Let me say, first, that I welcome a book such as The City of Joy. There is nothing like firsthand experience, or the vivid description of it, to bring home the filth, heat, squalor and hand-to-mouth struggle for survival of the poor to a privileged Western world - a world which, otherwise, has a tendency to ignore poverty, or dismiss it as the victims' own doing.
The Problem
If there is one difficulty I have with The City of Joy, and with Dominique Lapierre's personal solution, it's that it gives the impression that India's most pressing problem is urban poverty, and that the answer is to send a handful of dedicated, white "sahibs" into the slums, along with a few Mother Teresas. This to be accompanied by financial assistance to small rural village irrigation schemes, in order to stave off poverty-inducing drought.
In fact, India and her problems - and the solutions - are vastly larger and more complex. Some forty years after the end of the British Raj, the problems continue to confound, in spite of a wide variety of earnestly applied correctives. I am not a great fan of statistics, because they tend to dehumanize issues (exactly the reverse of what Lapierre is trying to do). But a few figures may help define India's situation more clearly.
India is not only a country, it is a continent. The Indian Union consists of twenty-three states occupying almost 3.3 million square kilometers. Only about one-half of the land - the narrow coastal strips and the teeming Gangetic Plain - is suitable for agriculture. The ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of India is mind-boggling. Some 80 percent of the population is Hindu (or some variation thereof), 18 percent follow the Muslim religion, and 2 percent are Sikhs. Differences and unrest among these groups always lie just beneath the surface and flare up in constant repetitions of violence and bloodshed. At least fourteen main languages and five hundred dialects are spoken in India. Less than one-half of the population speaks the "national language," Hindi. And still fewer speak the former colonial language, English. How in the world do you govern a nation as far-flung and diverse as that - let alone mobilize its people and resources toward some common end? (Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi must ask himself that question every night.)
The total population now stands at an estimated 750 million; more than three times that of the United States and second only to China. If it continues to grow at present rates, the population will top one billion by the year 2000. This could make India the most populous nation on earth. Of this immense mass of people, an estimated 350 million (46 percent) live below the poverty line. Perhaps 100 million (13 percent) could be considered, by U.S. standards, to be mid- or upper-income.
The average income per person per year is $260. (Try to imagine how you would survive on $21.66 per month.) That places India among the eleven poorest countries in the world, with fully one-third of all the world's poor. In other words, if you have a mind to do something about poverty in the world, or any of its related problems, you've got to deal with India in order to have any real impact.
Living on $260 a
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