Meet Devraj Shetty, look who crippled him

Fifth Column

Tavleen Singh

DEVRAJ Shetty is the most disadvantaged Indian I know. He is poor, illiterate and severely handicapped from a polio attack, at the age of seven, that also lost him his home. His parents were too poor to support a child with no legs and flippers for arms so they put him out on the street and left him to fend for himself. He spent years crawling around the streets of Bangalore before someone helped him get to Madras where a charitable institute donated him a wheelchair.

Then, someone suggested he go to Mumbai because if he was going to spend his life begging in the streets then he was better off in a city whose streets were supposedly paved with gold. So, he came to Mumbai and spent the first few days terrified, hungry and lost at Bombay Central station before a kind shopkeeper offered him a place to sleep in the front of his shop.

The shopkeeper now brings him every morning to Marine Drive where he spends the day sitting in his wheelchair - come rain or sun - and by 9 p.m., when the shopkeeper comes to take him home, he has generally managed to make enough to pay for his food.

It was on Marine Drive that I met him late last year. We got talking and when he told me his story I asked if there was anything I could do to help. He said there was. He hated begging and would like to live a life of some dignity and believed he could do this if he could be allotted a public telephone booth. There was a scheme, he said, for handicapped people so it should not be too difficult for me to get the allotment.

I did not think it would be either and instantly, about seven months ago, called MTNL and went to see the General Manager. He was gracious and helpful and said he could supply the telephone in a week but could not provide a public place for it to be installed. He could only give it to Devraj in his home if he had a home. But, if I talked to the municipal commissioner I should be able to get a public place allotted quite easily. Not only did I contact the municipality but I also wrote about Devraj Shetty in a column early this year.

By fortuitous coincidence, Ajay Singh in Pramod Mahajan's office read the piece and called me to offer help. I suggested he speak to the municipal commissioner to expedite things. This he duly did and permission was granted but then it came to the turn of Mumbai's traffic police to intervene. For months they dangled us along with the promise that they were checking for a suitable site but since it was taking so long I made a few private inquiries and discovered that nobody was being given telephone booths in the city. That the whole scheme was a sham but a sham of convoluted proportions in which small armies of officials pushed files around and pretended to be looking for suitable sites.

All the while Devraj kept hoping and hoping and hoping until last week when I was finally told, after the umpteenth search, that his request for a phone booth had been rejected. An arrogant, senior police officer I spoke to said, "We cannot be expected to allow booths to come up if they are a danger to traffic". How a public telephone booth on a payment can be a danger to traffic is beyond me but such are the ways of the Indian state.

I tell you the story of Devraj Shetty to draw attention to the futility of the anti-poverty programmes on which the Indian government spends more than Rs 35,000 crore a year. These schemes have been criticised by the Planning Commission, by prime ministers, by journalists and economists. It has even been pointed out that if every Indian living below the poverty line was simply sent a cheque of Rs 8,000 every year he would benefit more than he does from the anti-poverty schemes but despite this why does nothing change?

Why does taxpayers' money continue to be poured into schemes so ludicrous that a central government scheme to pay old age pensions spends crores of rupees to provide Rs 100 a month to old people in remote villages? Why are goats and cows provided as part of some other foolish scheme to villagers in areas where there is no grazing land? For one reason and one reason alone: the money goes into the pockets of the long chain of officials who are supposed to be administering the scheme. It also pays their salaries and provides them with houses and cars and telephones. So, why should anything change?

My failed efforts to help Devraj Shetty also taught me something else. If with access to a hundred strings to pull could not manage to get the machinery of the state to move there is absolutely no chance that the poor can benefit at all from the schemes that are supposedly in place to lift them above the poverty line.

This is why, despite our illusions of being an economic superpower, India remains one of the most squalid countries in the world. We would do much better to spend Rs 35,000 crore a year on providing clean drinking water, sanitation and housing in the slums of our cities than on meaningless anti-poverty schemes that have served mainly to delude the poor into believing there is hope when there is non.

Telling Devraj that he would not be getting his telephone booth was one of the hardest things I have done. (Respond to tavleensingh@expressindia.com)

Source: Indian Express
Dated :21st July, 2002