Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, discusses a recent UNDP report showing that poverty in India has halved in the last 10 years, and the newly unveiled healthcare plan for the bottom 40% of the population, nicknamed “Modicare.”
Ghosh calls Modicare “a scam that is going to benefit private healthcare companies” by providing healthcare insurance, based on the US model “instead of expanding a public health system which could actually provide [health care] much more cheaply, much more equitably and much more efficiently.”
GREG WILPERT: It’s The Real News Network and I’m Greg Wilpert, coming to you from Baltimore.
The United Nations Development Program, the UNDP, published a report recently showing that according to its multi-dimensional definition of poverty, poverty in India has halved in the past ten years. This comes on the heels of another report earlier this year which found that India stopped being the country with the largest population living below the poverty line in the world with, Nigeria taking first place in 2018. Then last week, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a new national healthcare plan. The plan is said to offer free health care to the bottom 40 percent of the population of India, about 100 million families. Here is how he announced the new program.
NARENDRA MODI: The number of people who will benefit from Ayushmaan Bharat scheme is more than the combined population of the whole United States, the whole of Canada and the whole of Mexico too. More than all three of these countries, and more than even more countries.
GREG WILPERT: The new health care plan is being nicknamed Modicare and is expected to cost 1.6 billion dollars per year. Joining me now to analyze India’s poverty and the new healthcare plan is Professor Jayati Ghosh. She’s professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Thanks for joining us today, Prof Ghosh.
JAYATI GHOSH: It’s a pleasure.
GREG WILPERT: So first of all, to understand what the UNDP really analyzed, what does UNDP mean with multi-dimensional poverty and why is this a better measurement than the more common international poverty line?
JAYATI GHOSH: Well, the international poverty line basically looks at incomes and it assesses whether you have an income that would allow you to meet certain basic necessities. Every country has their own poverty line. It’s not as if there’s one that is a standard across the world. But usually, it’s only based on income. And many people have argued that this actually leaves out a whole lot of the other important dimensions, such as health, education, schooling, nutrition, habitation, where you live, all kinds of things like that. So the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which was developed in fact in Oxford, is supposed to bring in all of those things; access to sanitation, access to water, access to food, access to healthcare, access to basic nutrition, all of these angles.
So definitely, yes, it’s a better measure. The difficulty is that it will rely on different datasets. And so you won’t always get necessarily a consistent time series, because you’re using time series from different variables and different statistical systems that are collecting them. So you may not get a sort of consistent result. The bigger problem is that we don’t really have too much of this data after 2011, 12. So I really don’t know how the UNDP has managed to give us information for the last ten years. It would be remarkable if they managed to do this, because nobody in India knows.
GREG WILPERT: Well let’s turn to the question of what is poverty doing. I mean, is it going up or down? I mean, according to the UNDP, it has been declining. And if that’s the case, first of all, I want to know if you would agree with that assessment. And then, if it has declined recently, what government policies have contributed to the reduction of poverty in India?
JAYATI GHOSH: Well to be completely honest, nobody knows whether it’s declined or not. It may well have declined, because after all, the Indian economy has been growing at seven to eight percent, and it would be remarkable if there had been no decline in poverty over this period. But all of our survey data that would allow us to even get a multidimensional poverty index, the last such survey was conducted in 2011, 12. So we really do not have good data after that. Everything has been based on guesstimates. So maybe the UNDP has a better system of guessing, we don’t know. But all I can say is that there are no hard data that would allow us to say definitively that it’s gone down by this much.
GREG WILPERT: And what would you say are some of the main problem areas in terms of poverty in India at the moment?
JAYATI GHOSH: The biggest area is clearly nutrition. It has been a very important issue in India. We still have very poor nutrition indicators, especially nutrition outcome indicators, which we do have data for more recently. Many of our states are down there with the worst of sub-Saharan African countries in terms of inadequate body mass index, anemia and a bunch of other things. But also, there is a range of other areas of multi-dimensional poverty; access to clean drinking water, access to … I already mentioned food, but access to healthcare, access to decent education for everybody and so on and so forth. So we are still way behind other economies at our similar level of per capita income in terms of providing these very basic goods and services. I would say that, yes, there must have been some improvement in terms of poverty reduction, but it’s nowhere near fast enough and we’re still nowhere near where we should be even at this level of development.
GREG WILPERT: Can you talk also about the relationship between what you mentioned, the nutritional problems, but also you said that apparently there’s a agricultural crisis in India still going on and how that impacts poverty, how it relates to poverty.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/india-way-poverty.html
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