Not long ago, Late President of India Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam envisioned India to be a developed nation by 2020. The dream was of a developed nation on a path of social and economic prowess free from burden of poverty. Government’s came on board to the plans and initiated large scale development projects in order to achieve the dream. On one hand India flaunts bright edge of progress and increased opportunities but on the other hand hides the large population living in poverty.
What use are of heavily funded public policies are when we can’t ensure proper food and shelter for all the citizens. In a country where middle income group is burdened with taxes and still finds potholes in the road and corruption in public offices where does that hard earned tax payed really goes. We plan on to see what’s on Mars but sheerly neglect the poor homeless people living on our streets. The employment has risen but the living conditions of people below poverty line have not improved and rather got more deteriorated with increased pace of urbanization. Elitist and politician like to see the roads surrounding them constantly clean while efforts to clean the slum area come only at the time of election. Keeping tab on the poor citizens of the country is of importance for real development to begin. The daily earning of around 21% of Indian population is below Rs 100 and this is the scenario when government’s are promising employment through various rural and urban schemes, still India houses 20% of the world’s poor, why is it so? The answer is very complex, as despite the government’s neck and toe effort to bring people to a minimum waged job many are still unemployed.
The major reason to this is the presence of vast scale unorganized business sectors in India which gives less importance to the certified skills and survives only on the lowest selling rates prospect. The political parties and social service groups have their own agendas in place if they vocally support to remove poverty. A major fault lies in the strategy of prioritizing the urgency to remove the poverty over development and holding local administration responsible for every homeless person in their territory. The activism should come from both public and government in order to reinstate the uneducated and jobless youth in society and grant them a respectable social status. The basic enrooting of poverty is possible only when we grant a meaningful status to all the jobs in society by properly skilling the people and bringing them to the good respectable status in society, respecting the fact that they lack basic education. Which brings us to the status of adult education in our country, how shy we are to admit the importance of being literate and educated properly to lead a life well planned? The whole chain starts at the initiative from educated society by encouraging people to learn at any age and promote the agenda of awareness regarding technology and using advance measures to deal with life problems.
Because the question is not always of tomorrow, what matters the most is how much we value the present and work to improvise it.