Can anyone really live on Rs. 26 a day, the income of the officially poor in rural India? Two youngsters try it out.
Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of
their lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them,
Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at the
University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment
banker in the US and Singapore. The other, Matt, migrated as a teenager
to the States with his parents, and studied in MIT. Both decided at
different points to return to India, joined the UID Project in
Bengaluru, came to share a flat, and became close friends.
The
idea suddenly struck them one day. Both had returned to India in the
vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the
people of this land so little. Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us
try to understand an ‘average Indian', by living on an ‘average
income'.” His friend Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They
began a journey which would change them forever.
To
begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They calculated
that India's Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150 a
day. Globally people spend about a third of their incomes on rent.
Excluding rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a day. They realised
that this did not make them poor, only average. Seventy-five per cent
Indians live on less than this average.
The young men
moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her
bemusement. What changed for them was that they spent a large part of
their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the
question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were
expensive and therefore used sparingly, meat was out of bounds, as were
processed food like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil.
Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy
nuggets a wonder food — affordable and high on proteins, and worked on
many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: 25 paise for 27
calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was
their treat each day.
Restricted life
Living
on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that
they could not afford to travel by bus more than five km in a day. If
they needed to go further, they could only walk. They could afford
electricity only five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly used
lights and fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers.
One Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by shops, gazing at things
they could not buy. They could not afford the movies, and hoped they
would not fall ill.
However, the bigger challenge
remained. Could they live on Rs. 32, the official poverty line, which
had become controversial after India's Planning Commission informed the
Supreme Court that this was the poverty line for cities (for villages it
was even lower, at Rs. 26 per person per day)?
Harrowing experience
For
this, they decided to go to Matt's ancestral village Karucachal in
Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana
and drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day
which their briefly adopted ‘poverty' permitted. They found themselves
thinking of food the whole day. They walked long distances, and saved
money even on soap to wash their clothes. They could not afford
communication, by mobile and internet. It would have been a disaster if
they fell ill. For the two 26-year-olds, the experience of ‘official
poverty' was harrowing.
Yet, when their experiment
ended with Deepavali, they wrote to their friends: “Wish we could tell
you that we are happy to have our ‘normal' lives back. Wish we could say
that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights ago was as satisfying
as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It probably was one
of the best meals we've ever had, packed with massive amounts of love
from our hosts. However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh
reality that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a
meal will remain a dream for quite some time. That we can move on to
our comfortable life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival — a
life of tough choices and tall constraints. A life where freedom means
little and hunger is plenty.
Plenty of questions
It
disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider
excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne?
Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend? At
a larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it
just plain luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to
build a life of comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of
many of these material possessions, (which many of us consider
essential) or, more importantly, tools for self-development (education)
or self-preservation (healthcare)?
We don't know the
answers to these questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt that
is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and generosity we
got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough lives.
We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely
didn't treat us as that way...”
So what did these two
friends learn from their brief encounter with poverty? That hunger can
make you angry. That a food law which guarantees adequate nutrition to
all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to realise even modest
dreams. And above all — in Matt's words — that empathy is essential for
democracy.
Blogged via : The Hindu
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