OO@®Q The Guardian of September 26th carried a despatch from Alistair Cooke who, as part of a round the world tour, visited Caleutta last month, He was obviously very shocked by what he saw - wo reproduce some of the most relevant extracts of what he wrotor
*,eesemit of all the abstract nouns, poverty is the one that in Asia assumes a wholly now scale and immediacy, For your own sanity you very soon learn to accept, and to pass by, tho nightly bundles of rags, shored up against dark treetrunks in tho country and the buildings of the cities, which occasionally stir end stretch and turn into prostrate human beings.
“Thore is no reliable count of the people who sleep in the streets of Calcutta (in fact, the official estimate of the population lurches between 2% and 4 millions), tut in a city where over half the population is migrant, where 64% of the men and 52% of the wammware illiterate, and where there are not quite two hospital beds for every thousand inhabitants (against the still inedequate 10 beds in Britain and the United State), the strest is all the usual things, but also a haven, shop and refugee shelter, A quarter of the people live in slum huts, and almost 80% of these house five families with a common privy and a water tap (where they are lucky enough to have oither), and living room for each human of about 7 feat by 5. ;
“very night the ambulances clatter around the rough streets, and when a body with thighs like bamboo poles refuses to be kicked into protest, it is turned over and found to be dead and hauled off to the mortuary. Two to throes hundred a night of such corpses is the grudging figura,
",esseeby the light of day we wont to the railway station, Not 20 yards from the platforms crowls of ragged families were camped on the stone flags. With ono hand a young mother stirred a rusty pot of rice over o few smoking twigs and with the other she hold an infant, no bigger than an embryo, to a broast as shrivelled as an old hot water bottle. Heside her was a rotted bag of what, for want of a meaner word, had better be called possessions.
"5 other naked children, weighing anything from 10 to 50 pounds, fiddled and yawned around her, Outside and opposite the station ore the bustees, the dark and ferocious slums, Dy any Yestern standard they are almost impossible to describe. They are hovels about 6 feet by &, roofed over with dingyplywood, sometimes draped with sacking....
"Many of them have a few commodities stacked on a tilted boards cakes, cigarettes, betel-nuts leaves, “Coca-Cola” bottles. You peer as close as your conscience and your stomach will let you, and inside the black interior there are two families, maybe a dozen writhing humans. WHere thoy eat, sleep, talk, play, give suck, excrete, brood, and copulate.
VeceeesOnd half of all the households of the city are so-called "nessing families" of stray males. ind yet this is a city whose per capita income is 70% higher than the nationalaverago. It now stands at the princely figure of £45 a year, and may go as high as £53 in 15 years,"