A Poverty Pickle

I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of months now and have drafted and scrapped it several times – poverty. It’s such a difficult issue to pin down, let alone work out what my thoughts about it are. What even is poverty? A purely financial take on it doesn’t even scratch the surface, particularly when you think about the role that assets like land and livestock have to play here. It’s not uncommon to see women and men glittering, yet still slumped by the side of the road; someone with little understanding of Indian culture might see this jewelry as a savings fund, but the ever-present pressure of dowry prevents it from being so.

                Can we measure it by facilities, then? Maybe. Access to drinkable water is improving by way of community pumps and taps, meaning less pressure on women to go trekking every day, though it only seems to have freed them enough to swap water pots for enormous bundles of sticks or basket-loads of bricks. There certainly a lot of excellent initiatives to train women in handicrafts and textiles, but I imagine they still don’t have a hope in hell of buying their own products. Nevertheless, the willingness of women (and of their families) to train must be evidence of progress.

                Child labour, on the other, I think we can all agree is a definite poverty marker. The sight of pre-pubescent kids wielding pick axes by the side of the road could never (and should never) cease to be shocking. The all too familiar tug of a grubby little hand on my is sleeve is just heart-breaking, especially knowing that handing over those ten rupees or a packet of biscuits would do more harm than good in the long run – if sending children out begging is effective, then what incentive would desperate parents have to send their kids to school?

                Then there’s the added complication of technology. The status attached to phones and laptops is so powerful that it seems to have overridden the want for the infrastructure that supports it. Politicians are handing out laptops to students who cannot guarantee having the electricity to charge them and to some teenagers I’ve met, school is just one giant electrical socket. I can’t help feeling that pressure from the ‘West’ and a general ‘keeping up with the Jones’ attitude’ is distorting natural evolution, which is never a good thing. Then again, without delving back into the whole Jamie Oliver/ poor people/ TV thing, who am I to begrudge anyone their escapism?

                But the main thing is that there is huge enthusiasm for change. There are organisations doing phenomenal work with massive community support, the caste system is gradually crumbling and the spanner thrown firmly into the proverbial works by the Aam Aadmi Party (The Everyman’s Party/ Mango Man’s Party, depending on your translation) has shaken up a political climate infamous for its corruption. While there’s obviously still a long way to go, the genuine optimism for the future of this country is exhilarating and is one form of nationalism that I could actually get behind.