This was the ideal on which our freedom fighters fought for an independent India. The fundamental premise was that if we, the citizens of India, had a say in government, then all decisions would be aimed at uplifting the lives of the people. We freed ourselves from the shackles of colonialism and adopted our own written Constitution in 1949. Now, 70 years on, we must ask ourselves: to what extent have these hopes been achieved?
There are many aspects to be considered in answering such a question. But no answer would be complete if one does not take into account the state of the poorest section of citizens. It could be said that poverty rather than foreign rule lay at the heart of the Indian tragedy. I have repeatedly voiced my view on many public platforms that intense poverty is wholly antithetical to the guarantee of human rights of any individual.
Protections against torture and extra judicial killings are traditional concepts of human rights, but it is abject poverty that can entirely destroy the right to life of an individual.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights mainly covers a wide variety of human rights, including a statement that no one shall be subjected to torture or cruel and inhuman treatment or punishment and so on. But tucked away practically at the end of the Declaration is Article 25, which reads as follows “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
The Constitution of India contains a similar guarantee in Article 21. But one would never suspect it to be so, on a mere reading of the text of Article 21, which only states that ‘No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law’. Over the years, the Supreme Court of India has expanded the scope of Article 21 by holding that the right to life is ‘the most precious human right which forms the ark of all other rights’.
In Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi and Others [(1981) 1 SCC 608], the Supreme Court declared that: “…the right to life includes the right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it, namely, the bare necessaries of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing and shelter and facilities for reading, writing and expressing oneself in diverse forms, freely moving about and mixing and commingling with fellow human beings. … it must, in any view of the matter, include the right to the basic necessities of life and also the right to carry on such functions and activities as constitute the bare minimum expression of the human-self.”
One can clearly see that the weighty words in the above passage are a resounding reflection of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But what is the reality behind the implementation of Article 21 of our Constitution?
It is most unfortunate that even today we see a significant part of the population living in extreme poverty. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated in 2001 that poverty was “a human condition characterized by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.” Who then, is to be blamed for these gross failures and deprivations?
I have often felt that we, Indians, are fatalists, for we believe that it is fate which has imposed a terrible deprivation on a section of the population or that it is God or the unfortunate “social starting position” in regard to that section of the population and there is, hence, nothing that man can do about it. It is most astounding that an entire class undergoes this debilitating deprivation with passive forbearance.
Scott Leckie, a renowned human rights advocate, had stated that “When someone is tortured or when a person’s right to speak freely is restricted, observers almost unconsciously hold the State responsible. However, when people die of hunger or thirst, [……], the world still tends to blame nameless economic or ‘developmental’ forces [……], before liability is placed at the doorstep of the State.”
Approaching poverty through the prism of human rights would result in lifting it from the status of a social problem to that of an unavoidable imperative. Torture is held to be unacceptable, poverty merely unfortunate. But it is such bifurcation of human rights that is unacceptable in the present day. Treating poverty as a violation of human rights would enable the Courts to enforce such rights.
The Indian Supreme Court has already treated the various facets of poverty such as the right to food, shelter, etc. as a part of the fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution and this has enabled the Courts to enforce these rights. The Government would be violating the right to life under Article 21 if it were not to take concrete steps for the purpose of rescuing that section of the population suffering grievous poverty from its tentacles.
This raises a further question, namely, is the obligation one that the State alone has to discharge, or, are there other actors who have to participate in the exercise of eradication of poverty?
Today we have multi-national corporations which control industrial or business empires with all the trappings of a State. Their budget equals or exceeds that of a small State. Their employees run into hundreds of thousands. The influence they wield is so great that they can affect the future of the people and of Governments. They are quasi-states and therefore, would have to share the burden of eradicating poverty from
within the sphere of their influence.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had once remarked that: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
It is therefore necessary for the Government concerned to prioritise its efforts and ensure that its wealth and resources are evenly distributed so that it achieves the full impact of Article 21 of the Constitution. Government spending must focus heavily on uplifting the poor and downtrodden.
It is the lack of will on the part of Governments with regard to an entire class of deprived citizens, who are invisible because they do not carry that great attraction to the powers-that-be, namely the vote.
They have to be given a voice, at least at the grassroots level, where the poor has to be represented by just one representative in the unit of local self-Government. Their voice would then be heard and, once heard throughout the country, one could expect the Government of the day to do everything within its power to carry out its obligations to the fullest extent. We, who are passive spectators to this great wrong which is being inflicted on thousands of our fellow countrymen, are equally to blame.
The State, if in need of funds, would have to levy a cess on every individual on his income above a particular level. Every corporate entity, having a turnover above a particular level, would have to adopt a whole village to ensure that the poverty-stricken population has access to the facilities required to live a life of dignity.
The silver lining is that India has halved its poverty rate since the 1990s and achieved annual growth exceeding seven per cent over the last 15 years.
In the ten-year period between 2005-06 and 2015-16, approximately 271 million people moved out of poverty. As per the World Bank’s Poverty Clock, close to 44 Indians escape extreme poverty every minute. India, as a member State of the United Nations, has adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The primary goal is to end poverty by the year 2030. India has pledged to ‘Leave No One Behind’ and has committed to fast-track progress for those furthest behind first.
Unfortunately, the recent statistics make grim reading. As per the NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals Index 2019, more Indians have fallen into poverty, hunger and income inequality in the past two years.
Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown measures, which were necessary to curb the rapid spread of the virus, has thrown millions of people across the world into poverty.
While data is still awaited, the pandemic could have potentially undone the progress that has been achieved so far. It is therefore all the more necessary for proactive efforts on the part of Governments, large corporations and all influential stakeholders to adopt policies that would result in the upliftment of the poorest.
KK Venugopal, a Padma Bhushan awardee, is an Indian Constitutional lawyer and a senior advocate in the Supreme Court of India. He was appointed Attorney General of India in 2017 and serving till date.
(Source: 70 Years of Indian Constitution, Published by Govt. of India)
