What makes the middle classes oppose or support initiatives intended to lift people out of poverty, and how can the development community secure their interest in and approval of such policies? The assumption among donors, development practitioners and researchers is often that the middle class are either not interested in helping the poor, or are motivated by self-interest when they oppose poverty alleviation initiatives because they fear that their own position will become more precarious.
This paper examines the attitudes of middle class Indians to poverty, and its findings reveal the complexity of their perceptions and beliefs. It shows that self-interest is not the only driver of middle class disapproval of assistance for the poor. It argues that the institutional focus, combined with a general assumption that political behaviour is largely driven by self-interest, has created an approach that is too narrow and unable to illuminate how change happens. The paper concludes that a political approach to policy design needs to be less institution-focused and to take public opinion into account.
The study is based on qualitative, exploratory and inductive research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 41 respondents living in various urban and industrial centres in the western Indian state of Gujurat. The questions asked were sufficiently broad to allow participants to focus on issues they thought important. Purposive sampling was used to select participants to make sure the sample was representative of gender, age, religion, caste, income and occupation. Urban dwellers were selected because the research literature shows that the majority of India’s ‘new’ middle class is urban-based.
Three broad themes emerged from participants’ responses to questions about poverty and the poor in India. These middle class respondents believed that: 1) poverty is part of the natural order; 2) getting out of poverty depends on individual effort and merit; and 3) the government does little to help them and they are the principal victims of corruption while, as they see it, the poor receive substantial government support.
Key Findings:
- Poverty may be a highly politicised issue even in a development context. Campaigns to eradicate poverty have been part of India’s electoral campaign narratives for almost half a century. This in turn has fed into the attitudes of other social groups, particularly the ‘new’ urban middle classes, who see themselves as marginalised by both the rhetoric and the resulting poverty alleviation policies.
- The politics of policy design and implementation are important. Given the preoccupation of India’s middle class with individual effort and merit, it would seem that they are more likely to support policies that promote education and employment for the poor than those that deliver unconditional cash transfers.
- Public opinion and political action are not only driven by self-interest. India’s middle class will support poverty alleviation policies that do not directly benefit them if those policies ‘fit’ their values.
- It is important to find out what drives disengagement of the middle classes from the poor in developing countries. In India, three aspects of the current political process seem to alienate the middle classes from the intractable problems faced by the poor: populist policies targeted at the poor and perceived by the middle classes as vote-buying; a political class widely perceived as endemically corrupt; and a sense that the country is, in effect, run by large, wealthy corporations. In fact, the findings of this study suggest that India’s middle class feel they have been frozen out of the political process and have no political space of their own in which to operate.