The more the rights the more the bonds.

Niti Aayog, the organization set up in place of the Planning Commission, has come up with 2 suggestions to tackle poverty in the country. The first is to identify the extreme poor, by setting a bare subsistence level of earning so that subsidies can be targeted to them, and the second is to impart skills to those people so that they can lift themselves out of poverty. But will it work? With respect to the eminent economist Arvind Panagariya, who is the head of Niti Aayog, the answer must be no. The reason why people get caught in a poverty trap is because they have too many children, as another report shows. In this report the woman, having worked extremely hard to bring up 6 children single-handed, voluntarily offers herself as a bonded laborer because her son wants to get married. More children and more bonded labor. The study shows that when a factory owner acquires a bonded labor for $200 he makes a net profit of $2,585, which is 191%, over an average of 6.3 years. There are an estimated 11.7 million bonded laborers in India. The punishment for any attempt at escape can be severe. At one level human beings are like commodities where value is decided by supply and demand. The more scarce the skills or knowledge the more the earning potential. Thus, chartered accountants are highly educated and highly paid but actuaries earn twice as much. The mystery is why do poor people have so many children when 35% of rural families have double income and 42% of these are in the DINK category, which means 'double income no kids'. It cannot be a lack of aspirations because 60% of households possess televisions, even with a lack of dependable electricity supply in rural areas. It must be because of economics. Those who see children as added expense will have few and those who see children as a source of income will have more. India has followed socialism since independence but has the largest number of poor people in the world. So, how to reduce the number of poor people? Some would recommend even more handouts and complain that " obligations to secure rights- based laws are being ignored by the Union government." But that is precisely what the Congress did and was routed in the elections in 2014 because it increased poverty by causing double digit inflation and tanking growth rate. Maybe it was a Malthusian warning of the population reaching unsustainable levels. Is there any proof fewer people increase wealth? The much criticised one-child policy of China has made it the second richest country in the world, after the US. Real wages in England increased by 250% between 1300 and 1450 because a large part of the population was wiped out by plague. Reducing the poor reduces poverty. More bonded labor means more NGOs. Must be very profitable, but not for the poor.