Appeal For Relief For The Poorest Of The Poor At The Time Of Pandemic
- Target:
- The President of India
- Region:
- India
- Website:
- onceinabluemoon2021.in
The following statistics (if statistical data are to be believed!) of India speaks for itself about the condition of the country. It has worsened during the catastrophic situation due to COVID-19 outbreak:
1. Population: 135.26 crores and still counting (May 2020)
2. Hunger Index: rank 102 out of 117 qualifying countries (2019)
3. Unemployment rate: 8.74% of the population (2020)
4. GDP growth rate: 1.9% post-lockdown (2020), following global recession
5. Happiness Index: rank 140 out of 156 countries (2019)
6. Corruption Index: rank 80 out of 180 countries (2020)
7. Informal sector workers: 93% of the total workforce (2019)
8. Availability of Hospital beds: 0.055 per 1,000 population (2020)
9. Malnourished population: 195.9 million malnourished people (2015-17); one-third of the world's malnourished children belong to India.
10. Carbon Footprints: emission of 2,299 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide (2018)
11. Poverty index: rank 49. Two-thirds of people in India live in poverty: 68.8% of the Indian population lives on less than $2 a day. Over 30% even have less than $1.25 per day. More than 36 crore Indians still cannot afford three square meals a day. India had 73 million people living in extreme poverty which makes up 5.5% of its total population. India's top 1% owns half of national wealth.
12. External Debt is nearly about Rupees 86 trillion (as on 02/05/2020)! (However, Indian Government has written off the astronomical figure of money, 68,607 crores owed by the super-rich people at the time of international crisis.)
13. Defense Budget: The union government allocated Rs 3.37 lakh crore as the defense budget for the financial year 2020-21.
India is a victim of Lawrence Summers’ (chief economist of the World Bank 1991-93) memo "Let Them Eat Pollution". Majority of Indians have lost their herd immunity for consuming spurious products of so-called Green Revolution (empirical data not available).
Keeping in mind the above scenario, this appeal is made to the Government of India for relieving the poorest of the poor at the time of COVID-19 crisis.
Sources: Different Apparently Trustworthy Websites
To
The Honourable President,
Republic of India,
Rashtrapati Bhavan,
New Delhi- 110004
Sub: Appeal for provisional relief for the hungry population during the Lockdown in the context of COVID-19: Project सह नौ भुनक्तु (we eat together)
Respected Sir,
With due respect to the tremendous efforts made by all the frontline workers, especially scavengers, drivers, nurses, physicians, food-suppliers and others, we are writing to you with a specific purpose to help those wretched of the earth, who were working on the basis of daily wages, living under the below the poverty level or otherwise unemployed Indians in unorganized or informal sectors in the context of lockdown due to the pandemic. We wish to name our appeal as Project सह नौ भुनक्तु (we eat together)
In this context, as we are deeply concerned with the conditions of this hungry population, we are requesting you to kindly consider following humble suggestions: As you know that the esteemed Members of the Parliament have sacrificed 30% of their salary and different entrepreneurs have made donations to save the country as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility, we are requesting you to kindly utilize that money as monthly allowances for those people. That could be credited directly to their respective bank accounts, which are already connected through their Aadhaar cards.
1. The Public Distribution System (PDS) could be taken into consideration for the BPL card holders without any exceptional and unsolicited interruptions.
2. Keeping in mind the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA), the temporarily unemployed human resources could be utilized for manufacturing sanitizers, soaps, gloves and masks after giving them the training required thereof. The raw materials for making these essential commodities could be distributed through the Public Distribution System. It must be appreciated that your government has kindly allotted a whopping sum of rupees 33,300 crores for MGNREGA in the ongoing financial year on an emergency basis. However, we, the commoners, do not understand the logico-legal ethos of writing off astronomical figure of money owed by the super-rich people at the time international crisis.
The need of the hour is that the nation-state ensures the food security of the disadvantaged people and pave the way for physical distancing rather than social distancing and become an example worldwide.
Positively speaking, due to this lockdown, we have seen that the earth is combating the consequences of anthropogenic global heating— sarvaṁsahā prakṛti is reverting back to its own essential self. We are strongly hoping for a sustainable retreat from the anti-green developmental paradigm as preached by the international creditors and looking forward to a decentralized self-sufficient local resource-based agro-centric green economy in the future instead of ostentatious display of non-essential commodities and their fetish conspicuous consumption.
COPY TO:
1. The Honourable Prime Minister, Government of India
2. The Honourable Finance Minister, Government of India
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The Appeal For Relief For The Poorest Of The Poor At The Time Of Pandemic petition to The President of India was written by Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay and is in the category National Affairs at GoPetition.