Shambo, the ‘sacred’ bull, got more attention last week than starving children in the suburbs of our richest city. Shambo’s last meal, his last walk to a Welsh slaughterhouse, and the entreaties of his supporters caught the attention of most major news channels but the shameful condition of children in Mumbai’s Aarey Milk Colony went ignored. A child died of hunger and more deaths will likely follow because of the desperate poverty in this semi-urban suburb but for some reason this does not bother us. It does not bother us either that on the edge of this city, in which the richest Indians live, there are people who live without adequate food, clean water, and basic amenities like schools and public healthcare. This, despite the thousands of crores of taxpayers’ money that the Indian state supposedly spends on alleviating poverty.

This column has often attacked government for throwing good money after bad by continuing to invest in elaborate anti-poverty programmes that leak like sieves, but I believe some of the blame rests with us. We simply do not care. I notice this more in Mumbai than in any other Indian city and find myself sickened by the trivia that passes daily for news.

Sample: ‘Bipasha Basu says her chihuahua is like her son. Poshto, as she calls him, was gifted to her by beau John Abraham. The relationship, as per latest reports, is over and Bipasha is single after ten years. But Poshto surely is keeping her good company.’

This sort of ‘news’ is so popular that it is now accepted in media circles that without the daily recounting of Bollywood’s love affairs and celebrity parties it would not be possible to increase circulation. So we have a situation in which just the leftovers from Mumbai’s parties and weddings could give the children of Aarey Milk Colony four square meals a day, but nobody makes the effort because everyone is too busy reading about last night’s big party to bother. The irony is that I have met more socially conscious citizens and do-gooders in Mumbai than in other Indian cities.

There are also mega funds available in the charitable trusts of big Indian companies, most of which have their headquarters in Mumbai. As someone who long ago gave up the hope that any government in India would develop the social conscience needed to admit that our anti-poverty schemes are a failure, I write this week in the hope of stirring our own social conscience into action.

Here are two suggestions for ensuring that not another child dies of hunger in the city of Mumbai. Suggestion one is that one of the city’s NGOs appeals to the city’s five-star hotels to donate their leftovers to a network of free kitchens, the first of which can be set up in Aarey Milk Colony, where the situation is acute. The food can be transported to the kitchens by getting the Tatas or Mahindras to donate the required vehicles.

My second suggestion is that one of the city’s bigger industrial houses adopts Aarey Milk Colony and takes care of all its needs. It would cost a bit of money but think of what a model of corporate social responsibility it could become. It could be emulated across the country in our poorer districts and we might succeed in eliminating poverty through private enterprise instead of just ‘alleviating’ it, which is all that government seeks to do.

In our socialist days it was possible to live with desperate poverty because nobody was allowed to be rich anyway. If anyone dared exhibit signs of great wealth the evil eye of government would fall upon them, and tax inspectors would hound them. In those bad old days even our five-star hotels cultivated the reek of genteel poverty and socialist squalour. The efforts to distribute poverty worked so well that the richest Indians were poor by the standards of the world.

Today, some of the richest people in the world are Indian and the lifestyles of India’s rich and famous are the same as the rich and famous anywhere. We cannot allow a situation in which children die of hunger. It is even more shameful that they should be dying not in some remote rural district but in the city of Mumbai.

If we wait for government to ‘alleviate’ the situation we could wait forever and even then the most that will happen is the creation of another elaborate, hopelessly leaky anti-poverty scheme. If we want real change it will have to come from private enterprise as has every other major change in India, but first we need to develop a social conscience that goes beyond Shambo the bull and Poshto the chihuahua.

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