District Naan

Poverty in India is harsh. Harsher than what I have seen in Africa, mainly because it's often an urban poverty with incredible inequality, when Africa has a more rural poverty, where people live on limited means, but with less inequality.

Kids in in Africa are seemingly very happy, but they still run up to you and ask for money - see my earlier blog post regarding what I think about this. The conclusion being that the dependence on charity often overflows from necessity into greed due to unconditional charity by tourists and development focused institutions (e.g. World Bank, IMF that have only recently refound favour in the financial crisis due to years of poorly structured aid to African countries and South-East Asian economies).

In India, kids do come up to you and instead of speaking the words "give me money", they simply cup one hand and use the other to peck the one and then lift it up to their mouths to signify feeding, as if they're hungry. Their clothes often worn and filthy show semblance of former bright colours worn away by time, user and mostly the slum/garbage dump where it was picked up. Their hair often so dirty it sticks up by itself, usually black and wiry, but with streaks of brown. They tilt their heads and try to syringe sympathy from you.

Usually it occurs in larger cities, an occurrence that isn't limited to India, but is well recorded everywhere from Washington DC to London. Especially when in traffic, beggars will roam between the cars, cabs and trucks to find anyone they think is willing to give. All of a sudden, they spot the Gora (white man) and rush over. More often than not it's a woman with a child or two, holding one in her hands and the other trailing along behind her. She gives the "I'm hungry" or the "kids are hungry" motion. They press their faces up to the window, tap and try to get your attention.

Other times, it's an elderly couple...which makes you wonder, if they're begging at this age, how long have they been doing it? How have they survived so long?

The worst example is of a young girl, maybe 8 to 10 years old, pulling a small platform with wheels. On it, sits a gentleman with no legs, trying to speed up the process by pushing himself along with his hands. That's when two issues strike you: the welfare state is limited, especially for the disabled, and secondly, the poor are very organised.

Gautmik explained to me that begging is an industry in India, especially in Mumbai. For food and shelter, beggars hit the streets to collect ridiculous sums everyday. The girl pulling an invalid on a trolley is set up to maximise sympathy and thus charity. It's disgusting in some ways, but in other ways you can see the benefit. Imagine the charity as a tax that gets given the a private company that delivers, for a profit, public services such as food and shelter. Usually the government steps in when these business are loss making, but the 'public good' is deemed necessary. Here, there is profit to be made and so the private sector steps in. The beggar gets the benefit that if they hall in a lot today, then tomorrow, if they fall short, they still have food and shelter...in other words, the organisation allows for risk minimisation or insurance.

Regarding disability, this is where you see the most desperate beggars, struggling to live without any help from the state. In Jaipur, Casi and I were walking through the streets between sightseeing stops when a woman with no legs sitting on the floor, lunged at Casi grabbing him and delving into his pockets. She was utterly desperate for anything. In Delhi, sitting in the back of an autorickshaw, a gentleman with ragged clothes and arms cut off just below the elbow, and thus holding a bag on what little he had left of one, stood by the rickshaw trying to reach in for any charity.

India's corruption is the source of leakages that prevent the creation of an efficient welfare state and so why the privatised begging system can step in to fill the hole. The disabled can't work, they are physically unable to. Without a welfare state, they really have nothing, so they turn to organised poverty, a veritable business of begging. And business is booming.

One has to keep a realistic perspective on it. The slums in Mumbai are not the cesspools depicted in films such as Slumdog Millionaire (which was disliked all over India when released here). They are buzzing hubs of business, industry and slum suburbs (slumburbs). Perfectly educated, middle class, white collar workers, having been born in a shack in the "slums", owned by his father and his father before him, are at home like any of us are in our brick wall houses or the Masai people are in their cow dung huts. Producers and traders gather together in enclaves to produce and sell goods from their native origins (e.g. Gujarati women making certain Saris, Muslim women making square cushions with eclectic patterns made from copper coil, etc...). They even have public services, such as transport. It's a way of life that functions perfectly well.

Nonetheless, poverty is aggressive in India. You have to be cold enough to shrug it off, but find a way to maintain your humanity somehow. When begging becomes big business, I struggle with the latter of these.