Outside Delhi, a new gated community boasts the kind of luxury normally associated with Los Angeles – a swimming pool, tennis courts, a golf course and private schools. Asia is changing fast. Its cities are now thriving hubs for transport, business and tourism. IT is booming. The shopping malls springing up across the region show that the middle class is doing very nicely, thank you.
But the story is very different in isolated rural areas and the ever-expanding urban slums. Across Asia, the world’s most populous continent, a third of people live below the poverty line.
People like K Rajamuthu, 49, who has spent 25 years breaking rocks in a quarry in south India. The most he ever earns in a day is £2.30, and he is bound to the quarry by a debt to his employer he can never hope to repay. His family, including six children, all work here.
For people like K Rajamuthu, economic growth is a world away. They are held back by a lack of education, housing and decent jobs, and impoverished by changes over which they have no control.
The growing divide
They are living proof that it takes more than economic growth to wipe out poverty. In the world’s fastest growing economies in south and southeast Asia, inequality is the biggest challenge our partners face. They say that growth is favouring the rich at the expense of the poor.
Throughout Asia, millions of small farmers are suffering the effects of economic policies designed to benefit big business.
In the Philippines, thousands of homes are being bulldozed to make way for multinational mining operations, shopping malls, factories, businesses and car parks. 'In this community all we want is a small piece of land each. Just three metres by three metres is enough,’ says Bong Balimbingan, an environmentalist from Mindanao who works with our partner the Socio-Pastoral Institute. ‘If the government can give the multinationals so much land, why can’t we have land?’ Two of our partners are demanding that the government build new houses for those made homeless.
Thousands of homes are being bulldozed to make way for multinational mining operations, shopping malls, factories, businesses and car parks
Many of our partners in Asia are helping farmers to save their own seed and cultivate their crops without dangerous chemicals and expensive fertilisers.
Fight for rights
But injustice is not just about economics. In India, dalits – formerly known as untouchables – are subject to every form of discrimination. In some villages they are even forbidden from using the same tea glasses in the local café as other customers. Our partners are leading members of the national campaign for dalit rights.
In central Asia, people are struggling just to survive. Governments have been plunged into poverty following the collapse of the Soviet Union and are now struggling to provide basic services. Our partners are helping women and the elderly, two groups who have been hardest hit.
In Afghanistan this autumn, a harsh drought forced parents to sell their daughters, some as young as 10, into marriage to earn enough to feed the rest of the family. But despite the ongoing conflict and danger to our partners, they continue to respond with aid.
Rebuilding
In December 2004, south Asia was devastated by the worst disaster the world has ever seen. The Indian Ocean tsunami swept 250,000 people to their deaths in a matter of hours, destroying lives, homes, villages, businesses and jobs. Two years later, dozens of our partners have helped hundreds of thousands of people to rebuild their lives.
‘I never dreamed I would live somewhere like this,’ says Pratty, 52, a dalit woman in Tamil Nadu, south India. ‘My new house means that I do not have to live in fear any more.
‘I am very grateful to everyone who gave money in the UK to help make this possible.’