Poverty in Indian Villages
Big towns like Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai cannot give you the real picture of India. They do not seem to be a part of India at all. Real India lives in villages.
How poor they are! A village is a den of poverty, disease and ignorance. It still lives in the age of earthen lamp and bullock cart.
How dark most village is today! Earthen lamps cannot drive away this darkness. Electricity is essential. It will help in many ways. It will give light, run small industries and also help agriculture.
How poor our agriculture is! We have to depend upon others for food. How can we solve our food problem? We must bring in science to grow more food. Old methods will not do today.
But science alone will not do. Our villages cannot improve without a change in our economic system. In a village most of the people are landless. They have nothing of their own. They belong to the class of have-nots. So, they have to work for big farmers. They work hard and feed the nation. We all live on the sweat and blood of these landless farmers. But they are not able to earn enough to live on.
There are only a few big farmers. They own all the land. They enjoy all the comforts of life. They belong to the class of haves. These two classes of people live side by side. And yet how different they are!
They seem to belong to two different nation’s altogether. How can our villages improve if this wide gap between man and man is allowed to continue?
The poverty of our villages is at the root of their backwardness. The same old customs and traditions continue in our villages without any break. Why so? Well, the people are illiterate and ignorant. The light of education alone can drive away the ghosts of old customs and traditions. But how can they be educated if they are so poor?
