posted
I dunno. But none of it - the mother selling the boy for $20 included - is surprising for India.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Yeah, I wonder what that does to growth plates and stuff, that's a lot of impact. It reminds me oddly of Bean . . .
Posts: 471 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
$20 is a lot for most people in India. India's poorer than Sri Lanka by a long shot, and in Sri Lanka, I pay my maid $3 for her to cook and clean for 8 hours - and that's considered high pay for a maid.
In India, the going wage is probably closer to $0.50 or $0.75. $20 is probably a month's wages for someone who isn't that poor, relatively speaking. For someone who's really poor, that can represent up to a year's wages.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
*laughs* Exactly! And remember the roaming cows leaving presents of cow crap on every road. And remember the pollution. And remember that there's a federal election coming up (presidency), so there'll be violence and more body counts on the evening news. . .
There are pros and cons to every situation. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by quidscribis: $20 is a lot for most people in India. India's poorer than Sri Lanka by a long shot, and in Sri Lanka, I pay my maid $3 for her to cook and clean for 8 hours - and that's considered high pay for a maid.
In India, the going wage is probably closer to $0.50 or $0.75. $20 is probably a month's wages for someone who isn't that poor, relatively speaking. For someone who's really poor, that can represent up to a year's wages.
I presume I'm safe in assuming that post was completely "FYI" and in no way meant to ameliorate the facts of the subject at hand. For instance, you're NOT saying "So really, the mother actually got a pretty good price." Right? Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Oh good heavens! No, I am NOT in any way justifying the actions of the people involved. It was strictly to put things into context - help those of us who haven't experienced such a life understand why someone might chose to do such a thing. But no, I do not condone such actions.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Quid, I put the winky on at the end as an edit, but before you replied. You might have missed it. My post was mostly in jest. I wasn't seriously implying you condoned the action, just pointing out one possible interpretation of the juxtaposition of your post in the thread.
posted
KarlEd, I never thought you would seriously think me capable of that thought anyway, so no worries. I was just so horrified at the thought that what I wrote could be interpreted that way, so I had to clarify. Ya know.
So yeah, it's all good. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I'm pretty sure it's forbidden by international human rights conventions to which India claims to accede. However, I don't think anything is ever done about it.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
It's just horrific that it's casual enough to be openly and happily mentioned in a news story.
We should shut down trade with them until it this form of slavery is both illegal and eliminated from India.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
It may be more complex than that. If you have more children than you can feed, if your poverty is so severe that your children's lives are in danger, selling them can seem like a way to improve the outlook for everyone involved.
I think the solution has more to do with improving the economy than with punishing the poor. And shutting down trade with India would only make the situation worse.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
From what I've heard, it's not so different from indentured apprenticeships that used to be common in Britain and America. Not that I'm excusing either practice. But you have to believe that that mother thought she was doing what was best for her child, especially in a country that values sons highly.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
But sell your child? Sell. Not give them over to someone who can care for them. Sell.
Sell.
Sell a human being.
Buy.
Buy a human being.
Own.
Own another human being.
Rationalize it how you want. From poverty to slavery is not a step up. It wasn't right when chieftains sold people from their own tribes in Africa to the slavers, it isn't right now.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
I think the notion of owning anything alive is pretty freaking weird, actually, but then I've been a vegetarian since I was six. Figured out I didn't have to eat animals to live. If I were starving in the wilderness or whatnot, I'm not saying I wouldn't eat whatever I could, but I don't need to. Heehee and I'm from Boulder and I am therefore officially my cat's guardian, not owner.
Posts: 471 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
What about the fees that are involved in adoption? Certainly the child's birth parents don't get those fees, but the new parents do buy rights to the adoption.
Posts: 1261 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote:Rationalize it how you want. From poverty to slavery is not a step up. It wasn't right when chieftains sold people from their own tribes in Africa to the slavers, it isn't right now.
I don't think anyone is saying that it's right. But not everyone has the benefit of our perspective, you know.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:I don't think anyone is saying that it's right. But not everyone has the benefit of our perspective, you know.
Yup.
Consider that the literacy rate in India is around 50% and that India is considered to be the most corrupt country in the world with the most corrupt government and police force.
Why would they know that it's illegal or why would they believe that law would be enforced when so many others aren't?
Arranged marriages are still the norm in India, much more so in the villages, and people living in the villages tend to be poorer. Sometimes, the marriages take place when the two people are children. While it's becoming a bit more common for the two adult members to have some say in who they're married to, it's still often enough that they just do whatever the parents tell them, even though that could mean they're married off to someone who's abusive, a stranger, an alcoholic, someone who's decades older, whatever.
With the dowry system in India, it's the bride's parents who give money to the groom's. Marriages are often so expensive that a family will spend a year's wages on the wedding, sometimes more. If a dowry is considered insufficient by the groom's family, the bride can be hurt, usually burned, and sometimes killed. In 1993, there were a reported 5,377 dowry deaths. And all this while dowries are officially illegal (1961).
But then, suttees (burning a woman alive along with the cremation of her husband's remains) happened long after that was made illegal (1829 to 1841, depending on the area), too. The last known case was in 1988.
Fahim and I were talking just the other day about children being sent to Buddhist monasteries when they're young - 6 or 8 or whatever. Back when he was a child, it was common enough, and usually, it was because the family was too poor to be able to feed all the children. It was simpler to send the children off to the monastery to be raised to be good little Buddhist monks. Benefits: they were fed and educated, often unlike the children who had to stay at home.
Remember after the tsunami? There was the incident with baby 81 and the 15 or 16 families who fought over that baby, all claiming the baby was theirs. There was the grandfather who sold his granddaughter to sex slavers. There were children who were forced into joining the Tamil Tigers. There were children who were kidnapped and taken out of the country to go into the sex trade in other countries. Thailand is known in the region as having more child prostitutes - both boys and girls - than anywhere else in the world.
Selling a child because you can't afford to feed and clothe him? Not surprising at all.
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posted
Yeah, I've read horrible things about AIDS in India, too. In fact, India has all kinds of problems, many of which would be solved (or at least lessened) a lot more quickly and easily were it not for the rampant corruption.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
I'll backup quids on this (though I hardly think she needs it). When I was in Thailand, back in 2001, you could go out in the country and buy a farmer's daugter for about $200 (US). That's more money than they will see in their lifetime.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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We stopped trade with South Africa over apartheid even over protests that the economic hardships would hurt the poor and disenfranchised there.
Is this situation that different?
India has huge economic benefits from trade with the US. The threat of cutting that off could spark sweeping change. I know that some say "But that will hurt the poor."
The South Africa sanctions showed that the impact on the embargoed country's poor is minimal. It's a sad fact that some people are on the bottom end of the scale already and they can't get much poorer. Cutting off the diamond and heavy metals trade with South Africa had little effect on them. Who it hurt were those in power and it hurt them bad. It also hurt those who had the franchise and could vote in the country.
With India, it could do the same.
But we can't sit idly by and say, "Well, that's just their culture, it's the way things are there because of the corruption." Because while we sit comfortably, some other human being is being bought and sold as nothing more than a hammer or a cow.
What a lousy value people put on a human life in some parts of the world. Or, excuse me, what a lousy value some people put on another human life in other parts of the world.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Yes. In South Africa the majority was being oppressed by the minority. In India, people are just dead poor. Not even remotely the same problem.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Arranged marriage isn't inherently wrong. I don't think I'd want it for me, but I know an adult Indian woman who's a graduate student nearby. She decided to choose an arranged marriage because she felt it would be logical for the long term. In her opinion, love/lust was clearly less important than overall compatibility.
She's met her fiance once, had numerous phone conversations, and the wedding is planned for this winter.
Posts: 1261 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
During the era of the SouthAfrican Embargo, Sopwith, Reagan and Bush maintained US-SouthAfrica trade as "constructive engagement" in keeping with their proAmericanApartheid "StatesRights" Republican party election platform; with the Administrations going as far as preventing US cities and states from independently supporting the boycott.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
dabbler, I'm with you. I wouldn't want it for me, but it has more to do with the fact that my parents don't know what's in my best interests, nor would they care. When parents do, then I can entirely see how it could work out.
A lot of people I know from church had arranged marriages and they're compatible and they love each other. It's just like getting married any other way - they have the same kinds of problems.
It's the arranged marriages when the parents do it out of social obligations or don't find an appropriate match or when the groom's family are so caught up in the financial obligations from the bride that they hurt or kill the bride if there isn't enough money or she doesn't cook right or treat the family with enough respect or she's of the wrong caste.
Sopwith, nowhere did I say we should sit idly by. I'm merely providing context so that others can understand the situation better.
I don't know that embargos will do anything but hurt the poor. I don't honestly know what would help, except education, but that's a huge problem in India. Heck, it's a problem in Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka is miles ahead of India in that regard.
While Sri Lanka has a literacy rate of over 90% (compared to India's 50%), people here still don't understand their rights or obligations. Laws here are open to interpretation - comparitively speaking, US law is straightforward and clear cut. Here, get three lawyers together and you'll have at least ten opinions on what the law is for any situation.
Mob mentality is always close at hand and demonstrations frequently turn violent, sometimes by the demonstrators, and sometimes because the police are bored, need a little entertainment, or just want the demonstration over so they can go home. Police brutality is accepted as normal and violence is a way of life - elections produce body counts on the daily news and assassinations, outside of election time, surprise no one.
How do you educate people so they no longer accept this as a way of life? How do you do this when the government is corrupt to the point of not caring about its people?
How do you instill necessary changes in the government without hurting the poorest?
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posted
I’d like to point out that there’s a lot of misinformation on this thread.
First, India is not the most corrupt country in the world. I bought the International Country Risk Guide this summer as part of my research on developing economies. This guide is considered the most authoritative publication on a number of risk factors that investors or government/international agencies might want to know before moving into a country. It covers things such as government stability, socioeconomic conditions, internal and external conflict, and corruption levels. While India is not the best country in the world, corruption-wise, it’s very far from the worst. It got a score of 2.208 out of 6 (Finland) in 2004. There are sixty-nine countries more corrupt than India. The UK and Switzerland, in comparison, got 4.5. Sri Lanka got 3 exactly, and Italy only got 2.458. India scores a LOT better than Sri Lanka in a number of risk factors, actually, such as military in the government, democratic accountability, or bureaucratic quality.
Second, India is not “poorer than Sri Lanka by a long shot.” India’s purchasing power parity (amount of stuff you can actually buy, after controlling for exchange rate) was $3,100 per capita. Sri Lanka’s was $4000. So, yes, India is poorer than Sri Lanka, but the difference isn’t so large as to create a 400% - 600% disparity in wages. Not once you adjust for what that wage can really buy you (if goods are cheaper, then a lower wage is natural, right?). I got this data from the CIA World Factbook. (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/)
Third, India’s literacy rate isn’t 50%. It’s 59.5% for the overall population, 70.2% for males, and 48.3% for females.
Fourth, I don’t see how arranged marriages can be considered a negative thing – it’s different from the Western world’s current practice, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. That being said, love marriages (as they’re called in Southern Asia) are becoming more and more common, especially in the cities. The legal age for marriage in India is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. Yes, there are still children marriages happening, but they aren’t the norm, and they’re becoming less common as communities become less impoverished. The northern states are the ones where the tradition, dating back over 1000 years to when Muslim invaders routinely carried off the unwed girls, is most firmly entrenched. These are some of the poorest states in India, where very little has changed in the past 300 years. Without education, how can these people learn differently? I’m certainly not condoning it, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad Quid is making it out to be (nor does Abhi, my Indian boyfriend). Pointing fingers certainly doesn’t help the situation.
Fifth, I’m not sure where Quid got the statistic on the number of dowry deaths, but I don’t think it’s accurate. Abhi says it’s flat out wrong. Also, one outlier suttee in 1988 doesn’t make it a trend – there have been only 40 deaths in the past 60 years since India gained independence, according to wikipedia. Quite a change from the time of the British rule, when suttee became something of a “fad” as a sort of ultra-Hindu protest against the British.
Sixth, slavery is indeed illegal in India. And the police and news agencies, according to my Indian boyfriend, do try to stop it when they see it. There are grassroots organizations struggling to stop slavery, and they’re definitely making progress. But it is a big problem still. However, when a mother is faced with either the death of her children or selling them to someone in the community, what would be the best choice? Let the children die, or let them become bonded workers with at least a chance at a free life? If you read the article carefully, you’ll notice that Budhia had only a few lumps of rice a day when he lived with his mother.
On a purely economic theory note, selling your child, rather than giving him away, probably guarantees him a better chance of survival, as well as any other children you might have. The mom gains money that will allow her to buy food for her other children, which isn’t a minor concern. And (the following sounds a bit cold-blooded, but bear with me) she knows that the person buying her son values him enough to pay $20 for him -which is a fair amount in India, at least in the villages. Someone who’s willing to pay $20 for a kid who’s less than four is probably going to be looking for a long-term gain from the investment. He’s not going to overwork the child, because a four-year-old can’t work enough to quickly return that $20 in profits. In fact, from the article, it sounds like the person was letting Budhia run pretty free: Mr. Das scolded the boy and had him run for 5 hours, without the man who bought Budhia interfering or wondering where the boy had gotten to.
I, like dabbler, am not promoting the selling of children into slavery – but I think I’d sell my children before letting them starve to death – there’s always a chance out of slavery (as long as it wasn’t something akin to torture), but there’s no way to get free from death.
India has many, many, many social problems to deal with. I don’t want anyone to think I’m forgetting that. The best way we can help them change, however, is not to cut off trade, as Sopwith is suggesting. Almost all of these problems are the result of lack of education and poverty – if that mom wasn’t near starvation, she wouldn’t need to sell off her children. Education levels will be able to increase only when children don’t have to work to keep soul and body together- that is, when their parents are making enough money on their own to allow children the relative freedom of schooling. Most schools in India are incredibly cheap, even after controlling for PPP, but families in villages can’t afford to have children not working.
Developing trade ties with India will help it to improve: after India opened its market in the early 90’s, PPP per capita went through the roof. Things like foreign direct investment, which bring not only money, but managerial and industrial skills to India will help. Microloan organizations, which give individuals and families a chance to start their own small businesses help. There’s a reason why investors are crazy over India (and China) currently: the country can achieve so much, if we can supply some capital and knowledge.
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