One night:
“Ma! Bhook lag rahi hai” he said, crying
“Mummi, kya aaj bhi khana nahi milega?” she said, with a disappointed but understanding look in her eyes. Their mother didn’t know how to explain, sighing, all she said was “Nahi baccha, I’m so sorry”
A lot of families go through this, a lot of children go to sleep on empty stomachs, and the parents of those children need to tell them the bitter truth. Truly, being born in poverty and growing up in poverty is no one’s fault, any one of us could just have been born there, in a poverty stricken family.
Today, approximately up to a quarter of the world lives below the societal poverty line.
In India, 22.8 crore people live below the poverty line, which means 22.8 crore people earn less than ₹32 per day and live in extreme poverty. And there are still more people, who struggle to make two ends meet every single day.
India is a developing country and is doing so at quite a fast rate, considering the poverty in India. While the outbreak of Covid-19 made the whole process slower than it should have been, our government has taken multiple measures and taken up schemes to better the quality of life of the poor, and they have indeed made significant progress. Like Saansad Aadarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY) and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) to name a few. India has more than halved its number of extremely poor individuals, in accordance with
a World Bank report from April 2023.
We, the people too, need to do our bit for the underprivileged. We should be motivated and inspired by the people who do selfless service and assist the poor, who form NGOs and be the voice of the deprived, who donate and do charity work for the needy and we too, should do our bit by donating to trust- worthy funds for them.
It is our responsibility as citizens of this country to help them get what they are deprived of; basic amenities and rights to education. The constitution was written to give every person a chance to grow and improve, so please, let us give them theirs. There are so many children out there who have dreams, who want to be engineers, musicians, artists, doctors, scientists, and have this urge to study but just don’t have the facilities. What they want are the opportunities that we get, that we so foolishly and blatantly ignore. When you want to upgrade from your old laptop or phone at home, instead of going for an exchange offer, unless money is a constraint, why not give the used device to an unprivileged student?
Poverty, yes it is the state of being extremely poor, and according to the very 1st SDG goal: The world needs to ‘End poverty in all its forms everywhere’. And yes, it is being worked on by various people, and governments across the globe, but most importantly, those living on the other side of the line of poverty need to remember that we only realize what we had, when we don’t have it anymore, so we need to always be grateful and not take the fact that we have a bed to sleep on, and that we go to sleep at night with a full stomach, for granted.
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