Profligacy V/s Poverty

I am glad that at least one top industrial tycoon has come forward to talk about the profligacy of the rich.  Speaking about a the 27-storey billion dollar house in South Mumbai, the Tata Group chairman, Ratan Tata said, “The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him”.  He also said, “We are doing so little about the disparity” and “India needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have.” (TOI, 22^nd May).

While top businessmen in America and elsewhere routinely donate a large portion of their wealth for the poor, most of the richest people in our country  continue to find means to make more and more money and to spend more and more on themselves.   We should be ashamed that while some of the richest people in the world live in India, majority of world’s poorest also live here and half of our population do not have proper food, shelter and healthcare.

In the pre-Independence days, inspired by the freedom movement, most of the industrialists in India, including the great G.D.Birla had a very simple life style and spent most of their wealth on charity purpose.  But these days, except for a very few rich persons, like Narayan Murthy of Infosys (who has always lived in a two or three bedroom flat), the neo-billionaires are in the habit of showing off their wealth.

Our government seems to be constantly harping on the growth rate.   But whether the growth rate is 2% or 10%, the lowest in the developing world or the highest, it does not affect the common man.  Benefits of economic growth have never reached the common man in the face of continued rising prices of essential commodities and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Unless some drastic steps are taken to lessen the disparities of income and to alleviate the poverty of more than 50 crores of people, our all economic progress is meaningless.