Contrary to the widespread perception, I find politicians from rural backgrounds not only have a chip on their shoulder but are also arrogantly flaunt their purported ability to feel the pulse of the people better than their urban counterparts. This aggression leads to politicians from urban backgrounds being perpetually on the defensive. Some, in fact, try to outdo their rural compatriots in demonstrating their commitment to village folk. I still recall Chaudhary Devi Lal crowing that the Janata Dal had an overwhelming majority of MPs with VPO (village post-office) addresses, compared to the urban bias among MPs of other parties. While this is natural considering that the majority of parliamentary seats are located in the rural areas, the implied suggestion of superiority of village-based politicians over townsfolk is grossly misplaced.

Despite the reality that India is steadily urbanising (although not fast enough according to international precedents) Government policies continue to be heavily tilted towards the countryside. Almost since their inception, poverty alleviation programmes have focused exclusively on people living in villages. The urban poor have never figured in the list of political priorities, which explains why poverty is much more acute and endemic in our cities compared to villages. Recent decisions of the UPA Government underline this strongly.

The NREG scheme has been extended to all districts barring urban areas, from April 1 this year. The massive agricultural loan waiver windfall will, obviously, benefit only farmers residing in villages. Successive Governments have leaned hard on nationalised banks to enhance credit off-take in the countryside, although the fact is that the number of rural bank branches has progressively shrunk because of economic unviability.

Lest this be seen as a jealous urban riposte to villagers, I would like to clarify that despite my cent per cent urban upbringing I have tried hard to sensitise myself to rural suffering. As a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Rural Development and Pachayati Raj, I have not only familiarised myself with problems of the countryside but also been deeply committed to championing the cause of villages. But having said that, I still believe that official policies are determined by a mythical notion of the impoverished village struggling to survive in the face of exploitation and neglect by affluent, Westernised urbanites.

While it is a statistical tautology that the majority of poor people live in the countryside, the degree of their indigence is probably lower in relation to the urban poor. Destitution is still uncommon in villages except as a consequence of natural calamities like drought and floods. The rural kinship network and social support systems are far more humane than in our cities. I have argued in these columns earlier that as a result of such support systems, the rural poor think many times before migrating to urban settlements where the socio-economic system is based on individualism and has no scope for accommodating the less fortunate. Besides, the institution of caste tends to break down in an urban environment, which in turn removes a major security net for the poor. If India is not urbanising as rapidly as it should have given its rate of GDP growth, these factors largely account for the mismatch between the global and Indian experiences. Nevertheless, there is a huge underbelly of poor people living in our cities, mostly in pathetic conditions. Anybody familiar with the chawls of Mumbai, the bustees of Kolkata and jhuggi-jhonpri colonies of Delhi would testify to that. And the fact is that they are completely outside the radar of politicians and policy makers.

But I believe that the urban poor are being overlooked at the politicians' and country's peril. As the latest delimitation of constituencies shows, the number of urban seats has jumped to keep pace with steady even if relatively slow migration to the cities. Most urban conglomerates now have a burgeoning periphery of semi-urban localities peopled by those servicing the menial job requirements of the manufacturing and service sectors. But these semi-urban habitations around our cities have no civic amenities worth the name. Power, water, sewage, health, education and transport facilities are in severe short supply. Progressively, these places are turning into ghettos on the pattern of slum clusters in inner cities. They are breeding grounds of crime and serve as recruitment centres for the mafia as well as terrorist organisations.

When the Employment Guarantee Scheme was originally conceived by Sonia Gandhi's jholawala brigade that dominated the National Advisory Council, it was supposed to include both the rural and urban poor. Citing alleged financial constraints, planners knocked out the urban component and politicians happily endorsed it. Looking back, the urban poor could easily have been accommodated in the scheme's net at a relatively small incremental cost. Alternatively, a separate programme for urban poverty alleviation, focusing primarily on housing, health and educational facilities for lower income groups could have been devised. Today, it is the urban poor and lower middle classes that have been hit hardest by runaway inflation. Has anybody bothered to seriously peek into a poor urban family's kitchen and wonder how it is making ends meet? When prices of edible oils, fuel, dal and vegetables (sometimes veggies are more expensive than meat), have shot past the roof, and rents have doubled in two years, the plight of poor people already living on the margin of indignity and pain, can easily be imagined.

As rightly alleged by a CPI(M) member in the Lok Sabha last week, in these conditions siphoning money out of the half-hearted Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM) for hare-brained schemes like the Bus Rapid Transit project in Delhi amounts to criminal insensitivity. Glorified slums (leave alone real ones) in our cities are on the brink of implosion. Is it any wonder that the urban crime graph is steadily shooting upwards? Pious pledges of earmarking a certain number of beds in speciality hospitals in exchange for concessional land, reservation of 25 per cent seats for poor children in extravagantly-priced private schools, quotas for the underprivileged in private housing colonies -- all of these have routinely gone up in smoke. At present, there is no official scheme targeting the urban poor, no financial incentives like NREG or soft bank loans, no unemployment allowance -- in other words no social security net whatsoever.

Contrary to the media generated conventional wisdom, the BJP did not lose the 2004 election because of India Shining, which allegedly led to a rural revolt. In fact, the party held on to its rural seats. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee did not get another stint in office it was due to two factors:

The anti-incumbency wave against its allied parties in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and

An unexpected rout in the cities, resulting in the slashing of its urban tally from 51 in 1999 to 14 in 2004.

Therein lies a lesson for Sonia Gandhi's much-touted pro-rural schemes and "Yuvaraj" Rahul's high-voltage forays into poverty pockets in the countryside.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, April 27, 2008