Poverty debate: Look who's talking

The curious case of the poor not finding a voice in the highly volatile poverty debate

Late last year, the BBC's Today programme ran a section on breast cancer treatment. Who did the anchor interview for this? Three men. In fact, he actually asked one of his guests whether "if you were a woman you would have no hesitation about being screened". The BBC's explanation for the absence of women to Caroline Criado-Perez, a freelance journalist, was that they could not find a woman to discuss breast cancer.

Ms Criado-Perez then created a website called The Women's Room to discuss this issue and found no shortage of 'em. The day before that, she wrote in a stinging piece in The Guardian, the same programme had a segment on teenage contraception. And they spoke to? Three middle-aged men.

Are you laughing? Then this may sound funny too. In the Sen-Bhagwati and Poverty Line debates that convulsed front pages and prime-time shouting matches, no major newspaper or TV channel actually thought to ask a single poor person - someone who actually earns less than Rs 27 a day in rural India or Rs 33 a day in urban India - her views.

True, anyone surviving on this perilous poverty line is unlikely to have heard of, or even bother about, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, respected Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati and the boffins in the Planning Commission. Or, indeed, worry their heads about the fine polemics of growth, redistribution, and so on. But there is something innately odd about the spectacle of mostly rich people - some of them extremely rich - fiercely arguing about what's good or not good for poor people.

Okay, let's be really patronising and assume that a poor person may not be unable to follow the supposed sophistication of these discussions. Still, it's not as though she cannot be asked simple, vital questions that inform the debate. Would she prefer cash instead of foodgrain? Would he or she prefer the government build a school or hospital or dole out cheap rations? Would they like a factory near their village?

Of course, there are plenty of NGO reps, bureaucrats and politicians who purport to speak for poor people and they are vocal on TV and edit pages. We even had two well-meaning lads try to live on the money the government deems the poverty line. But that's not the same thing as having poor people talking about (and for) themselves - and, indeed, these young men did things that poor people don't do, like buying bananas.

This omission is strange if only because, whatever the fierce disagreements over the number of poor people above or below the poverty line, there is manifestly no shortage of poor people in India to whom journalists can speak. India has 300-odd million of them, if we go by official statistics. Loads of policies are being fashioned in their name, and debated in nightly TV spectacles between bleeding hearts, hard hearts and other hearties in between, so why not let them join the discourse?

This is not a lofty argument for policy making styled on Ancient Greek democracy. Modern society is complex and policy making requires, without question, the services of politicians and experts, including economists and civil society representatives. But the media is another matter. In a democracy, especially one as universal as India's, we assume it should give voice to everyone.

Perhaps because its target market is the upwardly mobile middle class that media editors think it politic to speak to only People Like Us about People Like Them (PLTs). And then, of course, there's the laziness that gets embedded in the frenetic pace of the news cycle; it's so much easier to catch a regular, who knows the drill, than to go look for someone who may be more relevant but hard to mould into the format. And the nauseatingly patronising tone with which TV journalists address "PLTs" suggests that the former sorely need some orientation. But who can blame them when presenters from state-owned Doordarshan refer to "our farmer friends" in the same tone as they talk about "our little friends" (ie children).

Maybe this is a reflection of who runs the media and influences policy, but this unconscious paternalism is worrying because it shapes so many things. For readers of this paper in particular, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of them. It's become a buzzword for corporate groups in search of good karma. But a thoughtful leader in The New York Times titled "The Charitable-Industrial Complex" by Warren Buffett's son Peter Buffett frames the issue neatly. Among other wise things, Mr Buffett writes, "…with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, 'what's the ROI?' when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success".

Of course, as the recent experience in Niyamgiri demonstrates, "success" lies in the eyes of the beholder. Where Vedanta invested energetically in schools and clinics in the area, touting "development" and "jobs", tribals think of destitution. Sure, theirs may not be an optimum answer in the larger scheme of things, but at least someone asked them.