“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman,
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God. As Mother Teresa said in A simple path
“Poverty” is the worst form of violence”, said Mahatma Gandhi. Over the years, poverty has proved to be the biggest hurdle in the way of success of India’s development. Poverty is that condition in which a person fails to not only fulfil his basic physiological needs, but also fails to protect himself from diseases, get balanced nutrition, maintain good health etc.
In simple terms, a person in order to survive should have proper food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Thus, poverty refers to a person failing to acquire these minimum levels of subsistence and in turn suffer from starvation, malnutrition, and diseases.
Poverty has been an inevitable problem since the time immemorial. From late 19th century through early 20th century, under British colonial rule, poverty in India intensified, peaking in 1920’s. Over this period, the colonial government, de-industrialised India by reducing garments and other finished products’ manufacturing by artisans in India.
They instead imported these from Britain. These colonial policies moved unemployed artisans into farming and transformed India as a region increasingly abundant in land, unskilled labour and low productivity, capital and knowledge. Moreover famines and diseases killed millions each time.
Recently, in 2013, the Indian Government stated 21.9% of its population is below official poverty limit. In other words, India with 17.5% of world’s total population, had 20.6% share of world’s poorest in 2013. A large proportion of poor people live in rural areas. Poverty is deepest among members of scheduled castes and tribes in the country’s rural areas.
On the map of India, the poorest areas are in parts of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. In fact, the story of our prolonged poverty and tyranny attached has got so much fame that a , foreign director (Danny Boyle) produced a whole movie on the issue. This movie is Slumdog Millionaire which got worldwide acclamation through Oscar Awards.
Statistics reveals that economic prosperity has indeed been very impressive in India, but it is the distribution of wealth that has been uneven and has caused the grave problem of poverty. Other major causes of poverty are illiteracy along with uncontrolled population growth, unemployment and under-employment, dependence on agriculture, caste system and corruption. The causes of rural poverty are manifold including inadequate and ineffective implementation of anti-poverty programmes.
The over-dependence on monsoon with non-availability of irrigational facilities often results in crop-failure and low agricultural productivity forcing farmers in the debt-traps. The children of poor families are forced to take up jobs at a tender age to fend for their large families, thus are not only deprived of their childhood but education too adding to the illiterate bulk of the country.
Central grants for programmes like Indira Awas Yojana and others, which was aimed at providing housing to the poor, have been utter failures due to lack of proper implementation. Massive transfer of ‘Black Money’ overseas and under-utilisation of foreign aid have also contributed to the deepening of poverty in India. Nelson Mandela once quoted:
“Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it
can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings”.
Interestingly, the incidence of rural poverty has declined somewhat in the past years as a result of rural to urban migration. In order to combat the grave problem of poverty, first and foremost, there should be a strict check on population increase. Creation of employment opportunities, spread of education, elimination of black money, decentralisation of planning, helping women and youth to become self-reliant are some other ways to combat this problem. Empowering the weaker and backward section of society is also expected to contribute to the alleviation of poverty. It is not due to lack of resources or technical assistance that we are failing in achieving our goals but more so due to lack of execution of these plans and programmes.
Eduindex News 