Identifying the elite: Air travel is not the right indicator
by Arun Kumar
Mrs Sonia Gandhi, inaugurating the new airport in Hyderabad, is reported to have said, “… air travel was not elitist anymore”. With airports jammed and congestion in the air leading to delays in take-off and landing, many would come to that conclusion. However, saying that more people are travelling by air now compared to five years back is not the same thing as saying that it is not elitist anymore. Who do we consider to be elite in India?
The statement reflects the view of our top leadership about society. It is particularly important since it is Mrs Sonia Gandhi who moved the Congress to its evocative slogan, “hamara hath aam admi ke sath” and it helped the party regain power in 2004. Further, it is she who forced the powerful trio of PM, FM and Dy Chairperson of the Planning Commission who believe in the pro-corporate and pro- rich policies based on the neo-liberal philosophy, to accept the NREGS and now the farm loan waiver scheme. Thus, she has been the ally of the poor in the Congress party. Yet, her statement reflects where her empathy is.
The Unorganised Sector Report based on the NSS 61st round (2004-05) shows that 77 per cent of the population lives at less than Rs 20 per day. So, most people would hardly even use trains, much less flights. Those who do use the railways mostly travel by the ordinary unreserved compartments in our trains. The overcrowding of these compartments suggests that a vast majority does not even have the money for reservation, much less AC or air travel.
The statement is similar to the argument that India is prosperous since a large number of people use cell phones. In the metropolitan centres one can spot a rickshaw-puller or a gardener flaunting a cell phone. However, this does not signify that these users are able to afford these gadgets or are better off than earlier. They may be cutting other expenditures, perhaps on essentials for the family, like on food or education of their child. High-pressured advertising and peer group pressure is known to force people into irrational choices where they sacrifice their essential expenditures for the sake of prestige, etc.
Can one say that those who consume alcohol are able to spend enough on food for the family? It is well known that many of those who drink heavily leave their families destitute. Women’s movement against drinking in Andhra Pradesh in the mid-nineties focused on this. The plight of many such families moved Gandhiji to demand prohibition.
Malnourishment among children and women is higher in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Food consumption per capita has declined in the country after 1991 and this has affected the nutritional status of the poor, children and women. To argue that those who do not have adequate calories are eating more of high value food does not stand scrutiny. Production of one unit of meat takes six units of foodgrains and of one unit of chicken takes two units of foodgrains. So, as the well-off sections consume more of these items, their per capita consumption of foodgrains rises even though their direct consumption may fall. Since the overall consumption per capita is falling, the brunt of this decline in the average would fall on the poor who are in no position to go for higher-value food items.
The confusion regarding who are the elite is similar to that of who are the middle class in India? By definition, those who are the middle of any ordering of the population can be called the middle class. In India, if we classify the population by their incomes, then 500 millions would be in the middle. But these are not the middle class as understood in the international context of the “consuming classes”.
According to the survey, in 2004-05, only 4 per cent of the population (numbering 44 million), at the top of the income ladder and categorised as the high income group, spent more than the princely sum of Rs 48 per person per day. This category spent an average of Rs 93 per day. Thus, in reality, even these people can hardly afford air travel in spite of the drop in air fares. It is quite likely that given these figures, less than 1 per cent of the population or about 11 million people would be middle class and would be able to use air travel. This is certainly also the elite unless for any arbitrary reason one wishes to call the top 0.1 per cent as the elite.
There is a catch: these figures are based on the reported data. The economy has a roaring black economy which now accounts for about 50 per cent of the GDP. Much consumption is based on these incomes, but surveys do not capture it. Just as the black income earners do not reveal their black incomes, they also do not reveal their consumption out of the black incomes. So, consumption in the economy is higher than revealed.
But black incomes are concentrated in the hands of, at the most, the top 3 per cent of the population and so it is they who have the extra consumption and not the poor. Actually, the rest suffer since they have to pay bribes, etc, to line the pockets of the top 3 per cent and they have to curtail their consumption. In brief, at most 3 per cent of the population would be able to afford air travel, but would this still not be the elite?
Mrs Sonia Gandhi could have said that the elite need air travel because they travel frequently. What her statement indicates is the distance between our leaders and the common man who lives at less than Rs 20 per person per day. Even Big B is reported to have said that now poverty is a thing of the past. How insulated the top is from the reality — blinded by “India shining”?
All this is not surprising given the fact that our leadership rubs shoulders with the rich in India and abroad and not with the common man. Even the party of the Dalits demands from aspirants for its election tickets a donation of a few lakhs of rupees, if not more. Lakhs are spent on birthday bashes and big diamonds sported. In Parliament, designer clothes are flaunted which perhaps cost as much as the yearly expenditure of the common person’s family. To attend Parliament, MPs are known to fly in daily in their private planes.
The top leadership rubs shoulders with this lot and socialises with them on a daily basis. Recently, for the wedding of his son, one CM gave an invitation card package estimated to cost Rs 15,000 per invitee. The top leadership is imitating the businessmen in their lavish lifestyle. As they say, a person is known by the company he keeps. They do not any more identify with the destitution of the common man.
On days when the leaders make a political show of their concern for the poor, they make speeches to them or to hired crowds looking like the poor. Or, they pay a flying visit to the villages and slums and wave at the common people since they are cut off from the masses by the security bandobast. Unlike Gandhiji, they do not go and live in their midst. Empathy with the poor is missing. The leadership does not even need it because others also do the same and there is no competition. The statement that air travel is no more elitist when hardly 1 per cent of India uses this mode of transport is bereft of an understanding of the country; a bit like the Queen supposedly saying that if they do not have bread, let them eat cake.
