The Legacy of Malthus

The Legacy of Malthus

This movie looks into the issue of poverty prevalent in rural India. Deepa Dhanraj takes us from one corner of rural India where poverty persists to the Scottish highs which witnessed highland clearances in the 19th century. Scottish high landlords had legal claim over the common land on which shared croppers survived. Landlords rented the land to tenants who further let it to sub tenants. At the end of 18th century, volume sheep farming for wool and meat became immensely profitable than renting it to shared croppers in Scottish highs. The landlords claimed that due to increased unchecked population growth the produce from the land was insufficient to sustain the population. Shared croppers were legally and forcefully evicted from the land. There was misery, starvation and cycle of poverty amongst the evicted people by the more powerful who had law and authorities on their side. Many died, thousands migrated outside England, and some were allotted land along the shores which was uncultivable while others were displaced internally to big cities in England as cheap labor.

Per Malthus,

Malthus further claimed that the strain that the increased numbers place on a country’s resources also makes life more difficult for members of the middle class and the upper classes and threatens to drag them into the pool of suffering that rightly belongs to the lot of the poor.

Deepa Dhanraj rebuts this perception that overpopulation lies at the root of poverty problem. She draws a parallel of misery inflicted on the poor people of Scottish high to the poor in the Indian scenario.

She is right in claiming so since the poorer section of Indian society who does not have its own cultivable land are forced to live life of poverty and misery. Conditions of people belonging to lower caste are much worse because of the caste system. For centuries, caste hierarchy in Indian society made sure that millions were deprived of access to basic resources in erstwhile rural India. They were subjugated to inhuman practices and denied resources in terms of cultivable land, accessible water resources and other means of sustainable livelihood. All positions of authority, law and order and the justice system were indifferent to their plight. After Indian independence, the equitable rights and dignity of all Indians was enshrined in the Indian constitution. But, the failure of land reforms, a state subject per constitution saw that in many Indian states the old feudal system of land holding remained intact. Generally, India’s poor have meager physical assets and human capital and belong largely to socially deprived groups such as scheduled castes and tribes. Women share an extraordinary burden of deprivation within households.

All the ills that plague Indian society cannot be blamed on the failure of land reforms, but poverty and much of the violence and extremism in the country even today can be attributed to lack of access to land. The absolute landless and the near landless (those with less than half an acre of land) make up 43 per cent of rural households in India. The state of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh which have lowest record in land reforms are also the one with largest migrant population of rural poor who move to other corners of India in search of livelihood. This forces rural poor to go in search of livelihood for semi permanent or short duration. In the overall migrant population, differences across caste groups are not significant, but ST and SC migrants are more involved in short duration migrants.

Bihar also sees cycle of violence amongst the private army of feudal