My friend Bansi

“I sleep on the street,” Bansi told me. The two of us were sitting on concrete blocks at the edge of a market in Calcutta. “I can’t get a real job. I try to earn what money I can from tips I get when I carry the packages people buy here in the market. They call people like me ‘coolies’. There wasn’t a school in the village where I grew up. I never wanted to be a thumb-stamper (referring to people who could not sign their names) but that’s what I am now.”

“Is there a school in your village now?” I asked.

“There is a school now and my little brothers go there. But the teacher is quite ignorant. He can read and write but he only trained for 20 days to be a teacher. On many days he doesn’t even come to the school. That same thing is true in lots of our villages.”

We often hear of how the great progress Indians have made in technology has enriched their lives. That is certainly true but the result of that progress is taking far too long to reach those who live in poverty. Only 48% of women over the age of 15 can read and write simple sentences about their daily lives.

Throughout India Christian teachers have started schools for children of the Dalits, the lowest social class in India 's age-old caste system. “My own parents were Hindu,” said one of the teachers, “but they sent me to the missionary school because it was the only school in our village. Many teachers, like myself, are Christians now. We have set up orphanages for children abandoned by parents too poor to raise them. Baby girls, especially, are seen as a burden because of the Hindu custom, followed by many Christians as well, of having to pay the huge matrimonial dowry demanded by the groom’s family.”

As we traveled to the Calcutta airport at 4:30 in the morning we saw mile after mile of people sleeping on the sidewalks and in doorways. I wondered if one of them was my coolie friend, Bansi.