India (36 page)

A country’s estimate of its own poverty levels may not be the best source—the U.S. federal government has long been accused of setting its poverty line too low (and announced a change to the system in 2010). The World Bank uses global reference lines set at $1.25 and $2.00 per day at
purchasing power parity, meaning they are weighted for the cost of staple goods in a given country. In 2008, Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank published a revealing research paper titled
The Developing World Is Poorer Than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight against Poverty
, explaining an overhaul of methods of estimating poverty and deducing that although it was pervasive in developing countries, it was declining fast. The most noticeable change was in China, which since Mao’s death had managed a world-altering programme of poverty alleviation. Another World Bank publication estimated that, by 2015, only 84 million Chinese would be living on less than $1.25 per day.
³³

How did India look when judged by these international standards? It looked even worse. The government’s all-India line, when matched to the World Bank’s method of calculation, turned out to be set at only $1.03 per day.
³⁴
The international poverty line was higher, at $1.25 or $2.00 per day, which allowed some latitude in deciding the relative extent of poverty. These shocking figures showed that at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, 17 out of every 20 people in India lived on the equivalent of less than $2.00 per day, and more than half lived on less than $1.25 per day.
³⁵
The levels of poverty have been dropping steadily since then, although it was only in 2005 that the effects of earlier economic reforms started to make the numbers drop rapidly. If things continued at their present rate, India should reach a position in around 2025 where less than 10 percent of the population is caught in extreme poverty, when defined as an income of less than $1.25 per day.
³⁶

Percentage of Indians living below the poverty line

Another calculation was the “squared poverty gap” (the poverty gap index weighted by itself), which measured the severity of the problem by taking greater account of the very poor. It suggested the intensity of poverty in India had declined in recent decades. Under this analysis, Rajiv Gandhi’s time as prime minister emerged as a time of significant improvement. In 1981 the squared poverty gap stood at 8.5, in 1990 at 5.6 and in 2005 at 3.7.
³⁷
Certainly photographs or film footage taken of India during the 1950s or 1960s—or at the time of British rule, when famine was often rife—indicate a way of living that was substantially worse than anything seen today. Even in the poorest parts of India, where children die of disease, foul water and malnourishment, I have never come across the depths of human suffering that were visible on the streets of Calcutta when I first visited in the 1980s: an old man lying dying in the dust by Howrah station, and human figures who gave a sudden meaning to the previously empty phrase “skin and bone,” for that was all they had left.

Whatever political view you take of India’s economic liberalization, two things are clear: large numbers of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, and around one quarter of the population have so far gained very little. People still die from poverty, finding that eating rats or ground mango kernels does not save them from starvation, migrant workers continue to break stones by hand and live in pipes or under plastic sheeting, and parents continue to sell their children into servitude.

This was the central political and moral quandary of how the nation would develop. Would India go the same way as some Latin American countries, where the benefits of economic growth were restricted to a few? This was the standard criticism but looked unlikely: the new Indian middle class was visibly dynamic. Yet a wide gap remained. The growth of the economy would not eradicate poverty, but it could not happen without it. Judging by their unchanged position over previous centuries, the villagers of Uttar Pradesh would be no better off if Lakshmi Mittal had not held a lavish family wedding at Versailles.

Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the finance ministry, proposed in 2010 that the government implement its promise of “inclusive growth” by measuring progress through the rise in per capita income of the poorest 20 percent; unless their income rose at the same level as the rest of society, the government would be failing.
³⁸
Basu proposed various solutions, such as issuing food and fertilizer coupons rather than relying on subsidized products in the open market, which had previously had the effect of creating a shadow economy; government “ration shops” were a fount of
corruption, with grain adulterated with grit and some of the stock sold illegally. If Basu’s method were to succeed and be effectively targeted, it would depend in part upon a scheme that was currently under way to give every Indian a unique biometric identity card, with online verification. The plan, perhaps the most ambitious IT project in history, was being organized by Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of the Bangalore-based technology company Infosys. In the meantime, poverty declined while injustice remained—although some escaped their fate.

When Rajeev Samant was at the Cathedral School in Bombay in the 1980s, he formed an Ayatollah Khomeini cult. This was not because he was a Shia fundamentalist or indeed a Muslim (although Salman Rushdie was a former Cathedralite) but because he thought it might entertain the other children and annoy the teachers. He also ran a gambling syndicate, betting on cricket matches, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, but managed to fix the odds so he and his friend Cyrus always won. As a student at Stanford he was, in his words, “basically a party guy.” He went on to work in the finance department at Oracle in California before deciding to return to India. Samant was coming home, wanting to do something different in the new economy.

His father had a small-scale plastics manufacturing business and had started a commercial diving company. One day they drove together a few hours out of Bombay to look at a patch of land the family owned near Nashik. It was a dry area on the northern end of the Deccan Plateau, not far from the source of the Godavari river, and close to an important pilgrimage site where Lord Ram was reputed to have bathed. His father was inclined to sell the land, but Samant had an idea: he could grow mangoes on it. He would need permission to pump water from a nearby lake. He employed Dattu Mahadu Vanse, a local labourer, to clear the earth.

Over time, Dattu would lift himself from poverty in a way that would not have been possible in earlier times, and life for him and his extended family would be transformed by India’s economic changes. With Samant, he cut down grass six feet tall and dug up the scrub, avoiding the cobras and leopards. The plan to grow mangoes worked, but there was no commercial market for them. Samant tried growing tomatoes, roses, peanuts. The problem was the same. The land was fertile, but it was nearly impossible to make a business succeed. One day he noticed farmers eating grapes. Nashik’s grapes and raisins were popular. Might it be possible to make wine?

Dattu Mahadu Vanse was a stocky man in jeans, trainers, a shirt and a necklace. He remembered what happened next: “Rajeev sir went back to America for three months. He returned with some vine cuttings and said, ‘It’s a wine grape.’ I said, ‘What is a wine?’ He said it was a product made from grape juice. I had to grow the saplings and to water them.” After growing some grapes successfully, Samant persuaded Kerry Damskey, a Californian winemaker, to come to India and show them how to go about making wine commercially. The climate was deemed to be similar to Brazil’s, between tropical and temperate, although Nashik suffered from a monsoon—which was unheard of in any of the world’s wine regions. During the growing season, the climate was not unlike that in Sonoma County in California or the Barossa Valley in Australia. No bank would lend Samant money for this untested project, and he had to borrow from family and friends before a commercial bank eventually agreed to make a loan. In 1999 they produced their first bottles of Sula Sauvignon Blanc, and a decade later Sula Vineyards was selling 3 million bottles a year and starting to export around the world.

Their principal ambition was to grow a local market for wine (annual per capita consumption in India was less than a tablespoon, against more than 50 litres in Sonia Gandhi’s country of birth) by attracting the new middle and upper classes. Until the late 1960s there had been prohibition in Maharashtra, and drinking alcohol was still seen by many as an improper activity, particularly among women. Samant was astute at marketing the product not as alcohol, but as a way of life. The Sula website said: “Mr. Samant is an avid sportsman and enjoys running, yoga, diving, windsurfing and playing tennis in his playtime. Sula Vineyards is also a leader in sustainable winemaking, and has created direct and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of rural youths.” His first coup was when he convinced Mumbai’s best-known hotel, the Taj, to stock his wines. “I got to see the man at the Taj because we were both old Cathedralites. He said he could get French wine at the same price. I said that’s true, but it’s bad wine. He tasted our Sauvignon Blanc and put it on their list.”
³⁹
Samant also persuaded the state authorities to see wine as an area of potential economic growth and not to put an excise duty on it as they did on spirits like rum. There were now more than twenty functioning wineries in Maharashtra.

Before the winery opened, Dattu had almost no way to make a living. He came from a tribal group called Mahadev Kolis, known in Maharashtra for following their own customs and for suffering discrimination and poverty. Producing no surplus crops on their scraps of land, they had nothing to sell
but their labour. Members of the Mahadev Koli community, who tend to be short and dark, would often fall into debt to farmers, and find that in practice they had become bonded labourers. Dattu had no education at all. He went to a school once, but there was no teacher and he came home again. At the age of twelve he became a fisherman, sitting in an inflated tyre tube and paddling around a sun-splashed lake with a hook and a net. This sounds almost glamorous, like something from
Huckleberry Finn
, but it was bleak work. I asked Dattu how much he had earned. “That depends if I caught any fish. I sometimes made Rs100 per week. Sometimes Rs200.” Even on a good week, that was a lot less than $1.25 per day, and on a bad week it was about $0.30 per day.

We were sitting in a café above the Sula winery. Rajeev Samant ran the place along Californian lines, with the vineyards open to visitors, a tasting room and two restaurants: Kareem’s and Little Italy. The quality of the wine had improved over the years, as the vines matured. Nearly all of the visitors were Indian. Dattu spoke in Marathi, with his words interpreted by one of his younger colleagues, Santosh.

“My mother and father grew millet and chickpeas, enough for themselves. They were very poor because we are from a backward community. My first job was cutting the wild and thorny trees. Rajeev sir needed reliable people. I grew tomatoes and roses. When they were going to build the winery, I did other things like digging an eight-foot pit for a consultant engineer, and when the construction started I was a supervisor. I cleaned out the big tanks when they came from the manufacturer in Nashik. Mr. Kerry taught me how to clean a stainless-steel tank. It’s very, very difficult to make good wine. You have to be careful. I learned how to operate the press when we were doing the crush. I learned about racking [separating the wine from the lees or sediment]. Mr. Kerry had to explain all of this by sign language. If Rajeev sir was there, he would translate. I learned about the chilling plant, about adding bentonite to remove protein and how to avoid getting crystals in the wine. I understood how the automatic bottling plant would operate. I came to learn all the different parts of the winemaking process, although we did not speak the same language.”

A French wine grower had been with me when I toured the winery and been frankly astonished. As this man, Laurent, said: “In the south of France we cannot afford to employ the human beings. Otherwise, it is exactly the same. I can see the same love, the same passion to make the wine.” In the vineyards, they used the Israeli technology of drip irrigation.

I asked Dattu what his favourite wine was. “Shove you”—Sauvignon. “The first time I tasted liquor was at a post-harvest party when I had some champagne. I found it sour, and I felt a bit sleepy.” Did other members of his community like wine? “My father prefers a local rum made of molasses. The Mahadev Kolis are Adivasis and they normally prefer Chenin Blanc, which is not too expensive, and Madeira because it is sweet.” Santosh said, “Indians like fruity wines. Zinfandel is quite popular. You can see it being loaded there.” Out of the window, beside a stand of motorbikes which belonged to the workers, we could see an army truck being filled with cases of wine. On the way to Nashik I had seen the democratization of wine drinking—a roadside dhaba serving batata vada, potato fritters, with white wine.