As the world's rich meet, India's poor struggle on

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As the world's rich meet, India's poor struggle on

07 Jul 2005 12:59:39 GMT, Source: Reuters, By Terry Friel

SILIGURI, India, July 7 (Reuters) - Dipak Sarkar will almost

certainly never see one of India's shining new shopping malls or

ultramodern infotech centres, much less go inside one. But the three-

year-old stonebreaker's work and sweat will go into many.

As India joins the G8 table for the first time on Thursday, its

racing economic growth, among the fastest in the world, often masks

the almost unimaginable poverty that drives millions of children

into slave labour, teenage girls to sell their bodies for $1, and

kills countless numbers by starvation and disease.

" There are up to 50 percent of Indians who are struggling to

survive, " said Sanjay Bapat, who runs an anti-poverty portal,

www.indianngos.com from the financial capital of Bombay for aid

agencies and companies who want to help the poor.

" I see children who have more flies on their bodies than clothes.

One meal a day is terrific. Two is unthinkable. But the sense of

urgency to fight this is completely lacking. "

At an age when he should be learning to play with toys, Dipak, face

locked in grim concentration and too busy to spare more than a few

words, pounds river rocks into pebbles with a chunk of truck axle

weighing almost a kilo (two lb).

He works an hour a day, helping his parents fill a lorry with gravel

destined for the building sites of India's economic boom.

" I want to go to school, " he says, stooping to pile another load of

stones into his black singlet. It takes two or three grown men two

weeks to fill a lorry, worth 800-1,000 rupees ($18-$22).

Within sight of Dipak's pile of stones, a cheerful billboard with a

perfect, smiling mother dressed in white promotes a new luxury

resort - " A family entertainment zone " . Dipak's mother taught him

how to smash stones without smashing his fingers.

In the wide beds of the Balason and other rivers around this town in

eastern India, near Nepal, thousands of people, mainly children and

old women, spend their days crushing rocks and dragging wicker

baskets of heavy wet sand from the shallow water.

Families live in one-room, dirt floor bamboo huts. Black plastic

help keeps the monsoon out.

About 30 percent of India's more than one billion people live below

the official poverty line of 2,100-2,400 calories a day.

MILLIONS STRUGGLING

But by the global definition of earning a dollar a day, that figure

jumps to about half the population -- more than 500 million, larger

than the entire population of the European Union.

And that is more than the poor in Africa, the focus of poverty talks

at the summit in Scotland of the Group of Eight -- Britain, Canada,

France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- where

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets leaders on Thursday.

Not far from where Dipak works, 45-year-old grandmother Rani Shah

sits in the stifling humidity surrounded by marigolds, waiting for

one of her regulars to turn up at her brothel in Siliguri's Khalpara

red light district, a squalid slum with excrement blackening the

open drains.

The roughly 1,000 girls here, brought by poverty and sometimes

people trafficking and many looking younger than 18, earn $1-$2 a

session, a bit more if they agree not to use a condom and risk

becoming infected with HIV/AIDS.

" I have to do this work for my family, " Rani says, dressed in a red

sari and smiling warmly. " I can't do anything else. "

Rani, who has lived in Khalpara most of her life, used to be a

dancer like her mother, but she can't dance any more because of her

heart condition, kidney stones and diabetes.

She earns about 600-700 rupees ($14-$16) a week from her two or

three regulars -- " all gentlemen " -- including her

truckdriver " husband " when he can spare time from his regular family.

Since India began opening its markets and liberalising its economy

in 1991, growth has taken off. It averaged 7 percent a year over the

past two years and foreign investment has poured in, though at

smaller levels than in China.

The middle class has exploded to more than 300 million, by some

estimates, who send their children abroad for an education and are

buying second family cars in a country where not so long ago the

wait for even just a motor scooter was a few years.

But the gains are unevenly shared and have largely bypassed the

rural and urban poor. Resentment among the poor was a major factor

in the surprise ousting of the Hindu nationalist government last

year.

" We are poor basically because we don't want to be rich, " said

Bapat. " If we want to be rich, we can be rich. The resources are

there, it's just a matter of unlocking them. " ($1 = 43.5 rupees)

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