Incredible India 53 – How the Poor Survive in India

OK folks, fasten your seat-belts now.

For we are back with the latest installment of your favorite series Incredible India.

A short while ago we were reading a piece on Indian women renting their wombs to rich Westerners and sometimes rich Easterners (Japanese).

That set us thinking of the many different techniques poor Indians resort to for sheer survival in a barbarous land where Naxalites are the sole pressure-point on a callous kakistocracy:

* Poor Indians sell their pussies

It’s no secret that 99.999% of Indian sex workers come from the poorest of the poor. Be it Chennai, Kamatipura (Mumbai), Delhi or Bangalore it’s the poor girls who end up as prostitutes. And with the HIV explosion in India, these young girls are also dying in the thousands, unmourned, unsung and unnoticed.

* Poor Indians sell their kidneys

One of the commonest and oldest survival techniques of the urban poor is to sell a kidney. Of course, in Incredible India it’s not uncommon for the poor to have their kidneys stolen from them. Poor people wake up with a bandage and a pain in the groin. But that’s a completely different story.

* Poor Indians sell their wombs

Middle-class, educated Indians sell their programming services while the low-class, uneducated sell their surrogacy services i.e they rent their wombs for childless westerners. Womb-renting is catching up in India in a big way. According to this piece in Slate, it’s now a $500 million business with 350 clinics offering womb-rental services. Doubtless, the middlemen (doctors and hospitals)grab the lion’s share leaving the wombers (our neologism for the poor Indian women renting their wombs) with little.

* Poor Indians sell their blood

One of the commonest practices of the poor is to sell their blood. A few decades back, we lived near a blood-bank for a short while. Every morning, as early as 6:30AM, we were greeted with the sight of poor men in rags huddled  outside the gates to sell the blood for a few Rupees.

* Poor Indians sell their body strength

In other words, they act as musclemen or criminals and are involved in extortion, killing, debt collection and eviction for the moneyed interests. This practice is usually restricted to the large metros like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and the most part of Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal states.

* Poor Indians sell their bodies

It’s not widely known but a considerable number of Indians act as guinea-pigs for large pharmaceutical firms looking for humans for their new drugs in the final stages of testing. God knows, what impact these drug-tests have on their bodies.

* Poor Indians sell their babies and children

Impoverished families in rural India sell their young children who are then forced to work as unpaid laborers toiling for just a few morsels of food until a debt incurred by their parents is repaid.

Should all of the above sales‘ techniques fail, the poor Indians starve to death or work themselves to death for ridiculously low wages.

Of course given the rampant hypocrisy in Incredible India, everyone in the benighted land pretends all of the above ‘sales‘ is not happening.

After all, this is Shining India where we’ll soon host the Commonwealth Games on which we’ve spent an astounding Rs 28,000 crore.

Who gives a f*ck if the poor are selling blood, wombs or kidneys just to get by. Let the games begin!

Hopeless Nation
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times. Given the incredible chasm between the haves and have-nots in Incredible India, the country has no future to speak of.

Just some islands of prosperity in a ocean of abject misery.

Did we hear someone shriek Mera Bharat Mahaan?

Related Stories:
India, the Rent-a-Womb Capital of the World

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