Dinner time conversation.
D : Mama is there a spare blanket at home?M : What happened?
D : Ohh, there is this old lady who lives outside our house. She looks like she belongs to a nice family, and her kids didn't want her. She just stays there all day, and has no possessions of her own. People pity her and give her food sometimes. P and I feel really bad, we even went and bought her a pair of slippers last week. I don't know what to do for her. She stays out there even when it rains at night. I don't know how she manages.
M : Buy her one then……(cut short)
By now, I could completely empathise with the old lady. Isn't her mental agony of being kicked out of home enough, that she has to go through all these hardships as well? I could picture her on cold rainy nights, sitting under a protective branch, with her meager belongings. Then it struck me, that there are millions of homeless people in our country who don't have a shelter, why then have I never felt this bad for them? Is it because they have never known a better lifestyle, and this lady probably did have a better lifestyle and a house to live in? I suddenly regretted telling all the beggars to move on. Some of them may have been genuine. So, should I empathise with every homeless person I see from now on? Should you?
Mr. Karunanidhi has promised to give a Television and rice at Rs. 2/kg to every household in Tamil Nadu. There is a catch. "Household". What about the poor people without a family or a place to live? Should they not be the primary target for rehabilitation. Come to think of, shouldn't rehabilitation and employment opportunity score over sources of entertainment? I completely agree that a TV can go a long way in awakening the masses, and also educating them, but does it not sound like petty vote bank politics, a new techno savvy variety, because saying "We will provide drinking water and electricity in all villages, and connect them with metalled roads", seems to be an unfulfilled and clichéd promise made by politicians in the 70's.
I looked up some statistics, and I summarise here.
"We also count people in India". Really, I thought you were in charge of dogs only. Source : Census India
Total Population : 1028 Million
Houseless Population : 0002 Million
Number of Households (Tamil Nadu) : 14,665,983
Houseless Population (Tamil Nadu) : 86,742
"He said a Gujarat firm had also come forward to set up a factory in Tamil Nadu that would make colour TVs costing Rs.2,000." Source : Yahoo News
So, it comes to this. The people of Tamil Nadu have voted in a government that will spend 29,000 Million Rupees (I wonder how they thought it was possible), to give them televisions! What about the 86 thousand people without homes? They don't count, they don't matter statistically. So when the official census website claims to "Also count people in India", one can only guess what the primary motive of the census is..
About this entry
You’re currently reading “
- Published:
- 9:34 AM
- by Vivek
3 Comments (Post a Comment)