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Today's Paper | May 02, 2024

Published 26 Apr, 2021 07:41am

From The Past Pages Of Dawn: 1946: Seventy-five years ago: India’s appalling poverty

There remains no extant copy of today’s paper and the excerpt below is taken from the previous day’s edition.

CONDITIONS in India — the sight of hundreds of people sleeping on pavements which he saw on his journey from New Zealand to Britain for the Dominion Premiers’ Conference — shocked the New Zealand Finance Minister, Mr. Walter Nash, who is deputising for his Prime Minister, writes Reuter’s correspondent from London.

At a Press conference in London on Tuesday [April 23], he said: “We did not fight only a war to prevent certain things, but a war to achieve a decent living standard and economic conditions for everybody. …Until you have seen it, you cannot conceive what it means when hundreds of people have to lie out in the streets to sleep, because they have nowhere else to go… . How can we hope for peace when one-half of the world is living at a standard which is just half what the rest have got? In New Zealand, the average expectancy of life is 68 years. In [India] it is 27 years. How can you expect peace when that sort of thing goes on in the world?”

Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2021

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