India has the largest number of poor people in the world

Mike McPhate:

Among India's poor, survival is still won by acts of despair and cunning. It's a daily quest whose reward is a plate of rice or a simple medication.

Farmers in Maharasthra hang banners offering their kidneys for sale; overworked medics in Gorakhpur fashion tubes from paper to deliver oxygen to the diseased; hungry parents in the barren fields of Orissa sell their children for the price of a bag of grain.

Millions roam the country in pursuit of work, trading the want of the village for the indignity of bonded labor. At outdoor kilns dotting the scorched terrain of Andhra Pradesh, parents and children toil side by side mixing and molding bricks from dawn till midnight. By doing this, a family of six earns about $5.50 per week, enough for one evening meal of unripe tomatoes and broken rice, reject kernels used normally as chicken feed.

The workers bathe in the stagnant mud pits used to mix the bricks and sleep in mattress-size hovels no taller than a man's belly button, which contain their entire estate: some tattered clothes, a hand broom, a few dinged-up pots.

"We were born in the mud, we've spent our lives in the mud, and we'll die in the mud," says Bansi Dhar Bag, 43, his skin blackened by a lifetime of kiln work. "We have to lead our lives like this. We suffer a lot, but we have to survive. We have to suffer."

India's rise to prominence began with domestic market reforms in 1991 that broke the dam of globalization and sent the country's economy soaring -- growing at an average of 6.8 percent since 1994. In just a decade, the land of lepers and snake charmers was supplanted by one of tech tycoons and MTV veejays.

Contrary to government claims however, the liberated economy -- commonly portrayed as an antidote to poverty among global financial institutions -- has done little for India's poor, say several leading economists, including Jean Dreze, Martin Ravallion and Raghbendra Jha. The most notable outcome of reforms, they say, has been to make inequality and even wider chasm.

As the number of Indian millionaires grew an estimated seven-fold during the 1990s, the number of hungry Indians actually rose, according to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization.

Decades of underinvestment in human development in India, concluded the United Nations in its 2005 human development report, have yielded a grim set of statistics: half of all children remain malnourished, half of women remain illiterate, more than 80 percent of the countryside lacks access to a telephone or a toilet.

There's been a "tremendous lack of responsiveness to the needs and aspirations of the underprivileged," wrote Dreze in the journal Economic and Political Weekly. "Endemic hunger has been passively tolerated, and is barely noticed in public debates and democratic politics."

Let the poor call the tune

Asia faces 'major poverty test'

Britons unaware of Asian poverty

India's "pro-poor" budget boosts military spending and market reforms