Sai Baba promised Rs. 100,000 to orphan parents

Sathya Sai Baba quotation from Sanathana Sarathi

Sathya Sai Baba said: “I came across a tragic incident in a newspaper. It was about an uneducated and helpless mother and her three children. They were in such a pathetic state of poverty that the mother had to starve herself in order to feed her children. As their situation worsened, she took to the extreme step of committing suicide after poisoning her children. It’s a shame on the Bharatiyas! Can we Bharatiyas be so stone-hearted and cruel as to allow such a painful event to take place?”
This was from his discourse (11/8/2001), whereupon he made a major promise (see image with quotation). It seems he is completely ignorant of how things really are on his own doorstep – but then he is always surrounded by a large protective entourage and a court of yea-sayers who can’t tell him anything because they all want HIM to tell them good things!

He claims nothing he does is hidden. Where then are the accounts? How many mothers of fatherless children has he donated this large sum to? One can be sure it would be blazoned around by him in a discourse (he wouldn’t want to HIDE anything!). There are enough orphans from AIDS alone to bankrupt not only the entire Sathya Sai Baba mini-imperium, but probably the government as well. But maybe Sai baba considered that none of these countless thousands are “deserving”?? If they have no father OR mother, then they don’t qualify, it seems.

Considering the number of orphans in India, anyone can tell that Sai Baba’s boast must be hypocrisy? In 2002, the World Bank estimated that India is facing an accelerating threat from HIV which greatly impacts the social fabric, especially though the unprecedented number of orphans left with little or no adult protection.

from a Harvard study on AIDS and orphans in India

It is quite extraordinary that is evidently in blissful ignorance of the constantly prevailing conditions of massive poverty, malnutrition and hunger in India. Right now the situation with rising prices, not only of food, makes things far worse than ever too”

Sathya Sai does not know the basic facts about his own country. Yet he entertains and blesses all his nation’s corrupt and nest-feathering politicians as soon as they pop up at his ashrams. According to UN statistics, there are 20 million child labourers in sweatshops and mines who get no education. Indian government extrapolations of this 1981 data place the current number of child labourers at between seventeen and twenty million (Human Rights Watch 1996, 122). This extrapolation seems highly unlikely as: “The Official National Sample Survey of 1983 [of India] reports 17.4 million child labourers, while a study . . . sponsored by the Labour Ministry, concluded that the child-labour force was 44 million” (Weiner 1991, 20-21). UNICEF “cites figures ranging from seventy-five to ninety million child laborers under the age of fourteen” (Human Rights Watch 1996, 122).