The Century Times

Today is the blogosphere’s Poverty Eradication Day. The Century Times analyzes about the poor, the poverty, the rich, the chasm in between & the alternatives available to completely eradicate the poverty in Indian context. Lets start with exploring …

Who really is Poor?

No, not the beggars, for their gross earnings are above the national per capita income. (One report reveals the total earnings of all the beggars in Mumbai alone to an astonishing Rupees 180 crore i.e. 1,800 millions! Take a guess for Chennai figures by visiting here, for Hyderabad here, for Kolkata click here, for Delhi click here or this one.).

No, it can’t be the slum-dwellers of metropolis …as the valuation of most slum units are more than a well-built average rural home!

Nor it can be the person lying on a footpath …for these people have access to exotic & invaluable but legally banned drugs for their indulgence, which even a middle-class household can not afford, if it ever wished for the same!

And about daily wage-earners …I have observed most of them including masons, plumbers, rickshaw-pullers, auto-drivers, restaurant waiters, etc. making many folds higher income than a qualified junior level executive. Moreover, their status is that of a businessman as against the one slogging for his pay through out the month!

So who is actually POOR in the real sense??? Well, hold your breathe, for I might sound a bit insulting when I answer this question. But believe me, most of us fall into this category. Yes, all of us are poor. I am yet to meet a person who can claim that he is rich! Here I’m not just talking of poverty in monetary terms (though the above argument holds ground for this too) , but of poverty in spirituality, poverty in one’s character, in one’s morale, integrity, etc. terms. As a good human being you need not be poor on any account.

Most monetarily rich individuals are poorer than the pooorest in many other aspects of their life. They have put all their life-energies in use merely to accumulate money and becoming rich, nothing more. Despite accumulating great wealth, they are not happy or satisfied with themselves. Their personal or family life is not even adorable or immitable!

So extremeties  of any kind is bad. Mediocrity is the key. We have to strike a right balance in everything to enjoy and lead a happy & successful life. And this is what we should covet for in our life, if we ever want to achieve anything. But our society is falsely motivated and desperate to accumulate huge wealth individually! Society has misinterpreted the signs of success and therefore has failed miserably, time and again.

By now, you might have understood the answer to why we are still poor. And its obvious that key to eradication of poverty is in providing right training and proper education to the new generation with an eye on real definition of leading a successful life. Today our education system focuses heavily on disseminating information but is weak in imparting knowledge and enlightening the mind and the personality as a whole. Colleges market themselves by flaunting their high campus-placement figures, schools take pride in their number of candidates who were successful in entrance examinations of prestigious colleges. But they are clueless on the number of successful personalities they produced over time, who led their life successfully in the real sense.

We as a nation need to create happy and passionate individuals. Right passions need to be developed. Passions of every individual should be determined and given proper guidance & training to develop it further. Thus we shall be creating a society comprising of all passionate individuals. A passionate individual is more efficient & happier than anyone else. These will make the society more productive as well and yes rich too, in real sense.

Well, you would not have expected to read all this blah-blah in an article on poverty-eradication! Sorry, to make you read all these stuff.So now lets come back to the fundamental point of eradicating poverty in pure economic sense.

About one-third of our nation is said to be leading its life Below-Poverty-Line (B.P.L.). Technically, I don’t know what is meant by a Poverty Line. But perhaps BPL refers to people deprived of even basic amenities like food & shelter for their survival. Its very strange that most of our fellow beings are struggling for just their survival. What do our Government do then! Why we have a government after all! In my opinion, every human being once taking birth on this planet should have every right to survive till his natural death without much efforts.

Recent survey by International Food Policy Research Institute reveals that India occupies the 66th place among the 88 countries surveyed for hungry people as per their press release yesterday! Almost all South Asian countries are better off except Bangladesh. All Indian states are ranked below “serious”, Madhya Pradesh being the worst …categorized as “Extremely Alarming”. We are not doing any better on the Global Hunger Index. Indian is having one of the highest number of under-weight children and with one of the highest child-mortality rate.

Despite all this, our government says that poverty will be eliminated with the rapid economic progress of the country! How can a country progress with hungry citizens!!! India has one of the largest human capital in the world and yet we have failed to utilize it.

Some time back, I was at Amritsar …the land of the Golden Temple or the Harmandir Sahib. During my three days stay there, I couldn’t spot a single beggar! You know why? Golden Temple has one of the best managed langar facility (serving free food to all with reverence as part of the Sikh’s religious practice). At Golden Temple, all people are well fed. Can’t this be replicated in the whole country? We earn a GDP of about a trillion US Dollars every year. And with a population of about a billion people, if we serve a basic diet costing Rs. 15/- each twice a day to whole of its population round the year, it will still amount to less than quarter of its annual GDP. And almost all self-sufficient people will never go for that basic monotonous diet, even people below BPL will like to skip it whenever they can afford a better delicacy. So at most only 25% of the people will avail this facility which will hardly be around 6% of our GDP. And it will also eradicate the evil of begging, saving the donor of around Rs. 10,000 crore annually which could be put to better use in addressing natural calamities. 6% of our GDP might eliminate hunger altogether. Add another 1% for basic health care. And we shall have a huge batalion of healthy citizens resulting in the improved productivity. And I bet, it will compensate more than what have been invested over them in the long run. A healthy mind resides in a healthy body as the old adage goes. Here I would like to emphasize that 6-7% of GDP is not alms but an investment in our huge human asset lying unused.

But Governments’ strategies are faulty as always. They don’t address to the issue of eradication of poverty as eradication but of alleviation of poverty. The strategists don’t aim high enough. Poor strategists can’t lead to richer nation! In India more capital & time is wasted in coaching institutes than in mainline education system. I was surprised to learn that about Rs. 10,000 crores is spent in the coaching institutes for preparing students for engineering entrance examinations. Only if this fund was utilized to open new engineering colleges and develop infrastructure for better education, we would have been far ahead! But the practice continues as ever without any effect.

I have been the admirer of Kiva, who has taken the creative initiative of micro-financing to the benefit of entrepreneurship all over the world. Thanks to KivaB4B for donating 10,000 USD for this cause. Only efforts like this deliver results. All else is just blah-blah .

Poverty, Hunger, Begging, Indian GDP

Technorati Tags: Poverty, Hunger, Begging, Indian GDP