Who Should Get Homes and Welfare? The Truly Landless versus the ‘Poor on Paper’
N. Singh · ·6 min read
Translated from the original Hindi · मूल हिंदी लेख पढ़ें
If you walk through the interior lanes of any Indian village, you will encounter a deeply bizarre and shocking paradox.
On the village’s main thoroughfare will stand a two-storey pucca (permanent brick-and-mortar) house, with a tractor parked at its doorstep, a dish antenna mounted on the terrace, and inscribed in bold letters upon its wall—“Constructed under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana / Mukhyamantri Awas Yojana. Beneficiary: So-and-so.”
And merely two hundred metres from that very house, by the edge of the village pond or on barren wasteland, will be a family living beneath a torn sheet of black plastic tarpaulin stretched over four bamboo stakes. During the monsoon, the children of that family spend entire nights drenched in rain, in the winter they shiver through the bitter cold, and in the summer they endure the blistering blows of the loo (scorching heatwave winds). When you ask that destitute family—“Did you not receive a pucca house or a land patta (leasehold title deed) from the government?”—
the old woman replies in a trembling voice—“Babuji (Sir)! We went to the block office thrice. The patwari (village revenue accountant) and the secretary say our name is not on the list. They demand a bribe of twenty thousand rupees to add our name to the list. We don’t even have flour to eat, from where can we bring twenty thousand rupees?”
This is the naked, sickening reality of our country’s ‘Welfare State’!
The Triangle of Patwari, Pradhan, and Middlemen: The Game of Poverty on Paper
In his book ‘Ginti Se Satta Tak’ (From Count to Power), author N. Singh exposes the corrupt administrative machinery of rural India that makes the genuinely needy ‘disappear’ on paper while turning the influential and powerful into the ‘poor’:
- The Auction of BPL and Housing Lists: At the block level operates an unbreakable syndicate comprising the BDO (Block Development Officer), the Village Development Officer (VDO), the lekhpal (village revenue clerk)/patwari, and the dominant village pradhan (village council head). The moment the first instalment for housing is released, a commission of ₹25,000 to ₹40,000 is skimmed off right away. Any poor person unable to pay the bribe is declared ‘ineligible’.
- Fraud in Land Pattas: When pattas (land lease deeds) for the gram sabha’s (village general assembly) barren or pasture lands are distributed, by right they ought to go to the village’s Musahars, Valmikis, or landless labourers. However, by manipulating the official records, those pattas are registered in the names of relatives or fictitious servants of the locally powerful.
- Exploitation of Thumbprints Even in Digital India: Today, claims abound that everything from ration to housing has moved ‘online’ and onto ‘DBT’ (Direct Benefit Transfer). Yet the reality is that bank CSP (Customer Service Point) operators and local middlemen take the thumb impressions of illiterate poor folk, withdraw the money from their accounts, and merely hand them a paltry few thousand rupees.
The ‘Poor on Paper’ versus the Truly Landless: A Comparison
| Parameter | The ‘Poor on Paper’ (Dominant and Influential) | The Truly Landless (Exploited Proletariat) |
|---|---|---|
| Housing Status | Pre-existing ancestral pucca house and cultivable land readily available | Mud-and-thatch shanty along railway tracks, on pond embankments, or in threshing grounds |
| Administrative Access | Rubs shoulders with the pradhan, MLA, and patwari, with the capacity to pay bribes | Forced in utter helplessness to flee in terror at the mere scolding of a clerk at the block or tehsil (sub-district administrative headquarters) |
| Documentation Status | Ration card (BPL/Antyodaya [scheme for the poorest of the poor]), Aadhaar, bank account, and income certificate ready instantly | No valid documents; misspelled name in Aadhaar, and opening a bank account is a veritable battle of the Mahabharata |
| Welfare Benefits | Receives everything—housing, toilet, Kisan Samman Nidhi, and free rations | Used as the ‘poor’ solely in speeches and election slogans |
The Bitter Truth from the Book: N. Singh’s Scathing Indictment
Author N. Singh writes in the chapter ‘The Welfare Kleptocracy’ of his book ‘Ginti Se Satta Tak’:
“The most agonising truth of welfare schemes is that whoever possesses the power to stand at the very front of the queue is not poor; and whoever is truly hungry and homeless breathes their last before even reaching the threshold of the tehsil and block offices. In our country, poverty is not determined by whether there is grain in your stomach, but by how many currency notes you have placed in the patwari’s satchel to have a stamp affixed beside your name! This system was not built to help the poor; this system operates to feed the middlemen who siphon off budgets worth thousands of crores in the name of the poor.”
— N. Singh (Ginti Se Satta Tak, pages 128–129)
Pointing towards a solution, the author further cautions:
“Until the decision on allocations for housing and the landless is wrenched from the hands of corrupt babus (clerks) sitting in closed rooms and handed over to the collective verification of an open gram sabha, no poor person in India will ever be able to sleep peacefully under a pucca roof.”
— (Ginti Se Satta Tak, page 132)
Four Concrete Measures to Secure the Rights of the Truly Landless
- Physical Verification via Drones and Satellites: Instead of relying merely on paper affidavits, a 360-degree video recording of the beneficiary’s current residence using drone cameras should be made mandatory. Anyone found already possessing a pucca house should be prosecuted for fraud.
- Social Audit in an Open Gram Sabha: The final list of recipients of housing and pattas should be painted in bold letters on walls at the village’s public crossroads and the panchayat (village council) building, and confirmed by reading out each name individually before the entire village in an open chaupal (village assembly space).
- Direct Imprisonment for Corrupt Lekhpals and Pradhans: If housing or a patta is granted to an ineligible individual, recovery must not be limited to the beneficiary alone; rather, the verifying lekhpal and secretary should be summarily dismissed from service and prosecuted under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
- Legal Guarantee of Residential Pattas for Landless Families: Every landless rural family should be granted indivisible and non-transferable ownership rights to at least 5 dismil (a land measure equal to 1/100th of an acre) of land as a legally enforceable right.
A Question Worth Pondering (The Book’s Message)
Even in this Amrit Kaal (the auspicious era of independence), is an Indian citizen breathing their last beneath a torn plastic sheet not a stinging slap in the face of our entire democracy and judiciary?
For an authoritative analysis exposing this heart-wrenching reality of rural India and the tangled web of administrative corruption, every conscientious citizen must read this chapter of N. Singh’s book, ‘Ginti Se Satta Tak: Bharat Ka Ankaha Yuddh’ (From Count to Power: India’s Untold War).
The most agonising truth of welfare schemes is that whoever possesses the power to stand at the very front of the queue is not poor; and whoever is truly hungry and homeless breathes their last before even reaching the threshold of the tehsil and block offices.