One morning I was watching the Oprah Show on a television channel. The show was about the poorer sections of the US. There are millions of Americans living with minimum wages and struggling to meet their daily needs. The show was very touching, what with a couple sharing their experiences of having lived the lives of such poor people for a month, just to get a feel of what poverty meant.

Many Indians did not like Satyajit Ray because he made movies about the poor in India and exhibited them all over the world. But there is no dearth of the poor in India. Construction workers are aplenty in Bangalore now, what with the booming real estate industry. Enter the slum of any of these workers and you will be shocked to find that they do not have toilets or bathrooms. They do not have clean drinking water supply.

The builders (except a few of the real big builders) never think of where the workers will reside. The workers can’t afford a permanent home and start living around the construction site on empty sites or along the footpath in thatched sheds. They use the open grounds as their toilets; dump all the garbage on the footpath and fetch water from nearby buildings.

Many people live in thatched shelters besides rail tracks in the midst of sewage and garbage. This is the scene in all big cities of India. The more the city grows, the more the slums.

What does this show? The richer we get, the more we ignore the people around us! There are many homeless people  among the poor in India who do not have a place to live. Many of them can hardly get one meal a day. Millions of children die of malnutrition or simple illness like diarrhoea! Then what is it that we are boasting of? India is one of the fastest growing countries. Newspapers proclaim that the cost of office space in the cities of India is among the highest in the world! What a record! And here are people who live like worms in the dirtiest conditions; eating the dirtiest food, wearing almost no clothing and dying of reasons which the children of the rich would not even imagine.

Americans are taught to think of people who earn 'minimum wages'. But who will teach Indians to think of people who earn nearly nothing? We want laws to ban beggary. We want laws to ban prostitution. We want laws to ban child labour. But is there any law to ensure that having been born in this country, a person has the right to live decently, has the minimum economic strength to eat, cloth himself and afford a small shelter for himself?
We are only adding more and more to the list of the poor by increasing the gap between the haves and have-nots. More and more landless labourers or farmers with small land holdings are shifting to the dirty slums in cities, because nature and man are both up against their lives.

How can there be justice in 20 per cent of the people owning 80 per cent of the wealth? There is enough wealth for every man on this earth to lead a simple and contented life. But the problem is inequitable distribution. When some can afford to pay Rs 80-150 for a cup of coffee, hundreds of others cannot even afford a tea costing Rs 2! As human beings, we all are responsible for this condition.