Overcoming Poverty in India
From http://www.kenburnett.com Guardian Abroad 2006
Overcoming poverty in India
When it comes to fighting poverty in the sub-continent, where do you start? Perhaps by recruiting and training hundreds, even thousands of fundraisers, says Ken Burnett. Though we’d only arrived in the country at 2.30 that morning we were out on the streets late the same Saturday evening to see and meet the homeless of Delhi. It was my wife Marie’s first visit to India and I couldn’t resist showing her the real Delhi underbelly. So I arranged with friends from a tiny local NGO called Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan (AAA) to visit their work among the 168,000 homeless people who each night live rough on the streets of India’s teeming, chaotic capital. Young and old, men, women, children and even babies all coexist in this bizarre underworld alongside stray dogs, rats, donkeys and the occasional sacred cow. The numbers seem no exaggeration, though how anyone counts them is beyond comprehension. There are so, so many. It may be the largest population of the dispossessed on our planet, each snatching at sleep when they can as they crowd and cram together in rubbish dumps, graveyards, on pavements, at the road’s edge, on traffic islands, under flyovers, anywhere a fly could land. Here the frail, the sick, the lame and the mentally ill rub shoulders with the barely fit; beggars and thieves sleep alongside sex workers and pimps while predators and exploiters share their limited space beside the vulnerable and exploited. All appear thin as rakes, all united in poverty, discomfort and indignity, all clutching for dear life to what little they’ve got, just clinging on. In the daylight it looks bad enough. As night falls it quickly becomes a living hell beyond the imagination of Dante. Just before midnight we stopped by some rickety huts, AAA’s night shelter for the lucky few it has rescued from the dangers of the street. Here we met young Samina1 whose mother abandoned her on the street as a baby
Overcoming poverty in India
When it comes to fighting poverty in the sub-continent, where do you start? Perhaps by recruiting and training hundreds, even thousands of fundraisers, says Ken Burnett. Though we’d only arrived in the country at 2.30 that morning we were out on the streets late the same Saturday evening to see and meet the homeless of Delhi. It was my wife Marie’s first visit to India and I couldn’t resist showing her the real Delhi underbelly. So I arranged with friends from a tiny local NGO called Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan (AAA) to visit their work among the 168,000 homeless people who each night live rough on the streets of India’s teeming, chaotic capital. Young and old, men, women, children and even babies all coexist in this bizarre underworld alongside stray dogs, rats, donkeys and the occasional sacred cow. The numbers seem no exaggeration, though how anyone counts them is beyond comprehension. There are so, so many. It may be the largest population of the dispossessed on our planet, each snatching at sleep when they can as they crowd and cram together in rubbish dumps, graveyards, on pavements, at the road’s edge, on traffic islands, under flyovers, anywhere a fly could land. Here the frail, the sick, the lame and the mentally ill rub shoulders with the barely fit; beggars and thieves sleep alongside sex workers and pimps while predators and exploiters share their limited space beside the vulnerable and exploited. All appear thin as rakes, all united in poverty, discomfort and indignity, all clutching for dear life to what little they’ve got, just clinging on. In the daylight it looks bad enough. As night falls it quickly becomes a living hell beyond the imagination of Dante. Just before midnight we stopped by some rickety huts, AAA’s night shelter for the lucky few it has rescued from the dangers of the street. Here we met young Samina1 whose mother abandoned her on the street as a baby