> As I walked out of the Van Ness MUNI station in San Francisco last night, I walked by at least 20 homeless people, just lying on the street. A couple on wheelchairs, the rest just lounging around. A few of them reeked of urine and feces.
> And this is in, arguably, one of the richest cities in America.
You're conveniently ignoring several points. First of all, San Francisco draws homeless from all over the nation because it (a) has good weather year round and (b) is quite liberal and will tolerate and help the homeless. Unlike India, in much of the US, being homeless during the winter means that you will quite literally freeze to death. So the homeless tend to congregate in places where the weather is favorable for outdoor living year round. The fact that San Francisco is rich is a result of Silicon Valley, which developed where it has because of the proximity of the Stanford campus. So the two issues are not exactly connected.
More importantly, attempts to help the homeless on the streets of SF have been made over and over (and are ongoing). Many of these people refuse to leave the streets. Some of them even enjoy it. Many others suffer from mental disorders, but we can't force them to live in asylums (which was the case until the 1980s) - that would be inhumane, or so the argument goes.
As for India, its level of poverty is so staggering that any comparison to America or another first world nation is entirely pointless. Let's see what UNICEF has to say about child malnutrition, for example[0]:
> Malnutrition is more common in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. One in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India.
So India has worse child malnutrition than even Africa. How you can even begin to compare this to some bums on the street in SF is entirely beyond me.
0: http://www.unicef.org/india/children_2356.htm