For a long a long time a particular feeling had been rearing its my head in my life again and again. It wasn't sad or depressing, just a bit unsettling, an unspoken feeling that something isn't quite right, that there is a pawn somewhere on the board, out of place, waiting to be taken. Over and over it would disappear and I would think it went away because I figured out why: but always it came back. I don't know if this is one of those moments of temporary madness when I feel I have it all down, but I feel its real and if it is I'm in for a tough but exciting journey that I am about to embark on even though my current abilities are at best, questionable. This will be, hopefully ( what I would do without this word ! :) ) first of many posts that are to come, sort of a travelogue ! I know this calls for a bigger prologue, but now the prospects of completing the journey are quite slim and I don't want to spoil it with expectations. I apologize for all the shortcomings beforehand :)
What does it mean to be poor ? This thinly worded question appears deceptively simple at first sight: but we are people of twenty first century, we know about a lot of philosophical dilemmas that underline humanities right ? We know its okay to not know something precisely. That is perfectly true, only the quantification/qualification of poverty isn't just limited to theoretical musings; there has been and there still is much effort put into quantifying poverty since it is perhaps the biggest challenge that we as humanity face today.
At this point I won't go into the details of this ( but I plan to at some point :) ) because my grasp of economics is very little, great many men and women stand before me with their brilliance invested in precisely the same task and some of their results are here to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty. For me to say something about this would be like a highschooler trying to talk about quantum mechanics. But sometimes, highschoolers do stupid things that makes others think :) So I will outline bits and pieces of knowledge I gain, as I go along :), this should serve as a guide to, at least, the equally ignorant.
Why is it important to ask this question of what poverty is ? Don't we already have a Poverty Line and BPL ration cards ? Don't we have PHCs and Government Hospitals ? We do, and we are getting more but as all of us probably know, we are nowhere near solving this problem. Apart from the, just think of this simple fact. Most people who are reading this, or for that matter anything on the web own a computer or at least has access to one, they know enough English to read this, most of us probably own a mobile phone too. For the majority of readers, these things have always been there, we don't see anything unusual in them being there, but we are by far a minority. A quick Google search reveals that it is only 8.2 % of Indian population that has access to the internet, that too overwhelmingly men.
Leave internet, the proportion of people with access to modern sanitation stands at a shameful 35%. All this statistics is nothing new to us, it is packaged and presented to us in neat little tables and bar charts every day in newspapers. The saddest thing is that most of us think this is 'Okay', there is nothing wrong with this picture of the world. We probably feel sorry in an impersonal way for these people but it stops there. Occasionally, few of us come across people who need help and we do help them, most of us are good people. But the fact there majority of our huge population lives like this never registers anywhere, even if it does, it stays there only for a very very short while. It doesn't dawn on us that there is something inherently wrong going on here, where one set of human beings live in deprivation and do not have access to most of the things that we do, and it is not their fault by any measure.
This is truly, the tragedy of the commons. Some people are scared that admitting this would amount admitting that they would have to give up things they enjoy for a socialist dystopia/utopia. I don't honestly know which way it goes and I want to.
What does it mean to be poor ? This thinly worded question appears deceptively simple at first sight: but we are people of twenty first century, we know about a lot of philosophical dilemmas that underline humanities right ? We know its okay to not know something precisely. That is perfectly true, only the quantification/qualification of poverty isn't just limited to theoretical musings; there has been and there still is much effort put into quantifying poverty since it is perhaps the biggest challenge that we as humanity face today.
At this point I won't go into the details of this ( but I plan to at some point :) ) because my grasp of economics is very little, great many men and women stand before me with their brilliance invested in precisely the same task and some of their results are here to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty. For me to say something about this would be like a highschooler trying to talk about quantum mechanics. But sometimes, highschoolers do stupid things that makes others think :) So I will outline bits and pieces of knowledge I gain, as I go along :), this should serve as a guide to, at least, the equally ignorant.
Why is it important to ask this question of what poverty is ? Don't we already have a Poverty Line and BPL ration cards ? Don't we have PHCs and Government Hospitals ? We do, and we are getting more but as all of us probably know, we are nowhere near solving this problem. Apart from the, just think of this simple fact. Most people who are reading this, or for that matter anything on the web own a computer or at least has access to one, they know enough English to read this, most of us probably own a mobile phone too. For the majority of readers, these things have always been there, we don't see anything unusual in them being there, but we are by far a minority. A quick Google search reveals that it is only 8.2 % of Indian population that has access to the internet, that too overwhelmingly men.
Leave internet, the proportion of people with access to modern sanitation stands at a shameful 35%. All this statistics is nothing new to us, it is packaged and presented to us in neat little tables and bar charts every day in newspapers. The saddest thing is that most of us think this is 'Okay', there is nothing wrong with this picture of the world. We probably feel sorry in an impersonal way for these people but it stops there. Occasionally, few of us come across people who need help and we do help them, most of us are good people. But the fact there majority of our huge population lives like this never registers anywhere, even if it does, it stays there only for a very very short while. It doesn't dawn on us that there is something inherently wrong going on here, where one set of human beings live in deprivation and do not have access to most of the things that we do, and it is not their fault by any measure.
This is truly, the tragedy of the commons. Some people are scared that admitting this would amount admitting that they would have to give up things they enjoy for a socialist dystopia/utopia. I don't honestly know which way it goes and I want to.
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