Truly, words play mischief. Equality, equity, equitable... all of them get accommodated, I believe, if human rights are our central concern. Despite such an expanding vocabulary, the concern still remains in the back burner. Somehow, the sense of urgency does not get imbibed in our multifarious concerns pertaining to human rights. This is what I could arrive at, as I read articles and documents to understand the concept of social equity. It sounded too loaded for me when I heard it initially. Social equity is yet to gain the momentum it actually needs to make a difference at the policy level to benefit the lives of the poor. It might serve better to define social inequity – it’s the imbalance in prioritising economic development, at the cost of social development of those who are already lacking both for generations.

For many, poverty and hunger are terms associated with the downtrodden. They hardly realise the privilege of being on the other side of the socio-economic divide. Hardly do they wonder how worse poverty could be. I got an answer to this question when I had been to Rajasthan for our study camp in the final year. We lived with people who had the least access to water and food. No one can better explain the value of water than a woman who has to cook, bath, wash clothes and utensils in the same bucket of water. Mind you, this is no exaggeration! Just like a meal's value is only known to someone who has knows where his/her next one will come from. Right to food and right to water could make these people feel rich.  However, it would not take too long for them to realise that it was all a blessing in a disguise, given the shape the right to food bill is acquiring. While sharing our camp experiences, one of my friends exclaimed said that our politicians should also be taken on camps to feel the stark reality and see what their policies have done to their fellow humans. Whether they would go on camps or not, we the civil society have begun our mission to study realities. And in the process, we realised the need to look into budgets.

Budgets translate promises and priorities into concrete policies and schemes. However, the growth it has established over the decades has proved to be detrimental to specific sections of the population. Rather, such is the atmosphere accorded to growth that it does not percolate down to reach the poorest of the poor. Why is it so? Is it only because of problems in implementation? Certainly not. It is a combination of factors such as disaccorded priorities, lack of political will, the ugly nexus of corruption and nepotism, and indifference to the cause of protecting our limited natural resources. Marginalization is so inbuilt in our system that efforts to integrate them into the mainstream look utopian to many. This is why our policy makers need to recognize the fact that growth and redistribution complement each other. One without the other would be incomplete, might also lead to deleterious consequences. The best illustration in hand is displacement due to development projects. It’s no more shocking to many of us that such development projects divide people on accessibility, thereby keeping the socio economic divide more visible and allowing it to expand. Therefore, those who manage to cross through survive, while those who are not capable of, suffer. Survival of the fittest is taken care of…. But the rest of us… are we any less human by being illiterates, coming from a poor background, from a remote tribal hamlet, belonging to the dalit community, lacking infrastructure to reach the nearest public health centre, being born to manual scavengers?

Coming to think of democracy in this context, I am reminded of the age old ‘rice bowl’ theory. But, it does strike a chord. Why would democracy make any sense when I need to struggle for a bowl of meal a day? No matter who wins the elections, will I get my food and water? Unfortunately, provision of basic amenities that are ideally non-negotiable as human rights, is becoming an increasingly complex issue. Why? Despite promises on these influencing election results, the output has not been remarkable or in any way impressive. If adequacy of resources is a concern, I guess, for our leaders who knew enough to make tax exemptions, knowing the kind of losses it could cause for the exchequer, should also know how to generate resources to keep up promises made to the poor on the receiving side of the expanding socio economic divide. After all, we all belong to the same race and live in the same country. Why weren’t people on both sides given equal opportunities and resources? This reminds me of the biases Robert Chambers talks of in his book ‘Rural Development’ – spatial, project, person, dry season, diplomatic and professional biases.

Development tourists would seem to visit places that are accessible by roads, and those that lie beyond escape the vicinity and hence miss out on the visibility. This is what is characterized as ‘spatial’ bias. As for ‘project’ bias, the author himself has cited the districts under the Intensive Agricultural District Programme (IADP) that attracted attention on one hand while the poor districts of central India were neglected. Most of the development researchers approach people who are very likely to give them the concerned information. The poor who are inarticulate and brought up in the culture of silence hardly speak up even in the rare cases when they are approached. Similarly, beneficiaries of a programme would be called for but not those who lack the access due to multiple reasons. This amounts to ‘person’ bias. To quote him on ‘professional’ bias – “…specialisation, for all its advantages, makes it hard for observers to understand the linkages of deprivation. Rural deprivation is a web in which poverty (lack of assets, inadequate stocks and flows of food and income), physical weakness and sickness, isolation, vulnerability to contingencies, and powerlessness all mesh and interlock…….. They look for and find what fits their ideas. There is neither inclination nor time for the open-ended question or for other ways of perceiving people, events and things.”

Who is to answer this question - are we resorting to development that would negate the significance of delivering basic services to the people? Marginalisation has become the order of the day. Have our economic policies thought adequately of the social inequities as a fall out? Was there a contextual analysis of adopting such policies? I might be sounding naive raising such questions, given the scene of econo-politico dynamics at the domestic, national and international level. But I cannot imagine these questions escaping the attention of our policy makers and nation builders who would have been into a series of deliberations to conclude on them.

Well this brings in the question of governance… how good is the governance in our country? Can we assess it based on the avenues created to facilitate civic participation? Here again there is inequality. Will all our voices meet in the same frequency… to demand human rights for all?