Article on India's failure since independence
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There are poorer men in India - unlike some, Mr Singh has enough to eat - but all are trapped in a world without prospects.
Last week the Asian Development Bank released a report that confirmed that as Asian economies like India's have boomed in recent years, the gap between rich and poor has widened sharply.
Although inequalities are to be expected in developing economies, the bank said that the failure to invest adequately in health and education had left hundreds of millions of Asia's poor with dangerously little stake in their societies.
Skip down to the next generation of Mr Singh's family and it becomes clear how little advancement India's rural poor have made, even as their country basks in growing international recognition as a nascent global economic power.
Phul Singh, 40, lives a few steps across a muddy pathway from his father, in a house that would be better described as a hovel - an open-sided lean-to where he subsists with his wife and six children.
Designated as "BPL" - or below the poverty line - the Singh family receives monthly handouts of 5kg of rice, 20kg of corn and, if they had a stove, a few litres of kerosene. Like his father, Phul Singh is illiterate and gets by as a day-labourer earning 40 rupees (50 pence) a day during the harvest season.