"Late last year, two young men decided to
live a month of their lives on the income of
an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar,
the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied
at the University of Pennsylvania and worked
for three years as an investment banker in
the US and Singapore. The other, Matt,
migrated as a teenager to the States with his
parents, and studied in MIT. Both decided at
different points to return to India, joined the
UID Project in Bengaluru, came to share a
flat, and became close friends.
The idea suddenly struck them one day. Both
had returned to India in the vague hope that
they could be of use to their country. But
they knew the people of this land so little.
Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us try
to understand an ‘average Indian', by living on
an ‘average income'.” His friend Matt was
immediately captured by the idea. They
began a journey which would change them
forever.
To begin with, what was the average income
of an Indian? They calculated that India's
Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month,
or Rs. 150 a day. Globally people spend about
a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding
rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a
day. They realised that this did not make
them poor, only average. Seventy-five per
cent Indians live on less than this average.
The young men moved into the tiny
apartment of their domestic help, much to
her bemusement. What changed for them
was that they spent a large part of their day
planning and organising their food. Eating out
was out of the question; even dhabas were
too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were
expensive and therefore used sparingly, meat
was out of bounds, as were processed food
like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little
refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with
healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a
wonder food — affordable and high on
proteins, and worked on many recipes. Parle
G biscuits again were cheap: 25 paise for 27
calories! They innovated a dessert of fried
banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.
Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life
much smaller. They found that they could not
afford to travel by bus more than five km in a
day. If they needed to go further, they could
only walk. They could afford electricity only
five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly
used lights and fans. They needed also to
charge their mobiles and computers. One
Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by
shops, gazing at things they could not buy.
They could not afford the movies, and hoped
they would not fall ill.
However, the bigger challenge remained.
Could they live on Rs. 32, the official poverty
line, which had become controversial after
India's Planning Commission informed the
Supreme Court that this was the poverty line
for cities (for villages it was even lower, at Rs.
26 per person per day)?
For this, they decided to go to Matt's ancestral
village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs.
26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and
banana and drank black tea: a balanced diet
was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day which
their briefly adopted ‘poverty' permitted.
They found themselves thinking of food the
whole day. They walked long distances, and
saved money even on soap to wash their
clothes. They could not afford
communication, by mobile and internet. It
would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For
the two 26-year-olds, the experience of
‘official poverty' was harrowing.
Yet, when their experiment ended with
Deepavali, they wrote to their friends: “Wish
we could tell you that we are happy to have
our ‘normal' lives back. Wish we could say that
our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights
ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping
for throughout our experiment. It probably
was one of the best meals we've ever had,
packed with massive amounts of love from
our hosts. However, each bite was a sad
reminder of the harsh reality that there are
400 million people in our country for whom
such a meal will remain a dream for quite
some time. That we can move on to our
comfortable life, but they remain in the
battlefield of survival — a life of tough
choices and tall constraints. A life where
freedom means little and hunger is plenty...
It disturbs us to spend money on most of the
things that we now consider excesses. Do we
really need that hair product or that branded
cologne? Is dining out at expensive
restaurants necessary for a happy weekend?
At a larger level, do we deserve all the riches
we have around us? Is it just plain luck that
we were born into circumstances that allowed
us to build a life of comfort? What makes the
other half any less deserving of many of
these material possessions, (which many of us
consider essential) or, more importantly,
tools for self-development (education) or
self-preservation (healthcare)?
We don't know the answers to these
questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt
that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded
by the love and generosity we got from
people who live on the other side, despite
their tough lives. We may have treated them
as strangers all our lives, but they surely
didn't treat us as that way...”
So what did these two friends learn from
their brief encounter with poverty? That
hunger can make you angry. That a food law
which guarantees adequate nutrition to all is
essential. That poverty does not allow you to
realise even modest dreams. And above all —
in Matt's words — that empathy is essential
for democracy."
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