Poverty and Corruption: Indian Slums in A Nutshell

2482 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The importance of good governance

Poverty: the state of being extremely poor. Corruption: dishonest conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery. This is how many define poverty and corruption; however, without familiarity, words are just words – different combinations of the same twenty-six letters. Without actually experiencing either in one’s life, those of fortune can never truly understand the implications, associations, and repercussions of each, which is made evident by studying those who are living in rundown, despairing slums, which “for the purpose of census, has been defined as a residential area where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding … lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facility” (Johnson) of India. Due to the immense amount of corruption, there is little faith in the Indian government as of today; however, some programs have been implemented. Despite these attempted programs, many of them fall through on their promises due to the individuals who are supposed to be presiding over them. Therefore, it can be said that the corruption found in the intermediates between the governing body of India and those in need is what is keeping the slums of the country from prospering.
Piquing my interest in researching the effects of poverty through corruption in Indian slums, Katherine Boo’s behind the beautiful forevers presented me with this whole other world that I previously had no knowledge of. This non-fiction piece focuses on the unusual types of people that one will meet in the slums of Mumbai, the most populous city in India. There are those of little ambition, like Abdul Husain; fiery personality, like Zehrunisa Husain; great desire, like Asha; longing for love in a cruel world, li...

... middle of paper ...

... policies that have been set up, tend to not come to fruition due to hidden motives of the liaisons. Therefore, when dealing with this influx of knowledge, people should be inspired to go out and help these people.

Works Cited

Fernandes, Naresh. “Cities: City of Slums, Land of Scams.” India Today (10 Aug. 2012)
ProQuest. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.
Jagtap, D.R.. “The Economics of the Poverty of India.” Indian Streams Research Journal 3.2
(Mar. 2013): 2-3. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.
Johnson, Kay. “Indian Slums: 1 in 6 Indian City Dwellers Live in Conditions ‘Unfit for Human
Habitation’.” Huffington Post (22 Mar. 2013) Web. 02 Nov. 2013.
Krishna, Jai R.. “India’s Poor Hurt More by Corruption.” Wall Street Journal (10 Dec. 2010)
Web. 02 Nov. 2013.
Rana, Preetika. “Fact Sheet: Lokpal Bill.” Wall Street Journal: India (26 Nov. 2012) Web. 10
Nov. 2013.

Show More
Related

  • What Is The Last Taboo By Julia Whitty Summary

    1023 Words  | 3 Pages

    In order to understand why Whitty’s argument is effectively communicated it must be noted that this article was published in the politically progressive magazine, Mother Jones. The audience of Mother Jones mostly consists of young adults, mostly women, who want to be informed on the corruptness of the media, the government and the corporate world. In order to be fully effective in presenting her points, Whitty starts her article by creating a gloomy imagery through her story of the city of Calcutta and the hard lives which its citizens live. Through her use of words such as “broken down…. Smoky streets” to describe the scene at Calcutta, she is able to create this gloomy image. She ties this gloomy story to how the population of Calcutta is the reason for the harsh living environment and how immense its population density is when compared to cities like New York. Additionally, she discusses how the increase in population has caused harsh lives for individuals in the Himalayas, the rest of India and the rest of the world. Through these examples she ties the notion that the root causes of such hard lives are because of the “dwindling of resources and escalating pollution,” which are caused by the exponential growth of humankind. She goes on to

    Read More

  • Corruption: The Only Opportunity in Annawadi

    613 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Annawadi, the slum setting of the book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” nearly everything falls under the law of the free market. Things that most countries deem “basic rights,” the Indian people of Annawadi have to pay for. Clean water, education, and medical attention from hospitals are just a few things that are exploited by police officers, gangs and slumlords. The liberalization of India caused the country to begin a process of economic reform. People from the countryside flocked to the cities to find work in the new booming economy that no longer depended on its agriculture. With the increase in population around the bustling cities, came competiveness for opportunity. This competiveness made poverty rates skyrocket, making corruption (and corrupt activities) in Annawadi the only clear way of making it out of the slums. “In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of the country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corrupti...

    Read More

  • The Effects Of Education In Montayj's 'Duggan'

    1776 Words  | 4 Pages

    The article, “Education, poverty and schooling: a study of delhi slum dwellers”, highlights that “education positively influences poverty reduction, while poverty, or low income, adversely affects the quality and quantity of education”. This model is very much apparent in Jackie’s life. As she lacked formal education in the early stages of her life, she remained in the cycle of poverty even into her adulthood. Without the knowledge of how to change things and the inability of doing so, it is very much difficult, if not impossible, for her to get out of this infinite

    Read More

  • Conventional Common Wisdom

    1433 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although poverty has minimized, it is still significant poverty which is characterized by a numerous amount of things. There are two types of poverty case and insular. “Case poverty is the farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt” (Galbraith 236)Case poverty is not irretraceable and usually caused if someone in the household experiences “ mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, some educational handicap unrelated to community shortcomings” (Galbraith 236).Case poverty is often blamed on the people for their shortcomings but on some levels can be to pinpoint one person's shortcomings that caused this poverty. Most modern poverty is insular and is caused by things people in this community cannot control. “The most important characteristic of insular poverty is forces, common to all members of the community, that restrain or prevent participation in economic life and increase rates of return.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Greed In The Kite Runner

    908 Words  | 2 Pages

    Greed can lead to many different situations, experiencing times of hardship, consequences, but a major consequence is poverty which is not realized through

    Read More

  • Behind the Beautiful Forevers Analysis

    1207 Words  | 3 Pages

    While it may be easier to persuade yourself that Boo’s published stories are works of fiction, her writings of the slums that surround the luxury hotels of Mumbai’s airport are very, very real. Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” does not attempt to solve problems or be an expert on social policy; instead, Boo provides the reader with an objective window into the battles between extremities of wealth and poverty. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” then, exposes the paucity and corruption prevalent within India.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Behind The Beautiful Forevers

    1748 Words  | 4 Pages

    This is necessary as the vast majority of individuals migrating from rural to urban centers has been steadily increasing with the level of economic growth seen within the past twenty years as mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, this situation has further shown the structural issues and inequalities of cities, as most migrants end up having a poor quality of life living in informal settlements as highlight substantially by Boo. As a means of tackling this, however, the Indian government has turned its focus on investing rural regions, developing the agricultural sector. Specifically, Boo mentions that “the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had come down from Delhi to express his concern for the farmers’ hardships, and the central government’s determination to relieve it” (p. 138). While this is definitely important funds are not being divided justly. For starters, between rural and urban areas almost all investments are being targeting towards rural regions, which is only addressing issues of inequality in one section of the country. Furthermore, across rural areas inequalities of investment are quite often overlooked. Although, “one of the governments hopes was to stop villagers from abandoning their farms and further inundating cities like Mumbai, but Asha’s relatives knew nothing of these celebrated relief programs” (p. 138). Therefore, even though

    Read More

  • Behind The Beautiful Forevers

    1324 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo tells the stories and struggles of families living in a slum adjacent to the Sahar Airport in Mumbai, India. Boo details the ways in which the residents of this slum, Annawadi, attempt to escape their poverty, but fail to do so. Despite numerous initiatives sponsored by the Central Government of India to improve the lives of the many individuals living in Annawadi, these programs are ultimately unable to do so due to deep-rooted corruption in the city of Mumbai. Regardless of this, the residents of Annawadi seem to accept corruption as a fact of life, and do little to fight it. As illustrated over the course of Boo’s narrative, this results from the fact that many Annawadians recognize the ways in which the laws of their society allow for the unfair treatment of certain groups of people, especially the poor and religious minorities, and are also cognizant of the fact that they have no real power to change a system that

    Read More

  • Famine, Affluence And Morality By Peter Singer

    706 Words  | 2 Pages

    In most cases, shortage of money is not the sole problem. Rather, poverty is a mere term summarised by a sophisticated factors of corruption, lack of infrastructure, civil unrest, government failure, and many more. Especially, donated money are regularly spent to run campaigns, provide wages to staffs, and to run the charities, with a very few of the amount being invested directly to help the poor. This socio-political scepticism can be worse as some believe that charity is merely a band aid fix to the deeper underlying problem that is continuously causing the poverty, and it only becomes the basis for local communities to be dependent on

    Read More

  • Slums Case Study

    1066 Words  | 3 Pages

    From the reviewed literature, it can be seen that housing is affected by four major factors and these factors defines the type of housing and housing conditions of a settlement. High incomes bring about good housing whiles low income brings about poor housing. Low incomes and inadequate housing has a direct relationship with the emergence of slums in many countries. In this aspect, we are going to look at the types of slums, relationship between slums and housing taking into consideration the housing characteristics of slums using Nima as the reference point in Ghana.

    Read More

  • Shantytowns Case Study

    1583 Words  | 4 Pages

    Shanty towns, as Google defines them, are deprived areas on the outskirts of cities consisting of large numbers of crude dwellings. There is already a countless number of shantytowns around the world, but that number is growing. The main reason why families are moving into shantytowns is economic opportunities…“The driving force behind these migrations is the abundance of jobs in the cities” (Teghrarian, 1997). People, in hopes of pursuing a new career and making money for their family, often resort to these shantytowns for a temporary living space, but soon find out it’s too hard to leave (Painting with appositives). The families that populate shantytowns often work harder than the average citizen, but are forced to live in dirt and tents,

    Read More

  • A Study of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi

    1276 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...

    Read More

  • Corruption In South Africa Essay

    973 Words  | 2 Pages

    Crime and corruption are not relevant to the degree of poverty present in a country as some of you might think. Corruption is a social phenomenon that every society deals with, regardless of the level of development in the country. What makes corruption a dangerous social phenomenon is its ability to adapt to the conditions present in any country. If the country is highly developed, then organized crime and illegal practices are spread inside the government in the form of taking bribes, discrimination according to status, and tampering with legal evidence. Lower levels of societal corruption are present in the forms of mafias that gain power by making the poor poorer. In this project, I would like to focus on the corruption taking place in South Africa.

    Read More

  • Cause Of Poverty

    2564 Words  | 6 Pages

    Poverty is a global epidemic that contributes to the deaths of millions each year. However, poverty is more prominent in some areas around the world than others. The Oxford dictionary defines poverty as the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support, but it’s so much more. Poverty can be defined as being hungry, lacking shelter, being unable to go to school, being unable to see a doctor, or being powerless and having a lack of freedom. The reason behind the many descriptions of poverty is that poverty has many faces, and its definition changes depending on the place and time, however the effects of poverty on the poor are always the same.

    Read More

  • Effects Of Poverty On Society

    970 Words  | 2 Pages

    As one of the biggest problems facing the world today, poverty continues to have significant negative implications for the society. The effects of poverty are extremely severe and far-reaching, so much so that it was one of the top Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the Millennium Summit of the UN back in 2000 (Hatcher, 2016). To understand the effects that poverty has on the society, one must critically analyze the societies in which poverty is rampant, as well as analyze poverty from the relative perspectives that it presents. The core aim of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding of poverty and elaborate on the diverse ways in which it continues to affect societies across the world.

    Read More

More about Poverty and Corruption: Indian Slums in A Nutshell

Open Document