Eradication of the poor: A new approach

"We cannot have two Indias. You want the world to believe we are the strongest emerging economy, but millions of poor and hungry people are a stark contrast," the Supreme Court said on Wednesday pointing to a huge gap between poverty eradication measures and spread of the problem. 

Supreme Court’s outrage is clearly against the vast divide between rich and poor. Our scams used to be in lakhs earlier, upgraded to crores, then to 10s of crores, 100s of crores and now we have crossed 1000s of crores. We have also heard of enourmous sums of money being stacked away in Swiss banks. Alarming increase in the numbers of luxury cars in India also paint a fancy picture of the country.

The other side of the story is fancy for all the foreigners visiting the country.

Since its independence, the issue of poverty within India has remained a prevalent concern. As of 2010, more than 37% of India’s population of 1.35 billion still lives below the poverty line. More than 22% of the entire rural population and 15% of the urban population of India exists in this difficult physical and financial predicament. While most of us are trying to cut down our eating to come back to shape, these people are finding it difficult to get 2 proper meals a day.

Since 1950s, the Indian government has implemented a number of programs designed to eradicate poverty (this does not include the personal efforts of politicians to distribute their wealth for votes). However we still continue to have a major percentage of the world’s poor.

UPA government under the able leadership Manmohan Singh has a fresh approach towards this problem. As eradicating poverty is becoming a problem, so they have decided to eradicate the poor.

Heaps of food grains have been destroyed under the auspices of Food Corporation of India (FCI) across the country in the name of storage.  An RTI investigation shows that as on Jan 1 this year, 10,688 lakh tonnes of food grains were found damaged in FCI depots, enough to feed over six lakh people for over 10 years. No food no poor. This approach is expected to continue for few more years under the able guidance of Mr Pawar, who single handedly could account to reducing 30% of India’s poor.

This is not the only strategy which is being followed. In a first of its kind approach, which has got the attention of the whole world, a bank in UP has stated that termites have eaten up a huge pile of currency in their bank.

An army of very hungry termites seem to have munched through 1 crore rupees in currency notes stored in a steel chest at a bank. Bank officials say the notes kept in a 'currency chest' at the branch since January was found to have been reduced to dust. They also claim that the old building has been infested with termites all along.

CBI has been roped in to investigate this and they have reported that this army of termites is likely to move from one bank to another to feast on the new found item on the menu. News on all the job portals is that termites are hiring in full scale. Millions of termite resumes are flooding Monster, Naukri and other job portals.

By this, there is an attempt to eradicate the other menace of India, the middle class.