Ahmedabad has its poverty as well as its glory

     India is many things – far more than I’m going to be able to experience in this busy two weeks – and it’s a place that both meets and exceeds the stereotypes I’ve built up over the years, not only from fiction like the Phantom comic (which mixed lions and tigers, but had Indian settings), Rudyard Kipling or movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” but from talks with several friends who immigrated to the U.S. from India.

     I’ve talked about many of them, but I think I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about one that a visitor can’t help but notice: poverty. The World Bank puts the poverty level at 29% (others much higher – some close to 50%). But we saw dramatic examples, including the village of shacks of squatters along the river Sabarmati pictured. I hope the Internet doesn’t mask the haze of smoke and pollution along this region. It shows up well on the screen of my computer. This makeshift community lines the river bank for as far as the eye can see in both directions.

      We saw other signs of India’s poverty. One was a number of beggars plying their trade along traffic at one of the stoplights that were actually obeyed. Miriam noted after one of them had pawed at her arm that she left streaks of dirt (or it might have been the little boy who also was grabbing at her).  In my ride to the market on New Year’s Day, Purvey Desai, who teaches economics at St. Xavier’s, had explained how the beggars were a small industry in the city with many of them making quite a good living out of looking poverty-stricken and hungry or dirty.  Actually I haven’t fallen victim to beggars since alcoholics outside the old Rescue Mission used to hit me up on the way from my parking lot to the Milwaukee Journal and then I saw the line of women with babies at their breasts on the walk into Tijuana, Mexico, and discovered that they borrowed babies to look more pitiful. It’s a shame because the con artists probably keep people from helping needy people

      Several neighborhoods were filled with groups of naked and dirty children and people were sleeping in the street.

      Poverty is a fact of life, even in one of the world’s fastest growing economies