INDIA:The gap between rich and poor is widening in an India where prosperity is very unbalanced, writes Rahul Bedi
India's poor have been bypassed by the impressive and sustained economic growth that has western countries queuing up to tap into the country's new-found riches.
And as India's hitherto miserable image undergoes a swift makeover - last year, for instance, it produced more millionaires than China, the region's other economic powerhouse - with market analysts predicting its emergence as the world's largest economy over the next few decades, a third of its over one billion population live on less than $1 (€0.77) per head a day.
The disparity between the rich and poor is widening dangerously as India's economic growth rates rise. But apart from economic statistics - which rarely realistically paint an accurate picture of abject misery - two recent incidents revealed India's endemic callousness towards the dispossessed.
The first was the series of serial molestations and brutal murders of around 40 children of poor migrant labourers allegedly by a rich businessman and his servant in an up-market suburban house of India's capital New Delhi over nearly a two-year span.
For this agonising period, hapless parents of the victims, aged mostly between six and 12 years, complained repeatedly to the police in Noida, a proliferating software hub, about their missing offspring.
Finally, in December, police investigating an unrelated incident accidentally excavated skulls and human remains in a debris-choked drain near the businessman's house that have since been identified as those of the missing children.
"My 3½-year-old son Harsh never returned after he went to play two months ago," Poonam, a 25-year-old woman labourer, wailed.
"When I went inside the house [the murder scene] I found his clothes," she whispered.
One of the two guilty men even confessed, when administered truth serum, to engaging in necrophilia and even cannibalism with his victims.
Police, however, ignored the parents' pleas, callously dismissing them outright as fanciful simply because they were poor, wretched and without influence.
Media reports claimed that police even let off the businessman suspect in return for a hefty bribe, confident that the parents had no voice and would be unable to influence the course of events.
The serial killings, however, dominated the news and temporarily shocked even wealthy India, leading to the suspension of nine policemen and the handing of the case over to a federal investigating agency.
But three weeks later and the gruesome murders are just another incident involving the poor.
In contrast, a few weeks earlier a rich software company executive's son was abducted from not more than five kilometres from where the grisly murders took place. The abduction too hogged the media limelight and the police worked overtime to solve it. The child returned home safely 48 hours later.
In another symptomatic incident, the authorities are investigating reports of an illegal kidney donation racket that apparently preys on poor survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in southern India. There long have been reports of poor Indians illegally selling their kidneys to survive. But officials said the practice appears to have spiked in areas of Tamil Nadu state after the tsunami which destroyed fishing fleets locally and left tens of thousands of people destitute.
P Vijay Lakshimi, who chairs the state committee that authorises transplants, said about 60 to 70 kidneys are transplanted a month in Tamil Nadu. It is believed many of them are obtained illegally from poor people desperate to stave off starvation.
According to India's government the poverty line for the country's urban areas is 296 rupees (€5) per month for each individual and 276 rupees (€4.73) per head for rural areas for the same time period.
The authorities reason that this money will buy the food equivalent of 2200 calories per day, an amount medically sufficient to prevent death.
But in reality this is a cruel lie, bordering on inhumanity, as such a paltry sum of money could barely buy a day's meals for one person in the cities, let alone the rest of an average-sized family in addition to paying for other essential expenditures. Shanties in unbelievably squalid slums in larger cities cost upwards of 4,000 rupees (€69) each per month. Many such in India's financial capital port city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) are inundated at high tide.
To make matters worse, the poor have also to run the gauntlet of regressive bureaucratic control and widespread corruption.
Activists and non-governmental organisations also question how much of the money allocated for various poverty alleviation schemes, mostly political in orientation, actually reaches the poor.
Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had declared in the 1980s that not more than 15 per cent of funds earmarked for the poor ever reach their intended beneficiaries. Things have got much worse since.
According to a Berlin-based non-governmental anti-corruption watchdog Indians paid out over 210.6 billion rupees (€3.7 billion), or an amount equalling a quarter of the country's defence budget, in bribes in 2004 for essential public services.
Following a countrywide survey Transparency International said police topped India's corruption chart collecting around 38.99 billion rupees (€700 million) in graft.
They were followed by the judiciary, land administration departments and government hospitals that charged patients, many of them poor, a "levy" for admittance, doctor consultation and to avail of diagnostic services when they were meant to be free. Bribes even had to be paid at some crematoriums to dispose off the dead. As always, the poor suffer.