The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commission reports on poverty lines, the paper goes on to implicate these reports in the production of authoritative knowledge and the elision of the poor. Through the identification of the cut-off line, which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor, these reports control our ways of knowing and suspend our ability to imagine poverty in any non-institutional manner. Such representation not only omits poor’s everyday experience and converts poverty as experience to poverty as knowledge, but also predicates its objectivity on such elision. The paper also highlights the slippages and contradictions in these reports, and shows how in the seeming inevitability of poverty knowledge, people find innovative ways to appropriate and disrupt it.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty
• BPL
• Planning Commission
• language
• post-structuralism
• representation

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to the anonymous readers for their critical comments. The paper in its present form would not have been possible without their suggestions. I am also thankful to my friends and students for their critique, notably Niels, Samik, Kaamya and Kavitha.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jyotirmaya Tripathy is in the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. His areas of interest are cultural development thought and postcolonial politics of development.

Notes

1. BPL is a threshold income decided by India’s Planning Commission to identify individuals and households in need of governmental assistance. If an individual or household falls below this threshold, she/it can obtain a BPL card (or BPL ration card), which will bring highly subsidized food grains and other benefits. Such a practice in India started in the 1970s when the Planning Commission identified a minimum daily requirement of 2100 and 2400 calories for an adult in urban and rural areas, respectively. A household is defined as poor if it cannot spend required amount to ensure minimum calorie intake for its members.

2. For Barthes (1989), a work is a self-contained entity with a closed set of meanings. A text in contrast is a series of signifiers where meaning is perpetually deferred.

3. White (1973) believed that historians arrange the chronicle of events into a coherent narrative and model the latter on the genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. White (1987) further argued that historical authority and meaning could not be separated from narrative imagination.

4. NITI Aayog was conceived and formed by Narendra Modi led NDA government in 2015 as a policy think tank to further the government’s reform agenda and cooperative federalism. It replaced the Nehru era Planning Commission that was seen as too centralized and top-down and reminded of a command and control economy.

5. Recall period refers to a period (like one month or one year) in which a respondent in a survey is required to recollect her expenses. Longer recall periods are used for goods and services that are not bought frequently (like clothes) and shorter ones for frequent or regular expenses (like food grains).