Many people in India are so poor they barely survive, and dream of having their children in some kind of desk job so they can earn money. Any money. But not all parents love their children as much as this dad did; the reason most families stay poor forever is the guardian (usually the father) of the family is indulged in cigarette, tobacco or alcohol consumption. What they earn goes to fulfill the most basic needs of the family, and on intoxication.
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!
> the reason most families stay poor forever is the guardian (usually the father) of the family is indulged in cigarette, tobacco or alcohol consumption.
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.
This common knowledge enough that this does not need a citation. Its not just the addiction part, votes get caste on whether the candidate will hand out some free alcohol, a color TV and some cash as a one time incentive to get their vote. The thing is that this works in many states of India. Since getting the votes is so easy (although there is some arms race among the candidates) it should not be a surprise that after being elected these candidates are after their own interest (wealth grab) than do their job of representing the people.
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"
> The problem is much more deep-rooted than addiction.
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.
If you cite make sure to use a complete citation. He wrote "Not really an Indian, but from a similar kind of community in its neighboring country." which gives more credibility to his statement than the partial citation you used. It is still anecdotal of course but given the history of the region the culture does not shift dramatically as soon as you cross the border.
> which gives more credibility to his statement than the partial citation you used. It is still anecdotal of course but given the history of the region the culture does not shift dramatically as soon as you cross the border.
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!
What a rotund dismissal of very serious problem. Some things do generalize well, you know? The relationship of poverty and alcohol consumption is universal, no matter the level of patriotic grandstanding you perform, it simply debilitates family units.
Indeed, a lot of hard laborers need the addiction to plough through their life. Although one unfortunate aspect of this habit unlike in other countries is the casual disregard for spitting anywhere.
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.
Nothing can make poverty (as a national problem) go away overnight. But if a guardian started buying 50 rupees (USD 80 cents) worth of milk/eggs/notebooks/pens instead of cigarette, tobacco and alcohol tomorrow, or just saved that up for later, the quality of life will start rising for sure. That fifty rupees, which is what an average person spends a day, makes a difference.
I think this speaks to the fact that essential items supply/demand is skewed by purchase of cigarettes then? You can't really survive off of cigarettes, I'd imagine.
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.
>. According to article some government organizations deducted percentage of salary towards this fund by default. After some protests this default was reversed.
As we speak, the banner for PM Care fund can still be seen on the bank login page of Public Banks.
Judiciary has been captured by the part in power. Opposition can't do much other than being harassed by center agencies like CBI, tax departments and others.
The Opposition at all levels is just crushed to suit the populist narrative. In a world powered by fake news, the populist and majoritarian belief and narrative becomes the truth, and this drives the nation and society further towards right-wing mindset, and any opposition/contrarian views just keep diminishing - out of fear, delegitimacy and ignorance as they now form just a real minute segment of the whole.
BJP party is currently rolling cash and frequently tries to buy out governments even if they do not win the elections. Success varies.
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]
> the reason most families stay poor forever is the guardian (usually the father) of the family is indulged in cigarette, tobacco or alcohol consumption
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.
It’s not like if you stop drinking or smoking you’ll magically become rich.
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.
:-). I cycled 30 km a day while in college in South India (Tamilnadu). When I reached college, I would splash water all over my shirt because cycling in the heat (35 to 40 degree celcius on a nice day) would make me sweat profusely. The sweat dried quickly in the heat so I had white streaks of salt on my shirt which I felt embarrassed about (couldn't do anything about the smell of sweat, which is another story). When I washed my face, the water would run black due to dust and smoke. I suffered heatstrokes, got hernia (cycling caused it) by the second year in college. My story is typical and not special at all and to a large extent I was better off than most of my peers at that time.
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.
Sure the places are different. If it comforts you, we get wet (and cold) from the plenitude of rain ;) I've lived in France, a place with 35-40 degree summers, and I'm happy my ride was only 3km, not 30 ;)
Road conditions would be rather … different though.
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.
> But not all parents love their children as much as this dad did; the reason most families stay poor forever is the guardian (usually the father) of the family is indulged in cigarette, tobacco or alcohol consumption.
This is not limited to India. I've seen it in other developing countries in Asia
Ed Thorp's book had an entire chapter explaining that "Joe Sixpack" is poor because he spends all his money on beer and cigarettes. A similar narrative emerged in the British press during Ireland's great hunger. It's a recurring theme. Utterly false, but recurring.
It's not false at all. When your life is unimaginably shitty, it's hard to plan for the future and most excess income is used to make yourself feel better (flavorful food, alcohol, drugs, etc). I've observed this about myself (the worse I feel, the less money I save) and others. I lived in Africa for two years, and it's quite common for men to spend money on alcohol or meat, even if that means going hungry. Clearly, more value is being derived from a nice meal or a drink than a shitty, flavorless one.
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.
I think the point is more that, for most people, cutting back on minor luxuries wouldn't actually matter much because it doesn't actually add up to enough money to materially improve life in other ways.
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.
But it does! For example, in Tanzania (the place in Africa that I lived), a lot of women sell vegetables. They don't have enough money to buy them outright at the beginning of the day, so they take them on credit, and then pay for them at the end of the day. The vegetables on credit are very expensive, 25-50% more. The vegetable women is always one day behind, and losing a ton of income because she is being fronted.
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.
Microfinance is very hard to get right. It requires a lot of supervision, a large network of loan officers, and intricate structuring of the terms in order to align incentives. Moreover, the loans are capacity constrained, the risk is high, takes tons of work, a lot of local knowledge, etc.
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.
There should be a name for this kind of logical fallacy you're making. Like rational markets fallacy. You can't assume a market will always act rationally and freely in a simplistic manner.
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.
To quote Paul Weller's brilliant The Jam song 'A Town Called Malice' about the hardships of lower working-class life - 'To either cut down on beer/or the kids' new gear/it's a big decision in a town called Malice'
But you did not have to steal your bike to survive, like in post-war Italy (Ladri di biciclette 1948). Interestingly Italy with no cars, no motoscooters and no fat people looks much more habitable place. Likewise one might ponder what India would be if even more people would afford cars instead of bicycles.
There seems to be a slight misunderstanding regarding the ‘exam’ and ‘testing’ context in this article. I don’t know if it is translated or was just poorly written.
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.
>> 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.
I know it's an idea that would kind of... eat itself, were it reality. And maybe this is some shitty first-world take and I'm an asshole for thinking it or whatever. It's even a pretty unfair idea, really. But every time I read these sorts of human interest stories I wish there were a "send them some money" button. Again, an idea that would ruin itself immediately. I know. But failing that I'd rather not have them reported at all. This case is different, sure, because it's not targeted at an English-speaking audience at all, but we get them in our media, too.
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.
Life is really hard in most parts of the world and being born in a middle class family is itself a blessing for most when you realize the cruel economic cycles that keep kids of poor people poor.
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.
According to reports, 1crore 70lakh jobs in organized sectors have been lost.
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.
I would say that is not a very sustainable model because idea of the article is to point out class of issue a group of people are facing, not a single person. Sending the money to that one person who faced the issue may give instant gratification and uplift one person/family but it won't help the cause.
And in a country like India, there will always be people who will game the system and the "send me money" button less credible.
Yep, all those exact reasons are why I noted it's unfair (issue a group of people are facing, not an individual) and would be untenable as soon as it became any kind of system or recurring practice on any scale whatsoever ("there will always be people who will game the system"). Those are precisely the problems with the notion.
A related charity is GiveDirectly, which is one of the most efficient charities according to GiveWell, who rank charities on QALYs per dollar or something like that.
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.
How much help even $100 would be some of these places, if only it could get there
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.
$100 isn't going to do much. You think these people have no money but it's not the case - these people did have money, they lost it because the system is corrupt.
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.
The money isn't going to change anything. The best thing you can do is to learn perspective. Realize that billions of people are worse off than you will probably ever be, and that they can only dream of the opportunities you get every day.
Western society would be a lot better if more people understood this.
Instead of wishing & typing this out here + moving on, and then feeling worse the next time -- try messaging the publication and ask for a way. At least you can say you did what you could.
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.
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.
One of many such stories of indomitable courage and persistence is that of Jyoti Kumari, a 15-year-old native of Bihar's Darbhanga (Indian village), who travelled on a bicycle for 7 days carrying her wounded father and covered more than 1,200 km from Gurgaon in Haryana to her village because public transport was shut due to Covid.
So much subtext about the undeserving poor. Except that it's not even wrong.
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.
Maybe the reason some Asians are successful given the opportunities is because such stories are thought of as uplifting instead of lamenting against the system. The system is bad but what's wrong with celebrating and finding inspiration from people who beat it?
It's strange because if Asians are so successful why are so many people around me in Asia destitute? :sweat_smile: I could have sworn my country still faces poverty on a level unknown in the Western world for almost a century.
Oh, by the truckload. The more the misery, the more the misery porn. A few weeks after the lockdown started, there was a story about a ~13 year old girl pulling her injured father on a cart with her bicycle ~1000km home to their village. The Indian Cycling Federation offered her cycle training, and it trended on Twitter.
There's a difference between recognizing hardship and celebrating it as if it were a good thing, and the American variety of dystopic 'uplifting' news generally does the latter.
No, the 10th class exams are high school graduation. This is incredibly competitive, and the grades you get here will affect what jobs, trade schools and colleges you get access to.
It wasn't about medical treatment. He was taking his son for a school test so that he wouldn't have to waste a year. Education is critical to climbing out of poverty there.
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.
GP or the author of the article? I understand what the article meant (it was a school exam btw), I just didn't know if it was being presented as a sad story or an "uplifting news". It's impossible to tell from the translation.
Sorry - I didn't read the article - I was mostly trying to translate what (I incorrectly thought) the person you responded to was trying to say. I apologize.
The system is actually very insensitive towards such people and guess what? When these people struggle hard, clear all test - they go for robbing the nation with corruption and their justification for that has always been "when I was struggling and poor, no one came to my rescue now it's my turn and I deserve all the money accured through corruption" and it creates more poverty.
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.
Do you know a lot of civil service officers? Because you seem to think that the ranks of the Union public services are mostly filled with highly corrupt officers who were born into poverty. Whereas the truth is that although I know some officers who were the first to get a degree or a high school certificate in their family, I also know of many more officers who come from the upper class, and even some who've been in colonial administration for generations.
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!