Pleading The Case Of The Destitute

To punch for a social revolution in India is not as tough as one might think in an age where the earning breed of youngsters is more interested in spending their weekends drinking and dancing in pubs and dancebars. All that it takes to get there is to have a little bit of compassion in your heart to be different and good. However nebulous the dimensions of poverty might appear in the land, the condition of destitution is not unidentifiable. To put it straight, the poorest of the poor are the destitutes. People who have nothing at all to eat, no shelter, no access to clothes that aren't torn, unkempt, remnants of a collapsed household, most of them psychologically scarred, maggots feeding on their bodies, no strength to even stand up and beg for alms.

The absolute disregard the society imposes on the poor is completely shattering. Nobody cares for them because everyone is busy living their own lives, one is interested only in upgrading the lifestyle of his own, even the charity organisations that work in the nation are more inclined towards converting black money into white and taking a cut home for themselves, and the destitute continue to revel in the murk of social expulsion. 

The duties of the State to provide the basic necessities to the poverty stricken people - is observed in the breach. The beggary prevention acts we have are more interested in portraying vagrancy as crime, just because it branches out into sex work, drug peddling and human trafficking. Our policy framework must aim at hitting the root of the issue - which is poverty. Not stopping there, we need to move from being poverty-alleviation centric to making poverty completely defunct - though it might appear as an un-achievable distant dream. Deprivation of citizenship for these poor ones that accounts for a serious condition of invisibility before the State would only aggravate the wound that pusses into decay every passing day. The nation awaits a vital revival from the ministerial chairs as much as we do from the hearts of people. 

As a society, the mantle and mandate is on everyone living in the land to involve themselves in some way or the other to voice out for causes such as these; or change wouldn't come. We need to stop - sanctioning selective violations of rights, social expulsion and practising notions of justice involving stigma which permits oppressive treatment outside the law. The more we join hands to advocate social restitution and empowerment leading to the re-inclusion of the disentitled people into the pool of claimants from the state, the more blessed and happy our nation would become.