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The best tribute to Mother Teresa is to wipe out poverty

For the first time in the history of Independent India after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the entire nation has been united in unqualified grief with the passing away of 87-year-old Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better know around the world as Mother Teresa. Her death on September 5 in Calcutta, where she founded her uniquely selfless service organisation, the Missionaries of Charity, has numbed and orphaned Indian society to the extent that no non-political personality ever has.

And against all expectations, the response of all agencies of the central and state governments to this tragedy which has befallen the nation has been adequate and appropriate. A national week of mourning was declared and both the President and the prime minister flew down to Calcutta to publicly articulate the nation's loss and to pay fulsome tribute to this frail angel of mercy who for over four pitiful decades bestowed love and compassion upon the sick and dying and unwanted children in the city's appalling slums.

The week of national mourning and the state funeral which was held with all pomp and ceremony on September 13 are fully deserved tributes. For, in the past 47 years since she heeded the call and her inner voice and set up the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, over 3,000 nuns of the Order serve in 132 countries where they tend her "special constituency" of the homeless, destitute, hungry, and dying through the 169 schools, 1,369 clinics and 755 homes set up by the mission. Unlike the vast majority of sentimental do-gooders, Mother Teresa's compassion was backed by a strong will, institutional building abilities, and succession planning. Prior to her death she appointed a proven colleague, Sister Nirmala as the Superior-General of the Missionaries of Charity to continue the work to which Mother Teresa dedicated her life.

As is well-known, Mother Teresa had her critics. There were some who said that she glorified poverty and did little to rectify the causes of the widespread poverty in which the Missionaries of Charity wallowed. Yet the plain truth is that everybody can't be an economist and/or a political or social scientist. To such criticism Mother had a simple answer. "You take care of their tomorrow's, I'll take care of their (the destitutes') todays." And that's what she did tending the destitutes left to die on the streets of Calcutta while political parties chock-a-block with social engineers used the poor as their passports to temporal power.

A curious feature of the rich, warm, and wholly deserved tributes which have been paid to Mother Teresa by politicians of all political parties is that none of them accepts any responsibility for the wretched poverty of the citizens of Calcutta and other cities in India which aroused the constructive compassion of Mother Teresa and provoked her to establish the Order of the Missionaries of Charity. Yet, the plain truth is that the desperate poverty in which almost half the nation's population is steeped, is entirely man made and flows from the poor development policies adopted by the nation during the past five decades.

Therefore, a far grater tribute to Mother Teresa than the pomp and ceremony which characterised her state funeral, would be a national resolve to mount a determined frontal attack on the poverty and wretchedness to the amelioration of which she devoted her entire life. But it is important to bear in mind that the pressure to give priority to pro-people policy prescriptions capable of eradicating the abysmal poverty which is the lot of almost half of the nation's population must flow from India's lay citizens who loved and revered Mother much more than politicians ever did. Mother Teresa's death provides a defining moment in the nation's history to launch a determined attack on poverty and destitution and to lessen the burden of the Order which has demonstrated that the citizen's first duty is to show care and compassion for the poor.

Though at first sight national poverty eradication seems a tall order, India's developmental problems are not intractable. Already policy prescriptions which could sharply reduce the incidence of poverty have been written. For instance, it is now universally acknowledged that elementary education is the basic building block of economic development. Yet against the global norm of 5 per cent, this nation has never spent more than 3.5 per cent of its GNP on education. And even this meager amount is weighted against primary education.

Moreover, it is also universally acknowledged that government management of business enterprises is a surefire prescription for economic disaster. Therefore, it is imperative that a large number of central and state government public sector enterprises which "dominate the commanding heights of the economy" are privatised to generate resources for investment in the primary education and health sectors. These are two prescriptions which could right away begin the process of mounting a frontal attack on the crushing poverty of India to mitigate which Mother Teresa laboured gloriously, but in vain, all her life.

The message of Mother Teresa's life is that love, compassion and care for the poor and downtrodden are humanity's primary duty. And that if this duty is pursued with intelligent determination all things are possible. During her life, this once-religious nation's citizenry failed to absorb this message. Her death gives Indian society another chance to do so.