Poverty in India

Poverty is a problem in India. While India has made great strides in improving public facilities, for different reasons, not all of them are available to all people. For example, public school is available for free to all children. However, not all schools are good, and some families do not send their children to get a general education because there is more immediate opportunity for a child who gets a vocational education instead. This is just one example.

Poverty can manifest in strange ways. In Varanasi in particular, there is a problem where poverty itself prohibits safe sex practices. Various organizations around the world provide condoms free of charge to promote safe sex. The condoms are relatively inexpensive compared to the burden on society of the cost of treating sexually-transmitted infections. Organizations, particularly Western ones, see distribution of condoms as offering a single choice that did not exist previously – now people can choose to use condoms during sexual interaction, whereas they could not before.

But due to poverty, there are choices that people imagine that were never in the minds of the organization that distributed the condoms. For example, suppose that it costs $1 US to manufacture and distribute 10 condoms. But suppose that the enterprising Indian can accept the condom donation, and rather than use them during sexual intercourse, he extracts the lubricant from the condoms destroying them in the process. For his labor, he has $0.01 worth of industrial lubricant which he can use in his work. The recipient of the condoms might see more value in the $0.01 of lubricant than in the $1.00 of disease protection. Poverty in India is such that it is sometimes an economically-sound decision for a group of people to sit through hours of sexual-disease prevention classes, tell the foreign teachers what they want to hear continually over a period of months, and throughout the community take hundreds of dollars in aid by reassigning the use of the offered help, when all they ever needed were some supplies for basic living and wage-earning.

There is not an easy solution to problems like these, but Sanjeevani Booti believes that the start of the solution is grassroot efforts by locals, rather than having the situation almost entirely controlled by outside forces as it has been in the past.