Your Principles, My Food

Poverty is widespread in India, and has all kinds of effects on the country. Saying this is no great insight of course, nor am I going to start rattling off some dreary list of the obvious fallouts of poverty.

What I am going to do here is touch on one intriguing side-effect of poverty in this country: the way it touches on ethics.

I first began thinking about this when I heard about what's happening with a large low-cost housing project in Goregaon, one of Bombay's northern suburbs. In some ways, this is one of the only demonstrated large successes of what's called the "cross-subsidy" method of alleviating the housing situation in Bombay. That is, a builder agrees to build a number of smaller flats that he will sell to the poor at subsidised rates (the BJP-Sena regime in Maharashtra actually had a poll promise to give these away free). In return, the builder gets concessions to put up larger flats that he sells to the middle-class at market rates. The presumption is that the profit on the market-rate flats pays for the subsidy on the others, and then some.

In any case, this project was conceived and is managed by a set of scrupulously, almost painfully, straight and sincere people. Not once have they agreed to pay a bribe for the various Municipal clearances etc that they have to get. This is no mean feat, considering the project has 6000 flats.

But as a result of this refusal to bend, the project is vastly delayed. Hundreds of poor families first paid a deposit to be part of this scheme some 20 years ago. They are just getting, or in some cases have not yet got, their new flats.

You could argue that had bribes been paid, many homeless people would have had a flat several years ago. Hold on to that thought.

A man called Abraham George has just published an interesting book: India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty. George is an entrepreneur/businessman who did well in the States and, about ten years ago, decided he'd like to give back to India. So he set out to build a school in a poor Tamil Nadu district, Shanti Bhavan, selecting its students from among the poorest families there and promising them a top-notch education. (If you don't get the book, you can read more about the school and George's other philanthropic efforts here).

As you can imagine, George faced innumerable obstacles, from corruption to bureaucratic apathy to allegations that he was converting the school kids. This was one of them.

He once received a large shipment of American wheat for the kids in Shanti Bhavan. (An entire container full, in fact). The Customs officer at the port of entry wanted a bribe, which George refused to pay "as a matter of principle." Naturally, the wheat was held up, then pronounced "unfit for human consumption." To appeal that, George would have had to send the wheat for testing elsewhere, which would have meant further delays and expensive storage/transport costs.

Eventually, George simply burned the wheat.

Looking back, he says, he is not sure he made the right decision. "On an ethical principle," he writes, "I sacrifice[d] the welfare of several hundred children and poor people and allowed the destruction of a valuable food item."

Hold on to your ethics? Or feed needy kids? Refuse to pay a bribe? Or house people who have no home?

You shouldn't have to make these choices. But in India, sometimes you do.