Poverty is big business throughout the world. You may win a Nobel Prize by your work on poverty.
Thousands of people enjoy comfortable lives raising money for NGOs. Politicians win elections, which bring great power and wealth, by promising free goodies to the poor. Thousands of people are earning millions in tax free salaries working for the World Bank which is dedicated to development work in poor countries. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have committed most of their wealth to eradicating communicable diseases and development of vaccines in the third world in the belief that healthy people can earn a living which will automatically reduce poverty. But when so many extremely clever people have been studying poverty, when there are so many organisations working to reduce poverty and when so much money is being spent on alleviating poverty why are there people so poor that they cannot afford 2 full meals a day? Is it because no one is asking the poor what they want and then working with them to achieve it? Just because the poor are illiterate, malnourished and dependent on handouts does not mean that they are helpless or stupid. As the Congress found out in the recent elections after distributing so many handouts which, they were convinced, would be a ' game changer '. It is probably because their view point at the bottom of the pyramid looking up is completely different to all those at the top looking down. There is a great debate in India on what constitutes poverty. One Tendulkar Committee estimated that anyone earning below Rs 32 per day in urban areas was really poor, which set off an uproar. Reporters went out to see what kind of food could be bought with that amount of money and whether a man could survive on it. Now a Rangarajan Committee has set the lower limit at Rs 46 per day. But can human condition be defined by mathematics? In a country with 1.2 billion people the government cannot provide cheap food to everybody so it needs a figure so that subsidies can be targeted to the vulnerable population. However, within that population people are different. There is difference in build, in age and in the amount of labor a person is doing. Giving cheap food saves such people from dying but does not bring them out of poverty. The only way to get rid of poverty would be to create good jobs with respectable wages but the tragedy is that with so much poverty Indian companies cannot find enough talent to employ. Which means good education for everyone. But the poor need their children to work to survive so poverty carries on from one generation to the next. The poor watch TV. Instead of lecturing them we need to make entertaining serials showing the advantages of having fewer children, childhood vaccination and good education. If we make them laugh maybe it will work.
Thousands of people enjoy comfortable lives raising money for NGOs. Politicians win elections, which bring great power and wealth, by promising free goodies to the poor. Thousands of people are earning millions in tax free salaries working for the World Bank which is dedicated to development work in poor countries. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have committed most of their wealth to eradicating communicable diseases and development of vaccines in the third world in the belief that healthy people can earn a living which will automatically reduce poverty. But when so many extremely clever people have been studying poverty, when there are so many organisations working to reduce poverty and when so much money is being spent on alleviating poverty why are there people so poor that they cannot afford 2 full meals a day? Is it because no one is asking the poor what they want and then working with them to achieve it? Just because the poor are illiterate, malnourished and dependent on handouts does not mean that they are helpless or stupid. As the Congress found out in the recent elections after distributing so many handouts which, they were convinced, would be a ' game changer '. It is probably because their view point at the bottom of the pyramid looking up is completely different to all those at the top looking down. There is a great debate in India on what constitutes poverty. One Tendulkar Committee estimated that anyone earning below Rs 32 per day in urban areas was really poor, which set off an uproar. Reporters went out to see what kind of food could be bought with that amount of money and whether a man could survive on it. Now a Rangarajan Committee has set the lower limit at Rs 46 per day. But can human condition be defined by mathematics? In a country with 1.2 billion people the government cannot provide cheap food to everybody so it needs a figure so that subsidies can be targeted to the vulnerable population. However, within that population people are different. There is difference in build, in age and in the amount of labor a person is doing. Giving cheap food saves such people from dying but does not bring them out of poverty. The only way to get rid of poverty would be to create good jobs with respectable wages but the tragedy is that with so much poverty Indian companies cannot find enough talent to employ. Which means good education for everyone. But the poor need their children to work to survive so poverty carries on from one generation to the next. The poor watch TV. Instead of lecturing them we need to make entertaining serials showing the advantages of having fewer children, childhood vaccination and good education. If we make them laugh maybe it will work.
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