Poverty in India

These are numbers that one almost cannot grasp. In a country like India with a total number of 1.2 billion people, where the economy is booming and which also holds the number 2 place on the list of ‘countries with most billionaires’ it is almost hard to believe that half of its population has to struggle every day to make a living.

And yet, it is not hard to find this difference between the rich and the poor. When I go to work in the morning I can end up waiting at a traffic light, looking to my right seeing the most exorbitant new car and looking to my left seeing little children beg for some money so they can buy ‘chapati’.

Or if I take walk for my morning coffee to the little market close to my hotel: there are mothers sitting with their babies on the sidewalk begging for some food. Children, with hardly any clothes on and always barefooted, walking with me and asking if I have something to give. When the mothers or kids are seen by security guards they can count on the guard coming after them with a stick.

Or just around the corner of my hotel there is an area where a whole ‘village’ has developed; people from rural villages came into Delhi to find work and a better life. They have built their houses out of plastic sheets, some stones and wood and with the monsoon season about to start it isn’t very hard to imagine what happens if the rain starts pouring down.

Or at the market in Old Delhi, where you can find the best spices, teas, fruits and vegetables you see men carrying heavy bags on their backs. When I spoke with them I learned that they earn not even half a dollar a day.  

Working here in India makes me sad sometimes. How can the difference between rich and poor be so big? Why are the billionaires of the booming economy not investing in the development of their people? How long will it take to get rid of the malnutrition, the illiteracy and the poverty? I do hope that over the coming years the situation will improve, but I realise there is still a long, long way to go!