Madhya Pradesh man cycles 105km to ferry son to Class X exam centre
theweek.in
theweek.in
Hundred of thousands of families stay that way for years until the kid grows up, and either gets a job, or continues like the guardian. It’s sad, but true story that I lived through. Not really an Indian, but from a similar kind of community in its neighboring country. I’m telling all this because this kind of kind gesture from a father is rare, that's why it became a news.
Many people ride bicycles everyday for work - my father rode 30kms a day for probably 12-13 years because that was the only vehicle we had. He’d have rode 105 any day for me. Kudos to all the dads who put their children before anything else!
For anyone interested read "PM cares fund"
1. According to article some government organizations deducted percentage of salary towards this fund by default. After some protests this default was reversed.
2. This fund is exempt from audit because it’s not a “public fund”. Can someone throw some light on what this actually means? I’m referencing “Accountability and transparency” part of the article.
3. Part of this fund was used to buy ventilators manufactured by a local(Indian) company. Some hospitals returned these ventilators because of quality issues. Source - https://m.huffingtonpost.in/entry/agva-ventilators-pmcares-c...
As we speak, the banner for PM Care fund can still be seen on the bank login page of Public Banks.
What I am curious about is how much do they donate for causes like help during natural disasters, covid epidemic and things like that. They might well be doing that, but I dont know where to look for these numbers.
They are of course not obligated to donate, but given how they are the first to question the patriotism of others, I am curious about how do they roll with their own cash.
Related to money laundering infrastructure there is this too
[Demonetization in India: Superfluous discovery and money laundering]
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11138-019-00465...
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that this is utterly false, but I'm telling you that this isn't the case.
Or, more pithily: You're not poor because you spend everything on beer, you spend what little is left over on beer because you're poor and really need the pick-me-up.
If she had enough money to buy the vegetables outright, it would make a huge difference in her life. And indeed, this is the whole problem microfinance loans aim to solve.
There are so many people who just need a very small amount of money ($10-$20), and it would jump start their business.
But instead of saving until they have it, they spend everything they have at the end of the day. And it's easy to see why: when life is very hard, you need something to just feel okay enough to start it all again tomorrow.
Those that end up in a good place are the very people who have the willpower to delay their consumption. Most aren't like that, but some are, and the difference in outcome is stark.
I actually started a school over there, and taught some classes about personal finance, investing, compound interest, etc to a class of mostly young women (young men are much more difficult to teach).
Their minds were totally blown by how powerful even just saving 25 or 50 cents a day. One even told me a year after she attended the class that I had changed her life forever. And indeed I had, she went from having nothing and selling donuts (essentially) on the side of the road, to opening her first small convenience store, to saving money for her second.
These things matter, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of affecting change in 3rd world countries.
If the real returns to investment in impoverished regions are so high, why are those investments not being made? The fact that your advice "changed [a] life forever" is strongly suggestive of outsize returns to capital, which should attract strong investment.
Being poor is expensive.
All in all, it's almost impossible for microfinance loans to work for the lender. As a charity, it works okay, but if you want to earn yield, forget about it.
There's tons of really amazing opportunities in EM, but you can't exploit them by sitting at your desk. Or rather, those that can have probably already been exploited.
It's kind of like saying the taxi market is efficient, it cannot possibly be disrupted. Then Uber comes in and disrupts the market and then you say, the taxi market was inefficient and ripe for disruption. While the fact remains that all along it was inefficient. Bad example I know.
It’s of course tragic when parents make a bad position even worse, but addiction is a symptom of poverty and not the cause.
The issue is that India is a highly resource strained country and most internal issues are manifestations of the same fights over limited resources that show up as something else.
Usually due to financial issues.
It's also surprising that we could've played a better role with tobacco but instead heavily promoted and romanticized it for decades.
Any studies or citation or is this your personal experience extrapolated? I have seen many bad/uncaring poor parents without any addiction(unless you can call drinking tea addiction). Good parents in poverty is a blessing though and definitely a major part of their children's success.
Well, the OP's citation is "Not really an Indian,..." So you don't require more credibility than that when someone is commenting on an Indian story!
This gross generalisation is nothing new about India. People who do that(even if they are from a "neighboring country") do not understand the many contours of a vast and very diverse country! Indians have now become used to this partial vision of others about the country. The rest of the citation you included itself would have given you a hint: "similar kind of community in its neighboring country". Comparing a community to a whole country is quite a leap!
The problem is much more deep-rooted than addiction. There is a large class of people who have not benefitted from the democracy in the ~60 odd years of independence. The way they think is, "I am not going to get anything out of this anyway, neither did my earlier generation. This way I will at least get a TV and some free booze"
Yes, that's my point. There are more severe problems in india than addiction to alcohol and tobacco ruining kid's life. Handing out free things during election to people who are below poverty line has nothing to do with addiction. I was born in a state where handing out rice was very effective.
How Alcohol and Tobacco Cause Poverty https://thewire.in/health/how-alcohol-and-tobacco-cause-pove...
Impact of alcohol use on poor families: a study from North India https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1465989031000109...
Um no. The reason many Indian families remain poor is due to living in extreme poverty with few opportunities, and a bizarre caste system that emphasises it further. It’s not like if you stop drinking or smoking you’ll magically become rich.
The poorest people are the ones who need "caste" the most, it gives them the social security that they need the most.
https://www.amazon.com/Caste-as-Social-Capital-Vaidyanathan/...
Except you kind of do though because "rich" is essentially shorthand for "being able to buy what you want". I know plenty of people who considered themselves poor (couldn't afford a car, vacations, etc), and as soon as they stopped smoking realised they actually could afford those things when they weren't setting about $10/day on fire.
Smoking is a choice that everyone is free to make, but let's not pretend it has no impact on your ability to buy other things. It definitely does.
While I was in Kanpur, which is a prominent city in another prominent state, I would find cadavers of every kind, some road kills, some not, excrements of every kind, recklessly driven thundering trucks that could run you over, elephants waiting at street lights along with shiny imported cars. Its quite surreal if you think about it.
Incidentally, I was in Netherlands (Wassenaar, Duinrell vacation!) last year. Compared to Netherlands, conditions are vastly different in India -- place on earth, quality of life, social aspects, etc.
This is not limited to India. I've seen it in other developing countries in Asia
Just to be clear, this awesome dad was taking his son to another town to appear for the 10th grade Math examination so that he does not fail the paper. Off-topic, but I am surprised that these exams are still being conducted. Most academic examinations are suspended as of now and may resume next month.
Anyways, though the situation was like this because most public transportation has been shut down, it is still a sad state of affairs - and I don’t know what to do about it nor what can be a solution.
Respect for this father who is striving to push his son at least a level up the economic ladder via education.
Decades ago, my father used to walk several miles a day to attend school. His dedication and hard work has probably pushed my family through 2 generations-worth of growth. I’d say we are upper middle-class in India right now. And I am eternally grateful to my family for their efforts.
Kudos to this father, and others who strive through utter misery to rise above the hand life has dealt them.
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>> Due to the closure of buses (Public Transport closure) due to Corona epidemic , Shobharam took his son off his bicycle at 12 o'clock on Monday night.
There are many stories like this where in one mother drove 1400 km in her motorcycle/scooter to get her son from a place where he was stuck.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/a-mothers-p...
In normal times, these people would have traveled by buses or trains.
One more:
A five-year old flies alone to be with his parents:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/parenting/tod...
Some of those Yazidis in northern Iraq a few years back? Some of the people trying to get into Greece who got interviewed? Man I wished, as soon as they were someone halfway stable, I could have dropped them some cash. An amount I wouldn't have missed that much would have made a difference. This is an utterly dumb "take", I know, for so very many reasons not least of which is that I could be doing more locally and that's something I actually could do, but it's still all I can think about when I see these kinds of stories. How much help even $100 would be some of these places, if only it could get there. And then my next though is how dumb that is. And that I wish these stories would just go away if I can't do anything about them.
Bonus - if you are able to do so successfully, come back here and link it.
although the circumstances they allow you to help with might not be the exact ones that first attracted your interest and concern.
Edit: although I think they do share, and allow people to act on, something pretty much like your intuition:
> How much help even $100 would be some of these places, if only it could get there.
Yeah, well, I'm human enough to have those impulses but also know it's good to help anyone, really, and that satisfying myself isn't the point. So thanks for the link, I'll check them out.
There are similar sites that you can check. They sometimes give information about where to donate
There was a lot of coverage from India when they imposed their lockdown and the worst affected were the poor again. The crisis itself has a Wikipedia page for it.[1] Quoting from it:
> With factories and workplaces shut down due to the lockdown imposed in the country, millions of migrant workers had to deal with the loss of income, food shortages and uncertainty about their future. Following this, many of them and their families went hungry. Thousands of them then began walking back home, with no means of transport due to the lockdown. More than 300 migrant workers died due to the lockdown, with reasons ranging from starvation, suicides, exhaustion, road and rail accidents, police brutality and denial of timely medical care.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_migrant_workers_during_...
Middle-class is in no way lucky, they are overburdened by toll taxes, income tax officers harassing them, local goons not letting them carry on business, politicians and public servants asking for money.
In a sense, that's the whole problem. The unsolved thing that humanitarian organizations spend their entire selves trying to figure out. So it's not dumb to think about, but it's also never so simple as we wish.
Many farmers have lands which they sold to pay for engineering degrees for their daughters and sons. Now there is no job for them! Your land is lost and the degree is worthless which you traded the land for.
I disagree completely with this statement. My wife is from India I am "American" to simplify things. During lockdown in India which has been brutal we sent $100 to my wife's mother to at least help with food for families there. She went to a driver she knew who could procure the bulk food. He signed on with the effort procured the first batch. Then soon some of my wife's mother's former students signed on to help. We continued to send more money not knowing what our situation would be in a few months time (luckily I have been able to keep my job) More people signed on to help procure and deliver food to families and people who were migrating on foot away from the cities and back to their villages all in the face of brutal beatings by the hands of the police. It's beyond shameful what has been happening in India during this pandemic. Soon my wife's mother was able to convince other middle/upper middle class Brahmin families to donate to this effort as well. We continued to send more money ourselves. In all we sent $15,000 to help so far. A school field was turned into a distribution location and hundreds of families were lining up every day to pick up food as the government continued to bungle their operations. by that time a network of drivers had signed on who were procuring food and distributing it as well. To this day more volunteers have signed on and donations continue to happen from within the community to keep the effort going. $100 started as a pilot light and through the passions of the people has turned into so much more! You would be amazed what such a small amount can start. Even $10 will make a difference. Discouraging people is part of the problem. Do not do this! I understand there is corruption and the plight of the Indian farmer is unimaginable! Sharing what is happening there is important, no doubt! Just please don't make it harder for the mostly untold stories that happen every day that don't get news coverage or don't get talked about much. This is the only place I have shared this story, but the effort is still going on.
And in a country like India, there will always be people who will game the system and the "send me money" button less credible.
Western society would be a lot better if more people understood this.
Obviously, for a scheme like that to be efficient, an expert would have to distribute the money where it'd do the most good, rather than you picking individuals who showed up in the media.
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/bihar-girl-who-cycled-1-...
To give just one example, rates of alcoholism are higher in South India - both in TN and Kerala [1] - where endemic poverty of the Madhya Pradesh kind doesn't exist.
We can agree that addiction is widespread and there's been a world wide shift in the spending habits of people who earn less than a dollar a day. Banerjee/Duflo's Nobel Prize is based on that work [2]. Some relevant quotes:
> Yet the average person living at under $1 per day does not seem to put every available penny into buying more calories. Among our 13 countries, food typically represents from 56 to 78 percent of consumption among rural households, and 56 to 74 percent in urban areas. For the rural poor in Mexico, slightly less than half the budget (49.6 percent) is allocated to food.2
> Of course, these people could be spending the rest of their money on other commodities they greatly need. Yet among the nonfood items that the poor spend significant amounts of money on, alcohol and tobacco show up prominently. The extremely poor in rural areas spent 4.1 percent of their budget on tobacco and alcohol in Papua New Guinea; 5.0 percent in Udaipur, India; 6.0 percent in Indonesia; and 8.1 percent in Mexico.
> Perhaps more surprisingly, spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals.
5% is a lot on alcohol, but cannot be the major cause of poverty, festivals being an even bigger outlay. We also know that in India those spending habits are gendered, which is why prohibition campaigns have been very popular among women voters.
Nevertheless, the idea that the poor are poor because of their 'poor values' is one of the oldest tropes in the book. Please don't spread stereotypes that are neither grounded in data nor in actual lived experience.
I can read Hindi
Also this isn't a normal situation. They usually take a bus or train, but public transportation is shutdown because of covid which is why they traveled on a bike.
Sure, "we" should fix the system, but good luck waiting around for that to happen.
Poor people don't study to join Google or Facebook in India. They study for government jobs like customs officer, railway officer, Indian adminstrative service, Indian Police Service etc... all jobs where you can accure vast sums of money.
The amount of money these officers make offrecord is going to eyewater even westerners. In some cases, the wealth they posses rival even high end executives at Google and Facebook.
Most people understand and acknowledge this system. They know the only way to out is through it, they stay in system - stay hard, make connections then proceed to benefit from corrupt system.
Not saying most are corrupt but my experience with customs department, tax department etc... made me realize how corrupt they are.
Which does not refute the point I am making because a few corrupt people are enough to take down the system.