Posted on 05/16/2010 9:02:57 PM PDT by darkside321
"We live on a day-to-day basis," Suraj says, as the faint sound of hammering echoes across the village. "What we earn is what we spend on our families in a day."
In Ganne, just off the main road about an hour south of the city of Allahabad, this is a simple fact of life.
It is home to members of a poor tribal community, who live in small huts clustered around a series of shallow quarries.
Inside one of the huts sits a little girl called Poonam. She is three years old, and in the early stages of kidney failure.
Like many children in Ganne she has become used to eating bits of dried mud and silica, which she finds in the quarry. Tiny children chew on the mud simply because they are hungry - but it is making them ill.
When reports first emerged of children eating mud here local officials delivered more food and warned the villagers not to speak to outsiders. But Poonam's father, Bhulli, is close to despair. "What can I say," he shrugs. "We can't afford to eat properly, so how can I afford to buy medicines for her?"
"I am really worried about my daughter, but I don't know what to do next. The poor need the government's help - if we had it, we wouldn't be in such a desperate state."
People like Bhulli and Suraj make their money filling lorries with bits of rock. It takes about eight hours for five men to fill one load. They carry the stones up from the quarry in plastic washing-up bowls balanced on their heads.
One of the women in the...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
We should all be impoverished and overcrowded like that, bring on the illegals and socialism.
/sarc
We’re getting there, be patient it won’t be long now. We’ll be squatting in the streets with little tin cups selling pencils or chewing gum.
No, they don’t need government help. They need a government that gets out of the way of private industry and charity. The free market works wherever it is allowed to operate.
It sure feels like it.
We put corn in our gas tanks.
Look at the name of that town closely, “Allahbad”. It’s clearly a Muslim town and it’s suffering massive amounts of poverty while the rest of India is on fire. Just saying.
My son ran into people in Malawi - Africa - who ate dirt sometimes when it was the only thing to eat. He met young teenage boy was head of the family since both parents had died. The life expectancy there is short. This country is a democracy and mostly Christian.
They have no problems with government intervention preventing business from taking off.
Every place doesn’t have the same opportunities we’ve had here and the reasons aren’t simple.
President Obama and his wife Bigfoot were traveling by limosine motorcade, just south of the Indian city of Allahabad, as luck would have it, and something caught their attention: children and adults were on their hands and knees—eating grass! It was just scrub grass mixed with clay and bits of glass and trash.
Well, they were both shocked and Mrs. Obama grunted loudly, so the SS fetched a few of the unfortunates to their car where the Untouchables fell upon their faces.
“Let me be clear,” said the young, handsome putative president. “In my country we are all equal so please feel free to rise to your knees unless you are simply incapable of doing so in my presence, and that’s perfectly understandable.”
A couple of the older villagers rose up on their knees, and Mrs. 0 grunted again, several times. Her husband nodded and asked them, “We noticed you are eating grass. Why is that? Why don’t you eat arugala, if you like vegetation, or some nice, aged Kobe steaks?”
And the villagers replied, “Oh sir, we have nothing to eat and no money to buy food with, so we are reduced to eating grass!”
Mrs. 0 again grunted, and her spouse and keeper stepped from the limo and said, “On this let me be clear, you are flying home with us to the United Socialist ... oops, I’m always getting ahead of myself! I mean, you are returning with us to `America’ where you will be my guests in my home.
The villagers clapped their hands and some began to tie their few belongings up with twine in rags, and Barry/Barack resumed his oration.
“In our country, no one of color goes hungry! You will be well taken care of, let me assure you.”
And the village elder cried with joy, “Oh sir, this is too much! To take us into your home and feed us and ... “
And Mrs. 0 grunted and her International Man of Mystery said,
“Tut tut old man, think nothing of it. We’ve been gone all week, our grass is lush and rich and it must be a foot high.”
Actually, the town’s name is Ganne. Per the article, it’s about 50km south of Allahabad, which is about halfway between Delhi and Kolkata. It’s no more a Muslim town than many others in India, and there are many villages like Ganne where poverty is endemic. For example, about 50km south of Bhubaneswar in Orissa there is a small village being slowly poisoned by a privately-owned (foreign owned) bauxite mining company. They too make almost nonexistent wages every day, on the order of a couple of dollars, and get virtually no help. Only in the larger cities is there any money, and even there, it is all too easy to find people living in tiny squatters shacks made from trash. India may be on fire, but there are many more people than there are jobs or even education.
It is absolutely unconscionable for people to continue having babies when the children they already have are eating mud and going into kidney failure as toddlers from malnutrition, not to mention suffering permanent cognitive deficiencies since their brains can’t develop properly. The reason giving these people food never helps is because they just use it to have even more babies — instead of alleviating the suffering, it just multiplies the scale of the suffering.
They don’t exactly have money for contraceptives as they need all the money they make for food and life saving medicine. Natural Family Planning is a free option but it’s no guarantee of success.
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
— Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899]).
India has a totally corrupt govenment which is beholden to foreign influences - got really screwed by Muslim invasion, then ripped off by the British, and now many in the gov are Muslims and Hindus are actually oppressed, Muslims having preferential treatment, quotas, etc, even though they are 15% of the population.
Foreign money is a very bad influence - the top echelon connected get rich, the poor get the shaft; look at what happened in Bhopal. It’s happening all over. Monsanto is selling farmers seeds they can’t save and plant next year, and then when the farmers go bankrupt, they lose their land.
The solution is not just raw capitalism. Crapitalism. Captialism without a conscience screws people up badly. And in India there is so much bribery and nepotism that any kind of environment protective laws - even the most simple and basic - are easily flouted with a little money to the right people.
It’s not that people are lazy. Of course some people are, just like any place. Sigh.
Unfortunately, when you are born into total poverty, it’s very hard to get out. Like some others have said, being poor doesn’t necessarily mean you are lazy or ignorant.
They haul up rock ore on their heads and load it into trucks all day, and don’t make enough money to buy food. There’s something wrong with that, no matter how you slice it.
There will never be a solution to this problem when a people has only one outlet from their grinding poverty and desperation.
For a few brief minutes in their miserable lives they can experience the only affordable pleasure available to them...sex.
You are correct. It's free markets and the rule of law. Both are essential. But one basic problem with India is it's late start with free markets. For decades India was held hostage by an anti-free market sentiment fostered by its early leaders Gandhi and Nehru. Especially Nehru.
Yes, but look at the positive side. Imagine how low their carbon footprint must be!
Last I heard, there was no shortage of free contraceptives being handed out in India. The problem is unwillingness to use them — and a jaded acceptance of watching family members starve. It’s not uncommon for families to take an elderly relative and dump him/her by the side of the road somewhere, when the recent arrival of yet another new mouth to feed stretches the food supply to the breaking point. This is just sick. Stop having sex, for God’s sake, before you resort to tossing grandpa out like trash, or selling your 5 year old child to a “carpet school” for a few dollars. It’s not like these people don’t know how babies are made.
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