The Unlikely Economist

The Eighth Column has clocked more than 10,000 visitors and is still going strong. Needless to say, The Fatal ‘Head’ache series remains the most popular series on this blog to date, followed by the Nehru-Edwina affair. Thank you dear readers for making this a success. Keep sending your comments, queries and feedback to rajkmitra@gmail.com – they are truly my inspirations. Last but not the least, on public demand, I am contemplating “Season 2” of The Fatal ‘Head’ache series.

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Why is India still so goddamn poor?, I sometimes wonder. It’s not that our leaders and policymakers haven’t done any thing in the past six decades. They did whatever they could, yet the fruits of their efforts have not been as sweet as they should have been. So, what went wrong? Nothing apparently, everything really.

It was 1997 and Amartya Sen hadn’t won the Nobel prize. Economics as a discipline wasn’t quite “cool” with the educated Bengali middle class at that time. And I had no special love for Economics, because I knew very little about it, except that someone had told me that it’s easier to get through the civil services exams with Economics. I still remember my grandfather’s “what-the-f**k” expression when I told him that I wanted to study Economics. “Ota to meyeder saabject (only girls study Economics),” the 70-year old science graduate had retorted.

He couldn’t be blamed. Economics was and is still taught as part of the arts curriculum, along with History, Geography, Political Science, Philosophy et al. Economics remains an untouchable for the ‘elite’ studying Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Thus studying Economics wasn’t really a choice for me as well. It was a compromise to keep Chemistry at bay and yet obtain the much coveted ‘B.Sc.’ degree.

I was quite excited about attending my first lecture on Economics. It was like going out on a blind date. I was desperate to fall in love at first sight. It however took just 45 minutes for the excitement brewing within me to subside. Poor people and nations are doomed to stay poor – that’s the first thing I learnt at college – the vicious circle of poverty.

When I grew older, armed with a wider perspective, I began wondering, if such a vicious circle did exist, how could the US or Singapore which were much poorer than India break out of this circle? Did they get hold of a magic wand? Even closer home China could achieve much more than we could, despite taking the path of economic reforms almost at the same time.

So, what really did the trick? Their approach to poverty. They didn’t see poverty as a constraint, rather a great motivator to push them out of their economic backwardness. Economics teaches you how to create wealth, not how to maintain poverty at sustainable levels. Nevertheless, there’s a much deeper connotation to India’s failure in tackling poverty. Poverty is beautiful. What would our policymakers and so-called social workers do if poverty is eradicated? How would they siphon off trunks of cash if the need to spend on social projects evaporate? Time to ponder!