India's Poor - Hai Hai!
Another awakening, emerging giant. Alert to its potential and reaping the rewards of its highly intelligent and increasingly educated urban population, India is turning itself into the modern-day economic rival of China. An increasing middle-class and aspiring-to demographic. A tradition of clever and superb artistic craftsmanship with nimble hands and fingers to produce goods of clear value not to be seen exported from any other country of the world, and still to be had at impressively modest cost. (That's the old India.)A successful agricultural breadbasket for home consumption, although competing increasingly with the Western world to serve the increasingly adventurous palates of a more demanding middle class. Together with China, promising the world a tandem challenge in manufacturing prowess and economic might. India has come a long way, from endemic poverty to blossoming plenty. Or has it? Not according to P.V. Rajagopal who warns that almost 70% of India's population lives in poverty.
"Such conditions breed violence" he warns. "The kind of prosperity you see in cities like Bombay, Delhi and Chennai now is being bought at the cost of the poor people." The vice-chairman of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, on a speaking tour in Canada, he revealed that 40% of Indians remain landless, with 23% living in abject poverty. Canada can relate to that; as a wealthy nation with a high standard of living, there is yet a huge number of Canadians living in poverty.
In Canada, it's estimated that between 8% to 10.8% of the population live in poverty. Out of a population of 33-million, 3.5 million live below the low-income cut-off line. That's a lot of poor people. But everything is relative in this world, and what is considered low-income and poverty-stricken in the developed world doesn't quite compare with what pertains in third-world conditions - or, as the politically correct would have it, emerging economies.
In fifteen years of economic growth India has given growth to 300 "special economic zones" with industrial parks, high-tech complexes and shopping malls. None of which has had any residual impact on the 770-million Indians who eke out a subsistence as farmers or unorganized labourers in vast rural areas of the country. Mr. Rajagopal took pains to explain the differences between the haves and the have-nots in Indian society.
"India is an English word and its Indians are English-speaking, highly educated, articulate politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who are making wealth and comfort for themselves and their families at the cost of 70% of the Indians from Bharat" explained Mr. Rajagopal. "On the one side you see massive industrialization, steel factories are coming up, mining is happening, the airports are getting bigger and bigger, and the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are all travelling in to invest.
"But on the other side, there is ancient poverty and mothers selling their children and growing violence." And there is the Hindu caste system, which, although long-since outlawed by parliamentary decree, is still practised in the country, further victimizing the poor. Devaluing agriculture and promoting industry has had the effect of spurring a large migration from unproductive, non-employing rural areas to hopeless slums on the peripheries of urban centres. Creating even more destitute families. Hopelessness and despair breeding violence.
In the country's huge rural areas whole families are put to work in illegal bonded servitude in quarries and workshops. India's development, he points out, is greed-based. The social activist group Ekta Parishad of which Mr. Rajagopal is the founder has a plan to train young people through community leadership training or work sharing camps. Teaching strategies of non-violent protest and community development. Was it not ever thus? They have their work cut out for them.
India is an immense, complex, multifarious society. Albeit largely Hindu it has a large Muslim population. And Sikh. Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians. Protestant and Catholic Christians and Cochin Jews. There are the castes and sub-casts and the sub-sub castes. The untouchables and unapproachables. The agnostics, atheists and pessimists. Indians are provocatively activist, involved in legalities, in politics. This is a punctiliously bureaucratic society; everything in its place and a place for everything. Chaos too has its place.
It's no easy task to turn around thousands of years of culture, religious tradition, social convention. Women and children are particularly disadvantaged, their human rights violated, their vulnerabilities exploited. The India of today commonly visits violence and discrimination against women. Feticide, infanticide, neglect, malnourishment and death of young females are commonplace. As are marriage-familial abuse and killings of women, inclusive of dowry killings.
And then there is the horrendous plight of India's widows; elderly women whose husbands and protectors have died, and whose sons banish them from a normal life. Widows who are turned out of their homes, and forced to live in established communes where they become one another's family members, all of them begging for sustenance. And readily exploited by an uncaring society, long familiar and silently acquiescent in this particular tradition.
Even child-brides barely out of their teens, join the sad widows' groups, thrown from their homes. No future prospects, they will grow old and feeble and die of disease and hunger, ignored and sacrificed to tradition. In some backward rural communities the spectre of suttee can still occur, a traditional sacrifice of a widow on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. Oof toba toba! The traditional feudal system of India is never too far underground.
Starving children, many born with handicaps, physical and mental, from women whose misfortunes in life included not having sufficient to eat while in pregnancy, to never having the wherewithal to seek medical help. Children huddled on the street, begging passersby for a few rupees, a cup of lentils, a half-cup of rice. Much depends upon these incidental hand-outs, to feed entire families.
India
Population: 1,129,866,154
Unemployment rate: 7.2%
Percentage of population below the poverty line: 25%
Number of people living in the countryside: 700 million
Number living on less than $1 a day: 390 million
Labels: Human Fallibility, Political Realities, That's Life, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, April 27, 2008
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