POOR PEOPLE OF INDIA

"The Eastern India Context" 

In eastern India, poor men and women typically belong to scheduled tribes and castes. 

One household, of five to six persons commonly farms only a small area of land (about 

0.4 ha – an area about two thirds the size of a football pitch).  The main crops are finger 

millet and rice, but this production meets a household’s food requirements, at the most, 

for just three months of a year.  Wild fish are a popular but rare source of vital high-grade 

protein, polyunsaturated fats  and calcium.  Because of  recurrent food insecurity,

livelihoods depend upon local labouring for better-endowed farmers, or migrating for 

seasonal (urban) labouring opportunities to meet household needs.   Indebtedness is a 

common condition linked with people’s limited capacity to generate income. 

During the 1990s, work undertaken by a DFID funded development project and an NRSP 

funded research project in the State of Orissa and West Bengal enabled such poor people 

to improve their livelihoods through engaging in fish culture using seasonal ponds.  This

activity helped household food supply and created opportunities for income generation. 

Villagers at the target sites experienced improvements in their diets and in local work 

opportunities.  Migration decreased and human health, confidence, skills and capacity to 

take on new challenges (e.g., obtaining and  repaying a bank loan)  were substantially 

improved.  We have told this story in more detail in The Jabarrah Story. 

By 2001, it was apparent that, in order for  many more people to have access to the 

livelihood opportunities of the type experienced in a limited number of villages, policy

changes were required in the national and state-level service sector that concerns 

aquaculture.

 In urban areas, I believe that hardly anyone goes without food; there is always some kind of income. But their poverty stems from the environment in which they live�lack of sanitation, lack of drinking water, medical care. The answer to urban poverty is to get rid of the blight of slums and build proper homes with basic facilities.

 A number of people both within India and abroad think India is a poor country. It is not. The bulk of India's people remain poor because we are not able to give basic education to our children, we are not able to impart skills to our young men and women, and we are not able to get productive work out of them. If we can get another 200 million to 300 million people to join the ranks of those engaged in productive activity, India's GDP will soar.

 In India, poor children start working at a very young age. Some of the children work to help their families and at the same time, some families want their children to help them to run the family business. Thegovernment of India has always followed a proactive policy to fight with the problem of child labour.

The successive governments at centre have always stood for constitutional, statutory and developmental measures to eliminate the cause of child labor. The constitution of India has deliberately integrated appropriate provisions to provide compulsory universal elementary education and protection from child labor as well for children.

However, the Chief Justice of India (CJI), K G Balakrishnan, lamented that all the anti-child labor laws were not being implemented  across the country. He, while delivering speech on Friday at a seminar in the country on justice delivery standards for children, said that there were several proper legislation's in place just to protect children and to work for children’s welfare.

He further said that the implementations of these laws are still lagging behind in the country and it needs strong will power to implement such laws at ground level first. The seminar was organized by the Legal Assistance Forum. He also told that very few states such as Manipur and Orissa were implementing the Juvenile Justice Act seriously. He also said at the seminar that child labor was always a major problem in the country.

According to the data, India has a child population of over 445 million and 126 million of them are less than five years old. Is India serious about the welfare of its future, the children?

The progress report for children, released by UNICEF in December 2007, says that an estimated 2.1 million children in India died before their fifth birthday in just one year. The shocking part of the story is that of these deaths, more than one million deaths happened in case of less than 29-day-old infants. They died but the causes were preventable and curable. The data says that 25 per cent of all neo-natal deaths across the world occurred in India.

Nearly 50 per cent of low weight babies (8.3 million infants were low weight babies with less than 2,500 grams) died before their fifth birthday. That means at least 1/3rd of less-than-five-year-old underweight children of the world are in India.

The government of India will have to work hard in cooperation with state governments to restrict the child labor in the country and to concentrate hard to give better healthcare to the newborn babies as well. Sometimes, such goals look difficult to attain due to cultural and economic factors but this is the need of the time for us to stand and take oath to take care of the children, who are the future of our nation---

Please read my story?

Please read my adpated story. It may have some mistakes but read it. It is really emotional. I translated it from a Tamil story.
I lived on the terrace of a building. Down this, two families lived on either side of the building. The one on the left was a poor family with a husband, his wife and their six children and the mother of the husband. The owned a dog too. Their house always looked like a amusement park with the children running here and there. The wife was pregnant and so was the dog.
In contrast to the left side was the right side. The family on the right side of the building consisted of only two people: the husband and his wife. They were richer than the left side. Though they have been married for nearly twenty years, there were no children for them. Lone and silent, their house looked like a graveyard but with walking people. As I have told you earlier, we lived on the terrace of a building, not too far from them.
One day, while I was studying a book, I heard a scream from the left side of the building. When I rushed to the left side of the terrace to see what was happening below, I heard the cry of a baby. Then I understood it: the lady had just given birth to a baby. Feeling happy(though I don't know why) I went to resume my work. After about twelve o'clock, I shut my book and switched off the lights to sleep.
The next morning when I woke up, I heard not only the sound of the baby but an altogether different sound. I peeped from my house into theirs and saw four puppies on the threshold of the door with their mother licking them. So, the mother dog had given birth to four puppies. Happiness over happiness, I felt that God had really blessed them. I was thinking of adopting a puppy when my alarm went off. Oops...I need to rush to my office now.

Three days after the birth of the puppies, their mother vanished from sight. The puppies were crying for milk. Unable to bear their sad faces, the mother of the husband, told her daughter-in-law to give milk. "We don't have money for it" was the reply of her. I don't blame her. This is the condition of many downtrodden families in Chennai. "Why don't you give them any other food?" the mother asked her. "No, we can't. They may die. They aren't old enough to ear anything" she said and looked sadly at the puppies. She was the one who bought the mother dog to the house from the streets.
She made her eldest son to go and search for the dog. But he returned with empty hands. When her husband came from her work, exhausted an tired, she asked her to search for the dog. Though he was very tired, he agreed to do it. Minute by minute, the time passed. After an hour, he too came home with empty hands. "The municipality must have caught it since the license is no longer valid. We can go and claim our dog tomorrow and pay the money."
But the wife was not happy with that information. When night came, the cry of the puppies grew so loud that the wife from the right side came to our house and spoke with my wife about the racket the left side was making. "This is one of the worst families I have ever seen...have not they been told about manners? These lot never learn. That's why there are in the bottom. Will you go and tell them to stop their noises?" she asked my wife. My wife nodded. "Yes, advice is need. But not for them. Go and shut all the windows and the doors and sleep. The noise will be lessened." She told her. I felt happy that she retorted back. The wife left
the house looking offended. I was happy that my wife could understand the problem better than the wife from the right side.
The cry was so intense that I felt my heart pounding. I was sure that they are going to die. Why is God so mean? I decided to sleep as I saw the moon slowly glowing brighter. It was nearing midnight. I could hear the grandmother shouting to her daughter-in-law. "Come and give milk to the baby" she said. The lady looked dejectedly at the puppies and stroked their ears. Then she got up and went inside a room to give milk to her baby.

I could not sleep well. I dreamt of a world full of puppies crying for milk. When I woke up, in the middle of the night, I was surprised to find the atmosphere so quite. No puppy was crying. I went to see what had happened to the puppies. I saw the lady of the house, holding a small plastic cup. She squeezed her breast and made the milk to flow into the cup. Then she dipped a cotton ball into the milk and dabbed it on the mouth of the puppies. I felt my heart melt away. I could see the right house with all the lights out and snore coming from deep inside the house. Life is indeed mean.