The poor deserve to be respected.

One can understand that a foreigner would have no qualms wasting trillions of rupees to buy votes to remain in power and a bunch of sycophantic creepy-crawlies will obey orders while prone on the ground but why did the opposition surrender to this act of economic treason by not combining to defeat the Food Security Bill? One reason is that no politician would like to be painted as a heartless enemy of poor malnourished children and the other is the view that the poor are hopeless failures who deserve nothing better than 5 kg of rice or wheat every month. The problem starts with the angry debate on how a poor person is defined. Is it a person earning Rs 35 a day or 50 or 100. Surely, 66 years after independence we should aim higher, much higher. We could define a person as poor if he or she has just one of everything. One flat with one room, one car, one air conditioner, one fridge, one TV and one mobile. If the person has 2 of anything then that person would not be classed as poor. However, for the Congress a fridge, a car and an AC are all luxury items to be taxed beyond the reach of everyone so that they can then treat everyone as beggars. Then there are others who try to put a fake economic gloss on the treachery. Their argument is that since the poor spend a large part of their earnings on food giving them cheap food will free up some money to spend on other goods and thus expand the economy from the bottom up. " A well-nourished and well-educated workforce would be more productive and have higher morale, the best guarantee to sustain higher economic growth." Livemint, 27 August. The poor are not fools but their economic calculations are different to others because they have no assets and their income is short term. An adult, especially a laborer, will need more than 10 kg of grains a month but a child will need less. The adults can then feed themselves better or sell the excess for cash. So the poor will produce more children to boost their handouts. This keeps them imprisoned in poverty. It is like keeping a tiger in a zoo. He is well fed and comfortable but is an object of pity. The poor should be paid to have no children. That will release them from poverty and make them respectable rather than beggars who should be pitied. Trouble is you cannot win elections by respecting the voters. Can you?