Faith in the city

“Being hungry sucks.... Woke up today little disoriented, hungry and irritated. Was not a nice feeling – fell asleep again shortly after breakfast. And this is when my lifestyle otherwise is sedentary except for the evening run. Can only imagine the ordeal of someone who has to do hard labor on an empty stomach!”

--Blog entry on September 26, 2011, in http://rs100aday.com/ maintained “by two friends (Tushar Vasisht and Mathew Cherian) trying to bring to light the concerns of the average Indian through firsthand experiences”.

They were People Like Us who were born in middle class families, valued academic excellence and landed dream jobs. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Tushar Vasisht, as their website says, was an investment banker with Deutsche Bank in San Francisco and Singapore. Mathew Cherian holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins University, and has experiences in hardware design, educational technology, and the Semantic Web. 

The duo met at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) project, and two years ago they embarked on a daunting initiative to find out for themselves what it was to live on Rs.100 a day for three weeks in Bangalore and Rs.32 a day for another week at Karukachal in Kerala.

Living on Rs.32 a day? Remember, the Planning Commission had given an affidavit in the Supreme Court on September 20, 2011, that Rs.32 was the limit for poverty line calculations. There are lakhs of people in India who do with even less.

Tushar and Mathew chose Rs.150 a day as the budget for the Bangalore experiment considering the mean national income of India at Rs.4,500 a month. They fixed Rs.100 a day after deducting one-third of that budget that would go for rent. It was goodbye to many things that they had been used to until then—car, maid, air conditioning, washing machines, refrigerator, meat, milk or milk-based products, soft drinks, and so on.

“Needless to say, the experiment was highly challenging for us – personally and professionally. We lost 2.5 kg and 6.5 kg of weight, respectively, during the month and found ourselves bound by various constraints and challenges,” they wrote in their blog.

To those of us who try to find the path to salvation through Lent fasting and philanthropy, the findings of their report would be an eye-opener. For instance, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the recommended daily intake for an Indian is 1,776 calories. But the young men could only consume anything between 1,300 and 1,600 calories with the resources they had. “As a result, we were lethargic, even without putting our bodies through the rigor a day laborer subjects his to.”

Other challenges they faced included the breakdown of social and professional networks (“missed calls” were all they could afford mostly) and lesser mobility (limited to a 5-km circle, walking everywhere as bus fares were unaffordable). Other economic necessities like the repair of a pressure cooker or medical expenses were unthinkable.

Daily bread 

India is home to a large number of the world’s hungry people. According the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2012, after a small increase between 1996 and 2001, India’s GHI score fell only slightly, and the latest GHI returned to about the 1996 level. This when India’s gross national income per capita almost doubled. Why do people still go hungry to bed even as incomes have doubled?

The fact is that the benefit of economic growth is only for a few. Our cities have grown unimaginably and so have the gap between the rich and the poor.

So, “making sure that food can be accessed by all the people requires that they have the purchasing power to buy the necessary food, which, in turn, means that employment, remuneration and livelihood issues are important” (‘The Political Economy of Hunger in 21^st Century India” by Jayati Ghosh, Economic & Political Weekly, October 30, 2010).

A re-reading of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20: 1-16) will help us understand the social and economic implications of having a job, a living wage and the money to buy food. In short, the prayer ‘give us this day our daily bread’ is for the provision of resources to everyone (us) and not an individual (me or my family) and protection against everything that hinders from enjoying them. Or, the onus is on the entire community to combat poverty and hunger.

Church and the city 

More often than not, we resort to prayers and charity (tithing) as the easy way out. Charity, obviously, is to relieve the suffering of a person in need. But it is no substitute for justice. Jesus himself said (Matthew 23:23): “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” The key here is justice and mercy.

Sometimes we are quick to offer simplistic solutions. The other day someone told me there would be no poverty in our State (Kerala) if everyone there stopped drinking. That stems from a lack of understanding of the causes of poverty.

Poverty is not the failure of an individual or group to be successful individuals; rather it is inflicted on them by a lot of factors. The class or caste one is born into determines his or her life’s chances—access to food, good education, decent housing or medical facilities. 

This ‘structural violence’ is so institutionalised that it is seldom recognised as violence. The Church has a role to create awareness about this structural ‘sin’ and get involved in the struggles for economic justice and food security.

In the 1980s, amidst growing poverty in the British inner cities, a Special Commission of the Archbishop of Canterbury was established “to examine the strengths, insights, problems and needs of the Church’s life and mission in Urban Priority Areas and, as a result, to reflect on the challenge which God may be making to Church and Nation: and to make recommendations to appropriate bodies”. 

Its report, Faith in the City: A Call to Action by Church and Nation, created new awareness of the emerging gaps in British society. The report became controversial for its criticism of the economic policies of the government of the day for the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

“Faith in the City began a movement which was partly political (with a small p), partly theological and partly spiritual. In all three senses, it was a beacon of hope to a lot of people: local authorities felt that the dilemmas that they faced with limited resources in the face of overwhelming deprivation were being recognised; the churches on the ground felt that the rest of the Church was waking up to the realities of inner city ministry; and, most important of all, people who were locked into the poverty trap of deprived inner city communities began to feel that perhaps there could be a national understanding of the paralysis which gripped them. Faith in the City began a discussion across the nation and a movement within the Church. It showed that our common concerns could be harnessed in the common good,” said the Very Revd Graham Smith, The Dean of Norwich, in 2005.

How do we make our city good?

Youth and the city 

Some years ago, at the end of a three-day Yuvajana Sakhyam centre camp in one of the towns in Kerala on the theme ‘Whatsover you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do it for me (Matthew 25: 40)’, a young man got up to ask the speaker, ‘Achen, Where do I find the poor?’ The speaker was livid.

Most of us in the cities live in a bubble, untouched by reality. Let me list a programme for city Yuvajana Sakhyams in their emphasis on social justice.  

• Break out of the bubble, like Tushar and Mathew did, and make a conscious effort to apply the gospel to the economics of society. Why makes people poor? What are the causes and effects of poverty?
• Initiate studies on the Food Security Bill, the Land Acquisition Bill, and other pieces of legislation that affect the lives and livelihoods of a large number of people.
• At least one of our churches in Delhi initiated a ‘langar’ (community kitchen) for the poor during Lent. Can we have more churches opening up their premises for food and opening shelters for the homeless?
• Participate in the struggle to make food security a reality. “Let justice roll down like the waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5: 24).

‘Please, sir, I want some more’

The term Dickensian refers to poor social and economic conditions as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens. The Industrial Revolution had brought about major changes in 19th century England. Wealth grew, but so did poverty and hunger. Fashionable areas grew up, but so did debtors’ prisons and workhouses.
There is no striking picture of the Dickensian world than that of the half-starved Oliver Twist with his bowl saying, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ Strangely, this holds good in an “increasingly populous, urbanised and environmentally challenged” 21st century world.
Even as I write this, 17 children have reportedly died of malnutrition in nine months in Mumbai. It is said that 55 per cent of the city’s population live in slums side by side with some of the wealthiest people in India.
Hunger is an unwelcome guest in many more homes in India. In 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which brings out the Global Hunger Index (GHI), constructed the India State Hunger Index (ISHI) after analysing hunger levels in 17 major states covering more than 95 per cent of the population.
The results were shocking: Not a single state fell in the ‘low hunger’ or ‘moderate hunger’ categories. One state—Madhya Pradesh—fell in the ‘extremely alarming’ category.
Well, that sticks out like a sore thumb in the great India story since 1991 when GDP has doubled. In the race ahead, one report says, India seems certain to miss one of its key Millennium Development Goals: halving malnutrition by 2015.
There are other ways too in which children’s lives are wrecked. Six-year-old Parthiban is the son of the watchman in our apartment. Till a few years ago, his father, who worked in a ration shop, lived in a one-room shack. But when the rent became unaffordable, he opted to moonlight as a watchman so that his wife and son will at least have a roof over their heads; Parthiban sleeps, eats and does his homework in the common area between our flats and stairwells.
But Mohammad Manan Ansari, now 15, of Samsahiriya village in Jharkhand, could not even think of that. He began working in a mica mine at the age of eight. Thanks to the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, he is at a rehabilitation centre in Jaipur to study.
India is said to have the largest number of child labourers who are under 14 in the world. The ostensible reason is always poverty, but there are other factors such as parents’ attitudes, discrimination, and social exclusion which are responsible for child labour
Last year, Ansari narrated his story at the International Labour Organisation on the day dedicated to the fight against child labour. He has a new mission in life now: to defend children’s rights.
In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for children. While great progress has been made on child rights in the past 20 years, a UNICEF report says “many of the world’s children will never see the inside of a school room, and millions lack protection against violence, abuse, exploitation, discrimination and neglect”.
The most vulnerable among them are girls. In many places they don’t even get essential healthcare.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (in a novel by the same name) is the face of a young woman who learns at a very tender age that the world she lives in is a blighted one. The novel’s setting is the impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. It begins with Parson Tringham informing John Durbeyfield, a peasant, that he has noble lineage. He says “Durbeyfield” is a corruption of a great family name, “D’Urberville”. To the inebriated man, the piece of information was another intoxicant. (All of us, Saint Thomas Christians, will understand easily how heady lineage can be!)
Now it comes on the shoulders of Tess, 14, his eldest daughter, to take the goods loaded in a cart to the market the next day. Little Abraham, her brother, accompanies her.
The sun had not yet risen when the children set out on their journey, Abraham still groggy. …As he began to wake up slowly, Abraham, as little children would, got fascinated with silhouettes made against the sky by trees and clouds, “began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head”.
Suddenly, he stopped to ask his sister:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
There is another story from long ago, when a young woman and her husband, looking for a place to rest, knocked at the doors of several inns. They had no money, and were exhausted and cold, and she was pregnant. Later that day, she gave birth to a baby boy in a manger.
Time had some more bad surprises in store for the family. The parents had to flee to another country to escape the wrath of the king.
There are many reasons why people choose to migrate, including poverty, armed conflict, social strife, political turmoil and economic hardships. All such migration destroys human dignity, worst of all of children.
It is our collective responsibility to ensure every child’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation. In Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s words: “We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’
“His name is ‘Today.’”