Friday 20 April 2012

What motivates these people to live?


What motivates these people to live? Hunger, desire to live when they don’t have a family, friends and are ill-treated by everyone?

In Trivandrum, when I was going to Kovalam beach I saw a similar sight.
She did not have the skills or the product variety to pull consumers so as to sell her vegetables. This was quite evident as even a kid can tell the pain one can see in her eyes.
Definitely, the vegetable she is selling is grown in her garden or backyard of her house. Why is she not begging? ROI will be more. Is it her self-respect which many people think she doesn’t have?
But is the Indian education trying to address such issues? How will she survive a bad weather which gives headaches like food inflation and shakes the market causing nightmares to millionaires? She is definitely not a super human or super rich but how has she survived.
Can we make such an Indian our role model and imbibe her qualities?
Who will buy from her where we strive for quality, she even cannot weigh the vegetables as she doesn’t have a weighing pan. Can we splurge our money when we are not assured that what she gives is correctly priced?
Posting such pictures in Facebook or writing articles about abject poverty in India cannot help in mitigating the hardships of these people. The acts like MGNREGA though guarantee to provide fixed employment days to the employable but what is there for such elderly persons who cannot do physical work and are not supported by any family members. So, how to address these issues? The plight of such old women is much harrowing in the rural regions.
This can be improved by introducing FDI in fresh food retail. With FDI comes the management skills, technology, and new improved process of supply chain which can improve the margin of the growers? This will indirectly help the poor villagers who will have a constant revenue stream and FDI will increase employment opportunities as work force to meet growing demand and complexity of supply chain process will increase with passage of time. Although, this will be resisted by the middleman who kept the profits that should have been of the poor cultivators but regulations have to be made keeping in mind country’s long term benefits after trading off the risks emanating by resistance from middlemen.
Another initiative can be by the corporates who in their CSR activities can come up with innovative ideas of how to address the old age group who have been deserted by their family members. This can be community programmes which can be used for collectively addressing some concerns of the distressed populace. Example: Pipli in Orissa has very good craftsman who now cannot produce in mass which can attract shelf space. Even if it goes to showrooms the price negotiated is in favour of the dealers. This results in loss of commitment and in turn is slowly leading to the loss of the valued handicraft skill in Pipli.
So a community programme to help these weavers to sell their products at a right price by only guiding them and making them aware of the potential market can help this cause.  These guides can be executives of company who can also learn from these experiences working among the rural and underprivileged people.



1 comment:

  1. Lets hope and work towards a better India..
    Happy blogging..
    looking forward for more of ur posts... :) :)

    ReplyDelete