilled labour. Deskilling is a bigger phenomenon in India today than skilling.

* But the NDA is not doing anything very different what from the UPA was doing, is it?

Well, I would blame not only the current government but also the former one. We have to understand what’s going on in India in a globalised frame. India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank is at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own much capital. Then came the whole microcredit phenomenon, which was also a failure. Then came cash transfers, which is about bringing the poor into the market. But all these recipes have failed to raise the incomes of the poor. Having run out of ideas, they have now started blaming the poor for being poor.

* How can the poor be blamed for being poor?

If you look at the World Bank’s latest World Development Report, it says that the basic problem with the poor is that they don't save. Really? If you are poor, you are desperately trying to get enough food for your family, you don’t have money for housing, or for education, or for health, and on top of all this, it now appears that you carry the defect of not having an ‘accumulating mind’!

* You have been doing field work in India for over 50 years. What would you characterise as the single biggest change in the sphere of development?

The most striking change is the disappearance of the development paradigm itself.

* How can that be? We’ve just elected a Prime Minister who campaigned on the plank of development.

By ‘development paradigm’, I mean the promise of development as seen in the West — through modernisation, industrialisation, and a welfare state that offered prosperity for all and an easy life. You were promised that this would be followed in the Global South. Now we know it’s a myth.

* Can the poor in India hope for inclusive citizenship?

Citizenship is about rights and obligations. It is about being able to make claims on the state, and at the moment this is a privilege afforded by a minority of the Indian population. Also, inclusive citizenship not only means offering employment (inclusion in economic terms) but also creating space for them in terms of housing, health, schooling, skilling, and inclusion in social terms — which means focussing on equality. But we don’t see pro-equality policies, only pro-inequality policies. The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around.
 
The Hindu, 21 February, 2016, please click here to access
 
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The Hindu, 21 February, 2016, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/jan-breman-takes-a-long-view-of-the-changes-hes-seen-in-india-over-half-a-century/article8261990.ece?topicpage=true&topicId=


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