Page 220 - SocialHarmony

224 Social Harmony

the member of Parliament, member of Legislative Assembly,
the leader of the panchayat, and such other 50 respectable
individuals, and ask them that what should be done when a
sewing machine has to be given to a poor widowed woman,
and what she should do to get that machine. You write what all
things should be done, and anyone who writes it properly will
get ten marks upon ten. I can say in all confidence that, despite
the status of the respondent, whether he be a journalist, a news
editor who tends to split every strand of hair that can be found
in news, an honourable member of Parliament, a Minister, a
panchayat leader or an administrative officer, all of them will
be given zero out of ten. None of them will know how a
widowed woman can draw pension or get a sewing machine,
how she can get the application, how she can fill it, where she
has to submit it and where she has to sign. They don’t know
what all things she needs to do to get that pension or sewing
machine. When such great educated people know nothing about
this, how do you expect of a poor woman to know all this how
to get government aid?

From this situation, the only inference that can be drawn is
the fact that a government official should visit her house, and
not the other way round where people have to search for the
government. It will be like the raining of nectar. Sometimes, it
so happens that the government scheme occurs within the
confines of the government, while the poor man remains within
his confine, and there are middlemen, with satchels at their
sides; these are the people who approach the poor people. Often
when the dead body is yet to reach the cremation ground, and
the widowed woman is yet to remove her bangles, that the
middleman reaches her house, and commands her to sign here
and he promises to get her 500 rupees, with a promise to take
100 rupees as the commission. He will tell that if she needs a
house under the Sarda Avas Yojna for which she is eligible to
get 40,000 rupees, he promises to help her provided he gets a
commission of 5,000 rupees. These worldly-wise middlemen
have tricked people during the sixty years of independence,
they have exploited them in every way. Therefore, there should