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Thursday 02nd of September 2010 09:22:55 PM
The 1st lecture of 6th Mehr Chand Mahajan Memorial Lectures was held in the Dept. of Laws
Date of Submission: 2006-03-30 08:49:12
CHANDIGARH: 29th March 2006: The 1st lecture of 6th Mehr Chand Mahajan Memorial Lectures was held in the Dept. of Laws, Panjab University Campus here today.  Professor Mool Chand Sharma, Secretary, University Grants Commission delivered the lecture on “Poverty As Violation Of Human Rights”.  Prof. K.N. Pathak, Vice-Chancellor gave a profile of Sh. Mehr Chand Mahajan who was a Judge of the Federal Court and of the Supreme Court of India and also the Chief Justice of India for approximately one year.  It was pointed out that Justice Mehr Chand Mahajan was also a member of he Senate and Syndicate of the Panjab University from 1940 to 1950.  He had remained a part time lecturer in the Law College of this very University and was also a Dean of the Faculty of Law.  Shri Mahajan was a person with multifaceted personality.  The Vice-Chancellor also mentioned that Dept. of Laws was initially established as a Law School at Lahore in 1870.  At that time it was affiliated to the Calcutta University, Calcutta.  After the establishment of Panjab University at Lahore, the University took over this Law School in 1891 and it was changed to Law College in 1909.  Subsequently, it became Dept. of Laws in 1966.

Vice-Chancellor then introduced the speaker Professor Mool Chand Sharma who was earlier Vice-Chancellor of National Law University, Bhopal and has also been senior advisor to the National Human Rights Commission, National Consultant to the UGC on Human Rights Education, National Consultant to Ford Foundation, an expert legal advisor to the Law Commission of India, was also Procter-Director International Collaboration, was also incharge of Campus Law Centre at Delhi University, has been a senior full bright scholar, has been a recipient of Machswney award, recipient of UN-Afro Pacific Fellowship, has been a Visiting Scholar and taught at the University of Shicago, Kentucky, Vermont and George Town in USA and University of Learden in Howland. He was also invited by the University of Colombia and University of Harward for delivering lectures.

Professor Mool Chand Sharma in his today’s lecture dealt on the concept of poverty.  “Poverty is the most efficient and pitiless murdered and executioner and remains a main cause of human sufferings”. In his opinion poverty is a process. It is something to be felt and experienced and not merely to be said.  One should not think in terms of having pity on poor. He narrated and linked his personal life of childhood when he had himself undergone the trauma of poverty.  He further stated that the upper strata of the society including upper middle class, middle class cannot appreciate and feel the pinch of poverty.  For the most of us who come from middle or upper middle class, poverty and hunger resides ‘Out there’.  To even imagine the horror and pain of hunger is next to impossible.  In this context he cited a book entitled ‘Starving In The Shadow of Plenty’ by Loretta Schwartz – Nobel’s. He said that intensely dehumanizing and debilitating hunger is experienced by one out of every five people on the planet. “For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, walking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a growing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment’s respite even while you know and fear the sequel.  Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and because you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.

Hungry and poor people most often are illiterate, unhealthy and without political power. They give birth to more children that do other people, and their children dies at much higher rate.  Their life expectancy is considerably shorter than that of individuals in the developed world.

Poverty is a string of misfortunes, poor living conditions, unhealthy housing, homelessness, unemployment, ill-health, inadequate education, marginalization and an inability to enter into the life of society and assume responsibilities. The distinguishing feature is that these deprivations – hunger, over crowding, disease and illiteracy – are cumulative, each of them exacerbating the others to form a horizontal vicious circle of abject poverty. Poverty is often passed on from generation to generation making it increasingly difficult to escape. Poverty can be characterized by the peculiar indifference in the heads of the masses towards its seriously dangerous consequences.

Things like India Shining are superfluous and hence a myth.  Today he confined his lecture only to the conceptual part of poverty and he will continue with the same theme tomorrow in his 2nd and 3rd lecture relating it to Human Rights.