Mbilenews24x7 Bureau
India in 2023 is as it was in 2006 or may be worse.
Yet the Central government asks all the 140 cr people of India to celebrate the events ‘the 5th largest economy’ and ‘the G-20 Moment’!
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Sure, we have this crouching tiger economy. But life expectancy here is less than it is in Bolivia, Honduras or Tajikistan.
Per capita GDP ranks below that of Nicaragua, Indonesia or Guatemala. And the inequality we so strongly pursue breeds its own mindset.
For the top five per cent of the population, the benchmarks are Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia. For the bottom 40 per cent, the benchmarks can be found in sub-Saharan Africa.
The crass inequality on display in our schools runs across all spheres of India’s brave new world. India now ranks 8th in the world in the number of billionaires. But clocks in at 127th in human development.
Our 27 billionaires, Forbes assures us, are the second richest in the planet. Their combined net worth is bettered only by those of the U.S. As for Japan, Australia, Europe, et al, our dads are richer than their dads.
Sure, we have this crouching tiger economy. But life expectancy here is less than it is in Bolivia, Honduras or Tajikistan. Things are booming. But per capita GDP, as the UNDP’s Human Development Report shows us, ranks below that of Nicaragua, Indonesia or Guatemala.
Our growth rate is the envy of many. But the rate of decline of child deaths actually slowed down in the 1990s. “India alone,” points out the HDR, “accounts for 2.5 million child deaths” each year.
We’re moving fast towards new landmarks. We could soon have 100,000 dollar millionaires. And India may have emerged the 15th biggest donor to the World Food Programme last year. But since the time we began that journey we also added more newly hungry people than the rest of the world put together. It even saw a period when hunger rose in India and fell in Ethiopia. That’s what UN FAO data show us. We also exported grain to Europe at prices we denied our own hungry people. And we subsidised that grain which went to feed cattle on that continent.
Farm incomes have collapsed. And poor rural families, as Dr. Utsa Patnaik has pointed out, are consuming 100 kg of grain less annually than they did just a few years ago. Meanwhile, National Sample Survey data tell us that the number of farm households in debt has nearly doubled in the years of the ‘reforms.’ The government of India admits to a figure of more than 112,000 farm suicides in the past decade. Mostly driven by debt. In some districts, such suicides have almost doubled every year in the past five.
There’s pride in the press over the rise of ‘medical tourism.’ But more than a fifth of our own people no longer seek health care of any kind. They just can’t afford it.
We’re proud of being the ‘fourth largest’ cyber nation in the world. Never mind that the numbers this claim is based on are suspect. Never mind, too, that we’d tend to be the ‘fourth largest’ anything in the world. Or that if we did have 50 million users, it would still not be something to email home about.
The message, though, is clear: India Shining is back with bells on. What’s crucial is that there is no attempt to address this inequality. We strive only to enhance it. In the framework we now have, almost each and every policy deepens the divide.
Here, we proceed with righteous cause. The inequality we so strongly pursue breeds its own mindset. It’s the one we now entrench in our elite schools. The students of some of which are ferried back and forth in air-conditioned buses. Shangri La and sub-Saharan Africa (or worse) in one nation. Until the bills start coming in.
With excerpts from Shangri-la by Sainath
