It is not an exceedingly pleasurable experience that any resident, or a foreign visitor, is forced to witness in the streets of this nation, which is, if not crowded, is populated by young children who swarm around their darling mother in the dilapidated footwalks. In any walk through an Indian street, barring the streets of the wealthy, the proud Indian is subjected to see, young girls and boys who walk with sacks hung on their shoulders filled with used plastic containers, tin utensils and Coke cans.
India has one of the highest numbers of poor children in the world. Most of them live off by doing menial jobs such as rag-picking, begging and similar activities. Children under the age of six are not saleable or employable. Being young and tender they are not suitable for handicrafts and agriculture. Nor can they be sent to school, for you cannot feed your stomach with grade cards and degrees. This being a pestilent economic and social problem, it is high time that we take action to improve the juvenile scenario in India. And I would like to propose a solution, which was first mooted by Jonathan Swift in 1729 in his A Modest Proposal. If the following proposals are taken into consideration and executed well, excessive populace of poor children in the nation will not only cease to be a problem, but they will turn into valuable assets to country. Further, if implemented, my proposal can also add to the quality of the living of the rest of the society, including the wealthy children. It is upon a random calculation that I assert that a child who is a year old will make two dishes for a family of four. And if seasoned with a little black pepper, salt and chilly flakes, could be a very agreeable meal.
Assuming that Rupees 30 worth of daily consumption is required to maintain the health of an average child; a child before being sent to the butcher at the age of 6 would require a total expenditure of
30 x 365 x 6 = 65,700 Rupees
A six year old child, on an average would weigh around 22 kg. However as you can see Rupees 65,700 is exorbitant for 22 kg of meat. This would mean that we should find a more economic way to deal with the problem. As Swift puts it, the children should be butchered at age of one since an infant does not require any more food than the mother’s milk for the first few years. So the Government of India’s calculation that consumption worth of around Rupees 30 per day per person is irrelevant here, since the burden is on the mother.
The advantages of sending the excess young population to the butcher are manifold. Firstly, this would make available in abundance, fresh and nutritious meat for the people, that the rich and middle class would find very affordable, and more importantly, delicious. Most of the meat requirements of the well-off population in India is currently met by chicken, raised in congested poultry farms and fed with food that is high in artificial hormones, which render the meat not only unhealthy, but dangerous in the long run. Considering this, bringing the meat of young children would definitely reduce the pressure on chicken. In the wake of Beef ban and the consequent lynching of a Muslim man in Dadri, the country has almost gone into a state of religious intolerance. Taking into the account, this prevailing scenario I strongly believe that replacing beef with those of economically unproductive children, would bring the much needed social equilibrium in the society. Since nowhere in India is a child regarded as ‘God’. ‘Goddess’, ‘mother’ or ‘father’, the sacrifice would be perfect alternative to killing of cows for food. And by this the innocent cows could be assured of better treatment and safety from the butcher’s knife.
Another major problem found in the demography of the country is an unhealthy sex ratio in the states to the North. Today there are only 930 females to 1000 males. Poor families often resort to a sex selective abortion, aborting the female foetuses which they suspect would grow only as a burden in 20 years, if given a chance to live. How could a family which can barely find roti to feed their growling stomachs find 2 lakh rupees and a Maruti car as dowry to marry their daughter? This is the major reason for sex selective abortion which has deteriorated the sex ratio in India. Even if given a chance to live, the girl children are often fed poorly and treated only as a burden by the family. If my proposals are implemented, families needn’t abort female children anymore as they can be converted into an income and an asset if given the chance to survive for a year. There would be a paradigm shift in the attitude towards young girls in our country, especially from their parents who could now focus on making the child as plump and fat as possible, in a twelvemonth. I strongly believe that this would reduce the hatred against the XX chromosomes and the young girls could avail of nutritious food and better treatment, just like the sons. Girls would no longer have to be forced seek employment in brothels and bring dishonour to the family. Domestic violence can also be checked as men would now become fond of their wives, taking very good care of them during pregnancy, for the couple has the potential to earn an income from the heavenly institution of marriage.
On the dismal side of the spectrum are the beggar children, which is a rampant phenomenon in both cities and villages alike. There are a plethora of child rackets in our country which kidnap children, trade their organs, poke out their eyes, chop of the arms and legs, only to be left to beg in the slums of big cities. This nuisance could be dealt by sending all the beggar children to the butcher to end their physical and mental turmoil, alongside saving the nation from the burden of these economically useless citizens and enriching the plate.
Blessed with an abundance of children under the age of six, we have the potential to turn them into valuable foreign exchange by exporting the meat to the needy countries. This would further enhance our foreign exchange reserves to import petroleum, Audis, BMWs, cologne and branded lifestyle.
Now you might suspect the personal interest of the writer in this regard. To be honest, I do not wish to appropriate any profits from this scheme, for myself being childless. It is in consideration of the poor state of India that I put forward my proposal directed to a social cause at improving the quality of the living of the rich and the middle class by removing the burden of poor children from the street and bringing them to the dinner table of the aforementioned.
By the way, I was being sarcastic, in case you wanted to jail me for promoting cannibalism.
– Illustration: Sofia S and Ashraya Maria
Article 19 