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Aiding the Poor in India
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12928 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
5,129 Words |
| Author
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Ann McDonald
Ann McDonald is a Washington-based development planner with
expertise in India. |
Let me say, first, that I welcome a book such as The City of Joy. There is nothing like firsthand experience, or the vivid description of it, to bring home the filth, heat, squalor and hand-to-mouth struggle for survival of the poor to a privileged Western world - a world which, otherwise, has a tendency to ignore poverty, or dismiss it as the victims' own doing.
The Problem
If there is one difficulty I have with The City of Joy, and with Dominique Lapierre's personal solution, it's that it gives the impression that India's most pressing problem is urban poverty, and that the answer is to send a handful of dedicated, white "sahibs" into the slums, along with a few Mother Teresas. This to be accompanied by financial assistance to small rural village irrigation schemes, in order to stave off poverty-inducing drought.
In fact, India and her problems - and the solutions - are vastly larger and more complex. Some forty years after the end of the British Raj, the problems continue to confound, in spite of a wide variety of earnestly applied correctives. I am not a great fan of statistics, because they tend to dehumanize issues (exactly the reverse of what Lapierre is trying to do). But a few figures may help define India's situation more clearly.
India is not only a country, it is a continent. The Indian Union consists of twenty-three states occupying almost 3.3 million square kilometers. Only about one-half of the land - the narrow coastal strips and the teeming Gangetic Plain - is suitable for agriculture. The ethnic, linguistic, and cultural
... (1996 of 31371 Characters)
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