So now that we’re in rural India, where’s the poverty?

As you drive from urban Mumbai or Pune into rural Maharashtra, on your way to Jamkhed, the scene changes quite dramatically. Big buildings are traded in for tea stalls and hair cutteries, computer stores for paan and tobacco shops, cars for cows, and traffic five lanes wide for traffic in the game of ‘chicken’ with the opposing driver. Concurrently, the poverty also changes and many might ask where it went. In the city, poverty is in your face – men, women and children sleeping on the streets, claiming a piece of sidewalk as their own, wearing torn clothing and covered in dirt asking you for money. Many have disabilities – no legs, one eye, leprosy, or scars on their face. The concentration of poverty in cities is greater, with slum houses stacked on top of each other and men sleeping in their rickshaws if they can get off the street. For many visitors, urban poverty is overwhelming and leaves you questioning yourself and a system that permits such overt struggle and inequity.

And then you travel to rural areas and that poverty seems to disappear. Sidewalks no longer exist and people do not sleep on the streets. You say that it’s better in rural areas because at least the poorest sleep under a tent made of hay or tarp rather than uncovered on the sidewalk. It is much rarer that someone comes to you asking for money. Twenty years ago, Dr. Arole tells how it was rare to see a village woman without patches in her only saree. Yet today, you’d be hard struck to find a woman who does not own at least two to three sarees, none with patches. Where as twenty years ago people barely had any food, families now have bags of sorghum grain stored for difficult times. Twenty years ago only the rich had goats yet now the majority of families seem to own buffaloes, cows, goats or chickens. Even the poorest of villages can seem better off than the conditions faced by the homeless and poor in the cities. So where is the rural poverty if you cannot see it? How do you explain the statistics of high rural poverty when it is so much more transparent in urban areas?

To understand where poverty exists in rural areas, one must look a little deeper than appearances. One major cause of rural poverty is access – to government services, health facilities, higher education, and transportation. In rural areas, 36.5% of children are immunized and 36.9% of pregnant women receive at least three antenatal care visits, compared to 56.6% and 70.1% in urban areas, respectively. In the public sector there are 1.5 physicians per 10,000 inhabitants. Even when facilities exist in remote or underserved areas, posts often remain unfilled due to the financial draw of private practice, exemplifying why not one caesarean delivery has been done in the Jamkhed government hospital in the past ten years. Doctors, teachers and government officials prefer to live in cities, dragging appropriate health facilities, good educational opportunities and access to government resources away from rural India. The anti-poverty programs that have targeted rural India are ineffective and inadequate, often ending in corruption or mismanagement so that the funds and services meant to assist rarely make it to the needy. No program exemplifies this better than the Anganwadi worker program (established by Integrated Child Development Services) or the National Rural Health Mission and their Accredited Social Health Activist, both of which are meant to combat rural poverty yet are stuck in beaurocracy and inefficiency.

Poverty can also be understood in the dependence on agriculture for income and how unforeseen occurrences in weather and crops can disable a family for years. If there is a famine, or if there is too much rain, or if the cost for machinery is too high, then the crop is disabled or ruined and there is little to sell in the market and thereby no daily wage. For farmers without land, drought or insect infestation can mean no work for two to three weeks. For a typical family with little savings, a bad year or crop can mean taking out money from a bank or money lender and paying it back over one, five, ten or even more years. At times this dependence on the farm for income leads to women or children working on the land. For rural women, this is particularly hard due to their requirements also inside the house and raising children, or if they are pregnant. For children, working often replaces education.

When I asked Dr. Arole why the poverty numbers are so high in rural areas when it seems to have changed so much from twenty years back, he explains that it has much to do with the inequality between rich and poor. In the past twenty years, rural women wear more sarees and eat more consistent grains, yet their growth out of poverty has been much slower than urban growth into wealth. And compared with 20 years ago, the gap between the rich and the poor, even in rural areas, is growing. 21.1% of the rural population lives on less than 356 rupees ($7.5 – rural poverty line) per month, and 15% of the urban population lives on less than 538 rupees ($11 – urban poverty line) per month. And with poor health facilities in rural areas, 77% of outpatient cases in rural areas are seen by private doctors who have bills in the range that only the rich can pay. When a family earns 50 to 60 rupees per day, a medical bill from a private doctor can put you in debt for months to years, considering the average expenditure per hospitalization in rural government hospitals is 3238 rupees ($67) compared to 7408 rupees ($154) in rural private hospitals. Given the low level of services in remote areas, it is little surprise that the infant mortality rate for rural areas is 79.7 per 1000 compared with 49.2 in urban areas.

In addition to debt from unanticipated occurrences such as a medical bill or drought, financial strain also arises from rural families spending for marriages, feasts, or other social ceremonies. If the daughter is due for marriage, her family not only pays for the wedding ceremony but also for the dowry which can range from 10,000 to 500,000 rupees. And considering the fertility in rural areas is 3.07 compared with 2.27 in urban areas, the chance of having to arrange the marriage of two daughters is higher in rural India.

Finally, it is essential to recognize that statistics are just that – numbers. Poverty can be just as debilitating when it is taken as a mindset. For example, I lived with a family in a village for two days and during conversation they said they were poor and wondered how I could live with them. I was surprised to hear this as they ate three meals a day, all the men were employed and their babies looked healthy. They have plenty of space in their concrete house and even had many goats. Over time, I came to find that their lifestyle met basic needs and they had little to no luxuries. One of these luxuries very much includes freedom, something that they see as effervescent in cities.

For women, this freedom and escape is even more evident. While housing and meals are consistent, their life is still very much subservient to that of the husband. Her life outside the house is limited and there was little to take her away from the duties of daily life (the daughter-in-law I observed left the house twice the whole day – once to clean the clothes and the other to fetch water). She never eats outside the house nor travels to cities because of the money associated with a vacation, where as for a man it could be work-related. Yet men very much view their freedoms as limited in villages as well. So while the appearance of poverty may have been reduced, there is still very much the feeling of mental impoverishment. And this mental poverty becomes even more entrenched with debt, unexpected occurrences, and the Hindu philosophy of karma and accepting the circumstances of your life.

Where the average daily laborer makes 50-100 rupees per day working on a farm, the idea that in the cities they can make over 500 rupees per day is always in their mind. If given the opportunity, many men migrate to cities, at times alone and at other times with their families. These migrants tend to make up the urban poverty, as they eventually find their home in slums or on the sidewalk. However, if they get a job as a rickshaw driver or helping to construct a hotel, that brings in more money in three months than would one year of village work. The ambition and dream of many rural boys and girls is to work and live in the cities.

The message I hope to come across is twofold. First, I hope to give a better understanding of the causes of rural poverty and why you may wonder where it is when you come to visit villages. Second, I hope to explain the differences between what poverty is like in rural areas versus in urban settings, and why so many prefer to live in an urban setting, where to us it may seem dramatically worse.