Make strong foundation for BRICS

don't waste him

Rahul joins me for a pint of beer on Holi- the Indian festival of colours. He jokes and tells me that his life is not colourful. “ I want to go back to my home town to Darjeeling- I don’t like Delhi.” His friend Prabhakar agrees with him. They both work for Adidas as salesman.

Priya (name changed), a beautiful girl, also from Darjeeling works in a beauty parlour in South Delhi.  She probably has other sources of income, which she doesn’t want to divulge at this stage. She loves clubs and going out at weekends, but life is Delhi is tough.  She says, “ I have to stand the whole day,  and sometimes I am abused by the customers.  I don’t want to live here, but I need to earn. I want to educate my 9-year-old brother. I will do everything for him”.

Every year thousands of young boys and girls make their way to Delhi from the picturesque hills of the Darjeeling and also the north –east of India  hoping to get decent jobs.

Thanks to globalization: India’s booming retail industry and glitzy malls have given employment to many of them. “ We have the looks”, says Sanchita (name changed), who looks extremely smart in her mini-outfits.  “ We might be uneducated, but we know how to carry ourselves. We are easily employable. ” Sanchita’s bother is disabled, father is blind and her mom is often sick. At 22 she has to look for ways to support her family.

Darjeeling is known as the Queen of hills and is the home to one of the world’s most expensive tea, which contributes greatly to India’s exports. But unfortunately, the locals have benefited little from it. The tea is auctioned in Kolkata and drained out of the region much to annoyance of the local population. The locals have been asking for a separate state- Gurkhaland. The political demands have had fallouts- frequent strikes and bandhs have crippled the local economy. Tourism has been hit and the posh Anglo- Indian boarding schools no longer attract students from the rest of the country.

On a wider context, the suffering of the locals and lack of unemployment in some of India’s most scenic regions shows how exclusive India’s economic growth has been.

In many ways, the rising prosperity of India’s cities has given rise to a host of serious social problems- human trafficking is one of them. Hundreds and thousands of girls from India’s troubled north-east are directly or indirectly into prostitution in Delhi alone.

As BRICS leaders cobble up in Durban to discuss the possibilities of setting up a BRICS bank to help sustain infrastructure and human development, we hope that such initiative will be duly accompanied by a vision to economically boost some of the backward regions and communities in each of the BRICS countries.

For India, the priority should be to look at human development issues, creating more economic opportunities across the country and improve its defunct infrastructure. Above all it needs to fight corruption to say the least.

No dawn for the midnight’s children

Deepa Mehta's adaption of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives a panoramic view of the troubled history of the sub-continent. Central to the film’s theme are the less privileged children born on that fateful day on the stroke of midnight when India was born. 

Though the fate of this country has changed over the last six decades; the fate of millions of poor Indian children remain unchanged. India is a home to the world’s largest malnourished children, and the country has desperately failed to provide safety and security to its children.

In the recent Delhi gang rape case, there is debate about the handing out harsher punishment to one of the rapists, who is a minor. Many have appealed for making an exception to the case and urged not to treat the convict as a juvenile. Child activist Nicole Rangel writing in The Hindu has passionately argued that the minor rapist must be given a chance to rebuild his life. Whilst his crime is horrendous, it also must be noted that we as a nation failed to protect his childhood. She notes that he has had ‘no interface with the state’, and he has never been given an opportunity to aspire for a different life. She asks should he be given a chance for reformation?

The answer is ‘yes’.  By reforming him and by inducting him into the main stream he could, potentially, in the future be instrumental in showing the right path to many other poor children living in depravity. His reformation process should be a long and well worked out process. It should be a part of a larger investment to create effective systems to safe guard children in India.

On the other hand, taking care of our children is the not responsibility of the government alone. The civil society also has a duty. In India, most middle class families employ domestic workers. For those who are well -off should try and invest in the education of the children of the people they employ.

Bringing in a law to that effect for domestic workers’ rights may be a dream, but the people of India, who have been rightly demanding for greater security of women following the Delhi gang rape, have also the moral responsibility to fix the society.  Innovative measures like tax rebate by the government for a family that pays for the welfare of the children of the people they employ at home could act an inducement.

The poor in this country, especially the children need our help. It is a mammoth task but the ripples of change can be created if the civic society, the government and the NGOs join hands. Hanging a minor is not an answer. If criminals in this country can be politicians, why should a minor be deprived be change to reform? We owe him this for a better future for this country.