Yesterday I was watching a television programme titled "Daughters of the suicide country" on NDTV wherein they showed the surviving wives and daughters of poor farmers from the drought stricken regions of Marathwada and Vidharba in Maharashtra being forced into prostitution. The poor farmers had committed suicide after fallen into a debt trap owing to crop failure and unable to repay the loans taken from usurious money lenders.

It was a heart rending story. The women had to bring up their children and the daughters had to support their family by selling their bodies. The pimps and middlemen have exploited the situation in the poverty stricken regions by trafficking the women to urban centres like Mumbai and cash-rich cities like Ahmedabad.

Most of the women(the faces were blurred to protect their identity) in this profession who were interviewed had only one thing in common, to send money back home, not let their children into sex trade, educate their sons/daughters so that they can lead a better life. They also had a desire to lead a normal life once their family is settled. Some were lured with the promise of better jobs in cities and ended up in brothels and others were sold by their family to middlemen for money.

Even though India has done well in sunrise sectors like IT, pharmaceuticals etc..there is a large segment of population struggling to come out of poverty. As Amitabh said in an interview when asked "What would he have done if he was the Prime Minister of India for a day?"

I am not sure whether it was an honest answer or whether he was playing to the gallery however his quick answer was "to eliminate poverty coz it saddens him to see so many people living in poverty".

The other day I was reading an article in "Times Of India" which compared percentage of tax payers in India with countries like Australia, France, United States and England.

France had the highest percentage of tax payers @ 54%. Contrast that with India which has only a mere 3% of people as tax payers in comparison to its population. No wonder the tax rates are so high in India as the government wants to squeeze the maximum out of the salaried class who form the bulk of the 3%. This is in addition to the covert taxes which the govt levies in the form of VAT(Value Added Tax) and other excise duties on petrol, diesel and the household items like groceries etc. It's not difficult to see that the government takes away a huge chunk of one's salary.

My point is after paying so much of taxes the people end up with bad roads, power outages, no social security etc. Why can't the government spend the money atleast on helping out the poor farmers by providing them support and finance in times of need.

Tuesday morning, we had to make do with a TATA Sumo as our office shuttle was badly damaged after yesterday's mishap. I got to learn some new things today. We had a 2 hour session on UNIX programming and Message Queue(MQ) series(product of IBM).

Apart from the training session, it was pretty much a dull day. Tomorrow we have our tele-con scheduled @ 10 a.m.