Why the poor remain poor?

One of two in India is living in poverty. International agencies, donor nations, government, the UN and the NGOs, have been extending, from time to time, free medicines, clothes and financial helps to the poor and the sick. There have been consistent efforts to educate them, to reduce population explosion, empower women and to provide employment opportunities. These have not produced the desired results and millions remain illiterate, poor, sick and emaciated.    

The external, material helps do alleviate hunger and help to remove disease symptoms.   But it does not alter the reality. As soon as the helps stop coming, people return to their previous states. Why the efforts in such a massive scale do not improve  their lives? Has it got anything to do with their thoughts, beliefs and attitudes? Can external help alter the life of anybody? Well, if external help could change individuals and societies it would have already done so.  

A close analysis would reveal their beliefs and thought patterns remain unchanged. And there has been no effort to alter them.  They believe in fate, karma and no-solution-inevitability. They think too they are doomed without external help and it is the duty of the society or the government to uplift them. Their thoughts are about poverty, wants and sickness. They fear what they will eat, where they will sleep and what they will put on tomorrow.

Do their thoughts, fears and emotions create the reality? There seems to be a strong co-relation between the two. A hunger project study conducted by Wisner Erhard in 1977 has shown that scarcity orientation and victim mentality are at the root of the world hunger.

Hot humid climate has induced indolence and a helpless attitude.  Famine, poverty, diseases and plagues led him to believe in Karma or fate. People believe they are tools in the hands of Fate.

Man has today the power to alter it. The core belief system determines one’s mental attitude. And efforts to come up emanate from the latter. Man is no more at the mercy of nature or its forces. Medical science has advanced so much that diseases are under control. Industrial revolution has ensured adequate production of goods and services. Agriculture has developed so much that we are able to produce more food than is required. Man has become the master of his life.  Anyone can come shape his destiny the way one wants to and come up to any level. This belief is the primary requisite and starting point.