O GOD, BLESS THE POOR

From the Bible to the Indian scriptures, in most religious books, the poor have been thought to be closer to God. Gandhiji referred to them asdaridranarayan, which means “God resides in poor”. According to St Mathews, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” But these notwithstanding, the fact is that poverty hurts. And it hurts more because it grows because of the few rich who are getting richer.

While the media at large keeps on singing paeans of globalisation, liberalisation and marketisation, the poor are not able to get what the champions of market economy had promised. Fudging reality by statistics is one thing but stark reality is an entirely different story. In fact a closer and deeper look at the effects of globalisation would point out that the benefits of this most trumpeted media expression has helped the rich become richer while impoverishing the poor.

Even as recession persists, depression persists and the hitherto fairly insulated economies also get entangled in the quagmire of recession, clamour for more reforms is getting louder. These are Budget times in India and the annual Budget is due tomorrow.

While it is the Government’s prerogative to decide the course that the Budget may lead to, the economists  inadvertently or inordinately  are leaving no stone unturned to make things easier for the rich, which usually make things difficult for the poor.

Sounds harsh, but facts do speak for themselves. A recent Oxfam study bares it all. The findings suggest that the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 per cent in the five years since 2010. That comes to an increase of more than half a trillion dollars. The interesting piece of statistics is that in 2010, it was 388 people whose wealth was equal to that of the poorest half of the world population. In 2011, the number became 177, in 2012 it was 159, in 2013 it became 92, then 80 in 2014, and 62 in 2015. A systemic change that cannot be ignored.

The other interesting findings are that since the turn of century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just one per cent of the total increase in global wealth while half of the increase went to the top one per cent. Further, the average annual income of the poorest 10 per cent of people has risen by less than three dollars each year in almost two and a half decades.

As the gap between poor and rich widens year after year post globalisation, it is time to think about the real agenda of globalisation. The good reason of course was summum bonum or greater good to greater number, but it certainly was not the real reason.

If only one per cent people own wealth more than what 99 per cent own, something certainly is wrong with the scheme of things. Globalisation that started with much fanfare as glasnost and perestroika in the then USSR, saw the same USSR as its first causality. China has been second, though other emerging economies also fell prey to globalisation propaganda. Will it be India this time? Needs to be pondered over. The way our economy swings at global cues is not a happy augury and indicates a larger design. It is time God actually becomes the saviour of the poor as daridranarayan.