The time has come to change the poverty narrative in India
If you have ever found yourself wondering why the accelerator pedal is not doing its thing, and then looked down to see that if handbrake was on, you know exactly what India’s young are going through – a desperate urge to be rich, but being held back by an old poverty narrative that paints the rich as morally corrupt and evil.
India’s poverty narrative comes from being generationally poor for centuries that, at its worst, saw the devastation of the British empire-made Bengal famine. When the people of a country, generation after generation, have no hope of escaping poverty, the only way to retain some dignity is to make poverty a morally superior way to live. This is done by casting the rich as evil, who have snatched away what is not theirs.
Hindi cinema captured this narrative of the evil rich man (usually a man) from the debauched money lender of Mother India (1957), to the epic mere paas ma hai scene in Deewar
(1975) where the morally corrupt but rich brother has his gadi (car), bangla (bungalow) and daulat
(riches), but the morally superior and poor police officer brother has the mother and her blessings. Postliberalisation, it took a decade for cinema to begin reflecting a new reality where wealth was sometimes a backdrop or an aspiration, but the causality between wealth and moral crookedness was broken. Dil Chahta Hai (2001) was that watershed movie that had young adults going to the disco, leading well-off lives without being debauched or evil, and the female lead drinking wine without being a bad girl. In the two decades of the new century, Hindi cinema moved to second-order problems that can only affect people not thinking about the next meal – a sperm donor in Vicky Donor (2012), a late-age pregnancy in Badhai Ho (2018), or even a prematurely receding hairline in Bala (2019).
The movies reflect a change in the lived reality of millions of middle-class Indians (estimates of their number range between 30 and 700 million). Post 1991, and especially after the turn of the millennium, signs of a better life are unmistakable – whether it is cars stuffed into the narrow lanes of a Delhi Development Authority colony or air conditioners and washing machines being bought by domestic helps.
Attitudes towards debt and enterprise have changed as well. A loan for education, a vehicle, home or even vacation is a statement of confidence of the ability to earn more in the future and pay it back. Personal loans (including home loans) have gone from being negligible 50 years ago to driving the banking and finance industry. Reserve Bank of India data shows personal loans grew to 21% of total bank credit in 2019-20 from less than 4% in 1980-81. Homes were built till the 1990s at the end of the career. In the 2000s, ownership age dropped to between 35-45 years and a 2019 Survey by Anarock saw 20% home aspirants in the 25-35 age group, with 7% under 25. Debt has stopped being a dirty word.
Thirty years ago, a job meant stability and respect and good middle-class kids did not become businessmen. The last decade has seen a wave of entrepreneurship across the country. From 733 new startups in 2016-17, the number rose to 4,000 in 2021, bringing the total number of start-ups to 61,400 by January 2022 (Economic Survey 2022). Still nascent, the flame of enterprise is now beginning to burn brighter. Of course, the desire for a government job is still the driving force behind many such start-ups. While the aspiration to be rich is manifest in collective behaviour, the narrative of money being bad and the rich being evil is still around in conversations at dining tables and in living rooms, and in newspaper headlines and social media posts. The moral uproar over the opulent houses of the rich and how much they spend on their weddings is just one case in point. The outrage over Mukesh Ambani spending his tax-paid money on his kids’ weddings drove the news agenda for weeks. Members of Parliament introduced 10 bills to limit expenditure on weddings since 1988. The last one was tabled in 2018. Political posturing and social media chatter too have an underlying thread of discomfort with the rich. Profit seems to still be a dirty word, even if tax is paid at the marginal rate of 42.7%. The critics seem to be unable to see that behind what is being condemned as ostentatious are industries, businesses and services that make money and pay salaries – consumption feeds not just the Gross Domestic Product but millions of households.
A nation emerging out of generations of poverty and a socialist political mind-set needs a change in narrative. “I want to be rich” should not be shamefully imagined but be owned and aspired for; how to do it and what to make of it are second-order questions. A collective narrative is a powerful driver of change as it has the power to become self-fulfilling. In Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Robert Shiller documents how popular narratives drive recessions, depressions and other major economic events. A change in the poverty narrative to an I-want-to-be-rich one has the potential to drive the next few decades of economic growth in India.