Indian Church commits itself to helping nomads

(February 16, 2010) India’s Catholic Church will use all channels at its disposal to help nomads, whose lives have become “miserable,” Catholic officials said at the end of a two-day seminar in Bhopal on Sunday. Archbishop Leo Cornelio of Bhopal, president of Pastor Care of Nomads in India, PACNI, said growing industrialization and urbanization have become an increasing threat to nomads, who move with their families in search of pasture for their animals. “The Church holds every single life valuable and dear to God and hence it will have the responsibility to help the nomads progress in life,” Archbishop Cornelio told UCA, at the end of the seminar in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh state. He said that education would be the Church’s top priority to liberate nomads from the clutches of an undignified life. Some 120 Church volunteers, including 16 nomads, at the seminar said the Church should educate wandering tribes in the country, whose population is not officially estimated. Independent estimates say nomads constitute 0.7 percent of India’s some 1 billion people, mostly in northern Indian states.