WE HAVE LOST OUR WAY: PART 1

India, with the estimated total population of 1.30 billion people, the second-largest population in the world, is projected to overtake top-ranking China in the next 4 decades. This largest democracy in the world is a living paradox of modern development.

On the one hand, the country is gifting the world a highly educated workforce, exporting engineers, programmers and doctors to Europe, the US and elsewhere. With its English medium education system India has produced a sizable number of English speaking workforce leading to a burgeoning BPO and Call center industry across the country.

A booming economy with more than 7% growth rate that is leaving behind neighbouring China in year on year growth. Space missions have brought India among top 10 nations of the world. With nuclear technology for development deal it has gained recognition as an accepted member of the atomic club.

But the real India still behind in many crucial aspects as far as touching the lives of its vast population mass is concerned. Half of India still lives below the poverty line, and a third—more than the entire population of the United States—lives on less than $1 a day.

According to a report published in year 2013, India’s economic disparity has widened over the last two decades, making it the worst performer on this count of all emerging economies. The top 10% of wage earners now make 12 times more than the bottom 10%, up from a ratio of six in the 1990s.

image courtesy: miro may on flickr

image courtesy: miro may on flickr

image courtesy: ananmoy chatterjee on flickr

image courtesy: jagdeesh murmu on flickr

• The Forbes list of billionaires featured 55 Indians in 2013. Strikingly when the HDI is adjusted for inequality and every second malnourished child in the world is also an Indian.

• There are in total 7 states of India which are lagging behind in the race of economic growth namely Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. As per the recently released Human Development Report (HDR) 2013, India ranked 136th 134th the index loses its value by as much as 29.3%

• Individual income inequality measured by the Gini index has also consistently risen, at 39.9 per cent in 2011. The Indian growth-inequality paradox is easy to pin down—the wealth that India creates is not evenly redistributed.

• As per available data, a little more than 50 per cent of India’s population continues to be engaged in agriculture (which barely accounts for 14 per cent of GDP), while less than 30 per cent of the population works in the service sector, which accounts for more than 67 per cent of GDP.

• Inequality in access to education is so glaring, that in HDR 2013, India’s education index loses more than 40 per cent of its value once adjusted for inequality.

• Spending and consumption by the richest 5% zoomed up by over 60% between 2000 and 2012 in rural areas while the poorest 5% saw an increase of just 30%. In urban areas, the richest segments spending increased by 63% while the poorest saw an increase of 33%. The effect of inflation was removed while making these comparisons.

• The cause remains to be that the most significant link between growth and poverty reduction is employment generation. Unfortunately, for India, the last decade is widely recognized as a decade of jobless growth, thereby further exacerbating the problem.

The sky-scraping apartment complexes designed for the nouveaux riches of India’s urban centers are actually dotted by the plastic-sheet shanty towns of the migrant workers who built them—a force of 40 million scattered across the country, working for 50 cents a day.

India’s 123,000 millionaires now control $440 billion between them—almost half the country’s GDP—while the penniless populations of city slums swell each year. One needn’t sit in a car at a traffic light for more than 10 seconds before India’s desperate, bearing plastic toys, magazines and begging infants, come knocking at the windowpanes.

On the other side of all the hype and glaring figures we find more than 80% of rural houses do not have access to electricity.

Whatever development India has achieved in past 6 decade’s, though confined to a minuscule minority, has come by with a heavy toll on ecology and environment. This is another story to be told in the next blog.

What has lead to such disparities? What the policy and implementation flaws that has caused it? What measures can be taken to minimise the future damage? These are some of questions Tobe debated and answered for a common good. For the good of humanity and human existence.

These facts and figures about India I think is not confined only to India. There are several developing and underdeveloped countries probably facing similar situation.

So, I would invite you to participate in the debate, offer solutions to make this planet a better place for more number of its inhabitants.