Desperately disparate

TNN Jul 12, 2005, 02.45am IST

That Orissa has become India's poorest state, surpassing Bihar that was still the poorest in 1993-94, is now well known. But what is cause for concern, as has been pointed out in an article by Arjan de Haan and Amaresh Dubey in Economic and Political Weekly (May 28-June3/June 4-10, 2005) is that the distribution of this poverty within the state is highly uneven. Such stark disparities across various regions of the state illustrate the fact that democracy and social development are as important as economic growth for people to emerge from poverty.

The income-poverty data of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), when disaggregated on a regional basis for Orissa, shows that while rural poverty in coastal Orissa was 32%, it was 50% in northern Orissa, and a huge 87% in southern part of the state. A comparison over time indicates that the regional differences have been increasing: during the late '90s and ever since, coastal Orissa has been witnessing a poverty trend very much like the all-India average; the headcount in the southern regions has, meanwhile, showed a remarkable rise. (See Graph 1.)

That coastal Orissa has done much better than the other two regions vis-a-vis declining poverty trends becomes even more surprising when one takes note of the average landholdings in the three regions. The average landholdings in coastal Orissa, for various social categories, is below those of corresponding categories in the other two regions. (See Table.) The EPW article claims farm growth has been higher in the coastal regions. It must, however, be mentioned that farm growth in Orissa was very sluggish, and the growth rate of agricultural wages was hardly above zero.

It could also be conjectured that the reduced average landholdings in coastal Orissa, relative to its northern and southern parts, implies that its population has done much better in terms of shifting out of agrarian economy to industrial or service sector occupations, and so has escaped the poor performance of the farm sector. However, industrial growth performance,was worse than the less than 2% agricultural growth the state experienced.

The could partially explain coastal Orissa's better performance in tackling income-poverty relative to the southern and northern parts. De Haan and Dubey point out: "...each percentage point of non-agricultural economic growth in Kerala reduces poverty much more than it does in Bihar, and this is mostly explained by the much higher literacy in Kerala, particularly women's." The Orissa coast has fared better than both the northern and southern regions as far as public health and basic educational attainments go. Census figures say 49% of Orissa's population was literate, and this went up to 64% in 2001. But even in 2001, literacy levels in the southern districts remained around 30-35%, and female illiteracy below 25%, while the levels in Khordah, Cuttack and Puri rose to around 80%.

Though district-level health indicators are also available for Orissa, they are not as reliable and easy to disaggregate as education data. However, disaggregated literacy levels for various districts, as also the three regions, of Orissa, can be used as a proxy indicator for public health. Levels of income-poverty, female illiteracy and infant mortality rate in Orissa's old 13 districts compared in graph 2(a), suggest a clear correlation between the three. Graph 2(b) compares, for the 30 districts, the levels of female illiteracy with the percentage of women that receive skilled attention during pregnancy. This, too, indicates a correlation. The differentials in income-poverty between coastal Orissa, and the rest of the state can, therefore, be safely ascribed to their differential performance in the area of public health and basic education.

If the agency of delivering social goods to the three regions is the same (the state ), how does one explain this phenomenon of unequal delivery? The answer probably lies in a more empowering social order in the coastal region, which in turn is a function of more democratic social relations that have arisen out of an economy that is relatively less dependent on agriculture.

The disparity in terms of average landholdings, between the scheduled castes on one hand and the OBCs and general category on the other, in the northern and southern parts of Orissa is more than in coastal Orissa. (See Table.) This proves that archaic feudal social relations, of which comparative levels of landholding of social groups is a good measure, have a firmer grip in the south and north, than in the coast. STs, on an average, have larger landholdings. But to bring them into the picture while measuring social development through landholdings would lead to inaccuracies as their economy is dependent not so much on the farm sector as on forest produce. But they, too, have been hit over the past one decade due to deforestation, and dwindling availability of non-timber forest produce.