India land of abject poverty

[idune]

Malnutrition getting worse in India
By Damian Grammaticas
BBC News, Madhya Pradesh

About 60% children in Madhya Pradesh state are malnourished

Lying on a bed is a tiny malnourished child. Her limbs wasted, her stomach bloated, her hair thinning and falling out. Her name is Roshni.

She stares, wide-eyed, blankly at the ceiling. Roshni is six months old. She should weigh 4.5kg. But when she is placed on a set of scales they settle at just 2.9kg.

Roshni is suffering from severe acute malnutrition, defined by the World Health Organisation as weighing less than 60% of the ideal median weight for her height.

There are 40 beds in this centre. On every one is a similar child. All are acutely malnourished. Wailing, painful, plaintive cries fill the air. This is the Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre in the town of Shivpuri.

You might think we are somewhere in Africa. But this is the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh - modern India, a land of booming growth.

"The situation in our village is very bad," says Roshni's mother, Kapuri.

"Sometimes we get work, sometimes we don't. Together with our children we are dying from hunger. What can we poor people do? Nothing."

Typical symptoms

The lunchtime meal of boiled eggs, milk and porridge is handed out.

Another mother is cradling her daughter, trying to feed her. The girl's name is Kajal. She is two-and-a-half years old and so weak she can hardly eat.

Her mother tries to spoon some milk into her mouth. It dribbles down her chin. Kajal barely even opens her eyes.

Kajal's skin is pale. Her breath comes sharp, shallow and fast. She too is suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Her weight is 6.7kg.


Children wait for a meal outside an Anganwadi centre in Chitori Khurda

The nutrition centre here was set up by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef).

Doctor Vandana Agarwal, Unicef's nutrition specialist for Madhya Pradesh state, points to Kajal's swollen little feet.

"There is oedema on both the feet, scaly skin on her legs, even her respiration rate is high," Dr Agarwal says.

"The child is in a lethargic condition, her hair is thin, sparse, lustreless, easily-pluckable. These are the typical symptoms of protein energy malnutrition."

India has some of the highest rates of child malnutrition and mortality in under-fives in the world and Madhya Pradesh state has the highest levels in India.

There are around 10 million children in the state. A decade ago 55% were malnourished. Two years ago the government's own National Family Health Survey put the figure for Madhya Pradesh at around 60%.

So why is it going up?

Compounded

"It's basically inadequate access to food, poor feeding practices, poor childcare practices," says Dr Agarwal.

In Madhya Pradesh the situation is compounded by two significant factors. For four years in a row the rains have failed, so food crops have failed too. And now global food prices have risen, stretching many families beyond breaking point.

"In the past year food prices have increased significantly, but people's incomes haven't improved," says Dr Agarwal. "Like wheat, earlier they used to buy it at eight rupees a kilogram, now it's 12 rupees."


India has some of the highest rates of child malnutrition in the world

"Because of the increase in food prices a mother cannot buy an adequate quantity of milk, fruits and vegetables. So their staple diet has become wheat chapattis," she explains.

"A child cannot survive on wheat chapattis alone. About 80% of mothers and children are anaemic because they can't get good quality food."

To see why things are so bad, we headed out into the villages around Shivpuri. The drought zone stretches across this part of central India. The land is parched and barren. The air hot and heavy.

The village of Chitori Khurda is a ramshackle collection of 80 stone and mud huts on a rocky plain. The villagers here come from the bottom rung of India's social scale.

Among the lowest of the low in India's caste system are the Scheduled Tribes, just above them come the Other Backward Castes.

Together they make up 95% of the population of Chitori Khurda.

Worst hit

Even here, in this desolate spot, caste matters consign the lowest to the harshest existence.

Chitori Khurda village has no water supply. There are four wells in the fields around, but all belong to higher caste owners who often refuse to let the villagers use them.

So these are the people worst hit by rising food prices. They have little land of their own. What they do have is the least fertile, sometimes far away. Without water they cannot irrigate, so they cannot feed themselves.

And out here there is not much in the way of work either.


Doctors say inadequate access to food is one of the causes of malnutrition

The men of Chitori Khurda get odd jobs labouring for higher castes or just play cards all day. The women sit outside their houses sorting green leaves they have gathered into small bundles. The leaves are sold to make local cigarettes. But it does not earn much.

So in almost every home people are going hungry. Unicef says 79% of the children in this village are malnourished.

Siya showed me her house, crouching to get in through the low door, we entered a stifling-hot, single room where the family of six live.

Siya picked up the can where she keeps her flour. It should hold enough for a week's supply. There were just a few cupfuls left.

Her two youngest children, seven-month-old Anjali and two-year-old Aseel, are both severely acutely malnourished. The family can afford to eat only twice a day. The children chewed slowly on a few chapattis flavoured with a tiny bit of onion and ground chillies. It is all they have to eat.

Getting worse

Siya's husband works as a bonded labourer. He is still trying to pay off a loan he took out 15 years ago.

In theory the government provides 30kg of subsidised flour a month to every poor family. But corruption and inefficiency mean the system often does not work.

Even with the full allocation a family like Siya's would have to buy an additional 90kg of flour a month at a cost of more than 1,000 rupees.


Kajal had to be taken to hospital for emergency blood transfusion

Siya says several days a month the family has to go to bed hungry.

"The children cry and create a commotion," she tells me. "I go door-to-door until somebody gives me a little."

Every lunchtime the children of Chitori Khurda gather at the Anganwadi centre in the village. It is where nutrition and health services are provided at village level.

On the day we visited, each child was given two puris (small bread puffs fried in oil) along with some sweet porridge. The allocation is 80g of food a day per child.

The children ate it, then sat hoping for more, but there was none.

Madhya Pradesh is trying hard to tackle the problem of malnutrition, but it is getting worse, not better.

Corruption and inefficiency hamper the system. Some Anganwadi workers skim off food to sell. Others refuse to give food to lower-caste children. Many simply do not turn up as they are not paid much for the job.

Add to that high food prices and the poorest are sliding into hunger.

Back in Shivpuri, two-and-a-half-year-old Kajal had to be transferred to hospital. Her condition was so serious, she was so anaemic and her haemoglobin levels so low that she had to have an emergency blood transfusion.

Lying in her hospital bed Kajal was reviving, slowly. Her mother, anxious, looked on, a pressing question weighing on her mind.

Kajal should survive, but how will she feed her child?

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Malnutrition getting worse in India

 

[idune]

Its heart breaking to see any child going through such hardship. But indians and their own govt chest thumping on their wealth and spending billions of dollars for armament ignoring their own people.

What can one say about such heartless, brutal acts?

 

[BLACK_COBRA]

Bangladesh cyclone: Now food shortage threatens millions

Lack of shelter and clean water could kill many more, aid agency warns. By Andrew Buncombe
Sunday, 25 November 2007
Bangladesh cyclone: Now food shortage threatens millions - Asia, World - The Independent

For the people of Bangladesh, there seems little respite from poverty and misery, some of it the result of man and much of it the work of nature.
With aid teams still trying to get emergency supplies to those affected by Cyclone Sidr – a massive storm that struck 10 days ago, killing 3,200 – officials have said up to three million people risk being short of food for the next six months. The storm, the biggest for more than a decade, destroyed between 50 and 90 per cent of the region's rice crop.
"Thousands of families are facing the real possibility of a second wave of deaths that can result from lack of clean water, food, shelter and medical supplies," said Kelly Stevenson, the Bangladesh director of Save the Children.
Every year, thousands are killed in Bangladesh in floods or storms. Not surprisingly, those most at risk are the poor, whose dwellings are the least substantial and often located in the most vulnerable areas.
Yet sometimes the most basic measures can help. Officials say that the death toll could have been much higher if the authorities had not acted to warn people of the impending storm. One of the most basic warning systems involved dispatching volunteers equipped with megaphones to cycle around local communities urging people to take shelter.
Indeed, up to 40,000 volunteers with the Red Crescent Society were involved in warning residents to move into the 1,800 cyclone shelters and 440 flood shelters set up. As a result, when Sidr struck the coastline on 15 November, two million people were already taking shelter.
"It's as low-tech as you get ... basically a project centred around preparing people for disasters by using community-based volunteers who do everything from street theatre to school education and lectures to women's groups," said Dhupinder Powar, of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva.
The Bangladeshi government has promised that it will be able to feed more than two million people made homeless and destitute by the storm with 33lb of rice a month each, starting on 1 December, a programme expected to last at least four months.
At the same time, while more than $450m (£220m) in aid has been pledged from the international community, emergency workers are still struggling to get immediate aid to the worst-affected areas. This weekend, the US is preparing to help deliver food and medical supplies. USS Kearsarge has arrived close to the Bangladeshi coast and a second ship, the USS Essex, is expecting to arrive in the coming days.

 

[BLACK_COBRA]

Bangladesh: Life on the edge

For centuries, the farmers of Bangladesh's sandy chars have eked out an existence at the mercy of South Asia's great rivers. But as temperatures rise, time is running out for them
By Peter Popham
Saturday, 15 September 2007
Life on the watery margins of Bangladesh is the poor man's Las Vegas. You can start with nothing and, if the heavens smile on you, within a couple of years you can be the master of what looks like a prosperous little farm, in one of the most wildly fertile corners of the planet. Then weeks later you can lose the whole lot to the floods.
The risks and the rewards of life on the delta's fissiparous edges have been of this order for centuries. But with global warming the odds are steadily worsening. More than 600,000 people live on these margins, and their lives are getting more precarious every year. With changing climate, the flooding grows ever more extreme and unpredictable, the rivers even wilder. At the same time a general rise in the ocean's level threatens the viability of the entire watery way of life: fresh water goes brackish, threatening drinking water and water for the crops and livestock. The line between survival and destruction grows ever finer.
Every year the waters of South Asia's great rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra (known locally as the Padma and the Jamuna), come thundering down into Bangladesh from India and Tibet, bearing millions of tons of silt. At any point in their progress, whether slow, stately and corpse-encrusted at Benares or roaring like an express train through Assam, these vast rivers inspire awe. They feed and fertilise a subcontinent, and by the time they reach the last stage of their journey to the Bay of Bengal they are rampant and rampaging and the land is no match for them. They toy with it, tear it this way and that, carve new courses every year, create islands in the rivers one year, destroy them the next or 10 years later or even 20. A river that is a single mighty course one year, within a couple more can turn into a watery braid, dotted with islands.
And Bangladesh's poorest farmers grow fat or thin, prosperous or desperate, according to the rivers' whims. If you are a poor Bengali peasant and you have nothing at all and a family to feed, the chars are the place to head: sandy riverine islands or peninsulas created by the rivers' caprice. For the peasants without land, these sandy knobs are land without people, fresh-minted, claimed by no landlord or government, free of gates and fences, there for the taking.
What grows on sand? Not much, but sand can be shovelled into boats and sold to the construction industry in Dhaka. Or the sand can be mixed with the fertilising silt from the Himalayas: within months catkin grass begins to bed into it, providing thatch for the roofs of new huts, fences (fashioned from the stems) fodder for cattle, shelter for the huts of the betel nut farmers. When it is dry you can burn it for fuel. When the char floods you pile the grass into high mounds where the cattle can take refuge from the water.
Then the catgrass decomposes and draws in more silt and the wondrous fertility of the delta works its magic, and on the land that was water emerge banana palms, bamboo, jackfruit, guava, mango. In the West we hear nothing from Bangladesh but dire news of the country's poverty and misery. Then you pay the place a visit and once out of the toxic hell of Dhaka it's the garden of Eden, a riot of fecundity. On land that never existed before, and that cost nothing, and on which no title deeds existed nor ever will. It's the Big Rock Candy Mountain, South Asia style.
But then there is the price to pay. Because it's easy come and easy go. You live by the water and die by it too. There is absolutely no knowing how long a char can keep its head above the water. So there are crops, quick and easy trees, flimsy huts. But no pukka houses, no roads, no schools, no infrastructure at all. It's life on the edge. You might be there, reaping the catgrass, plucking the mangos for years. Or next week your life and the lives of your family could be in dire jeopardy – as the roaring river changes its mind. Then scrambling into the flimsy boats to find a new-made char elsewhere and start all over again.
The people of the chars are the most vulnerable of all in a country that is one of the most at risk as the climate heats up. The Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change indicates that a one metre rise in sea level "could displace nearly 15 million people" from their homes in Bangladesh – more than twice as many as in the whole of India; 30,000 square kilometres of land could disappear permanently. The char-dweller's poker game is steadily changing into Russian roulette

 

[idune]

Poverty still grips millions in India

By Kumar Malhotra
BBC News

Not everyone in India faces a bright future

Every now and then, India gets a stark reminder that the feel good factor created by high growth rates in recent years eludes millions of its people.

One came earlier this month when Unicef said that India had some of the worst rates of child survival in the world. In 2006, 2.5 million children under five died in India and China, of whom 2.1 million were in India.

When you talk to officials and experts in India, they say poverty in is in decline.

"In the decades of the 1980s, there was a very rapid reduction in poverty," according to Dr Pronab Sen, chief statistician for the Indian government.

"The decade of the nineties and the beginning of the two thousands - the last 15 years - has been a little slower, but there's still been a perceptible decline."


"People tend to forget that in all this talk of India Shining, that our development project is still very incomplete"

Economics professor Jayati Ghosh

The most recent government figure is that about 26% of India's population are officially classed as poor - that is people getting less than the minimum number of calories regarded as necessary for survival .

Data from other sources such as the World Bank support the notion that absolute poverty is in decline, although there always seems to be some variation between different sets of figures.

But some experts like Jayati Ghosh, an economics professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, believe that the poor in India are far more numerous that these figures suggest.

"We are not including people who do not have access to running water, sanitation, schooling, health and education. They may well not have any of these things, yet still not be considered poor because they earn enough to have the minimum calorie requirement."

Impoverished farmers

This is the key part of being poor in today's India - a lack of access to basic services and infrastructure. It all points to the need for massive intervention by the state.


Poverty alleviation programmes are blunted by corruption

This does happen in India - and has done for many years through anti-poverty programmes and schemes to develop both rural and urban areas.

Quite how much difference they can make is often debated. In the budget this year, the government announced a plan to help out impoverished farmers by writing off huge debts they have no hope of repaying.

It was certainly headline grabbing, but critics argue that its impact is limited because it doesn't amount to fresh money being spent in rural areas - just banks writing off bad loans.

Generating more growth in the rural economy has to be a priority, if only because some 70% of the 1.1bn population lives there.

It has lagged behind the manufacturing and especially the service sector. The government is currently rolling out a huge rural employment scheme, guaranteeing some work for the poorest households.

But if the rural poor do manage to earn money, they don't want to rely on the state to provide the services they need. This is illustrated by education, where the poor take their children out of barely functioning public schools so they can educate them privately.

Blunted by corruption

"This is the tragedy of Indian policy: the government is sitting there paying its teachers and they don't turn up to school," says Surjit Bhalla, an investment manager and economic analyst in Delhi.

The same neglect can be seen in the health sector. The World Bank says that less than 10% of public spending on health goes to the poorest 20% of the population.

When we talk about rural roads, irrigation, rural telecommunications, we really need to carry those through much, much faster than we are doing now

Pronab Sen, chief statistician

Poverty alleviation programmes can also be blunted by corruption, often colluded at by self-interested bureaucrats and unscrupulous politicians at various levels.

The result is that India now shows stark inequalities - often along caste, religious and gender lines. And in some ways, this has become a vicious circle.

"What is happening is that as the country prospers, the willingness of educated and skilled people to stay in the villages is going down," concedes Pronab Sen.

Does the current approach need to be rethought? Some would argue in favour of a greater focus on the small-scale sector in towns and villages across India to create more jobs.

This should be combined with a massive increase in spending on health and education as well as physical infrastructure like electrification, water supplies, irrigation, roads and so on.

The debate over poverty and inequality is a crucial one for the future of India's social and political stability.

Economic progress is creating huge opportunities for boom areas and more privileged classes. But those left behind look unlikely to catch up without sustained and carefully targeted intervention.


BBC NEWS | South Asia | Poverty still grips millions in India

 

[BLACK_COBRA]

YES..RATHER THAN BEGGING FROM INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WE (INDIA) HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO FEED OUR PEOPLE....



OUR ECONOMY IS BOOMING DUE TO INDUSTRIAL GROWTH..

THE INDIAN STATE YOU MENTIONED GETTING MORE AND MORE JOBS DUE TO INDUSTRIES ... (YOU CAN TRY YOUR GOOGLE SSERCH SKILLS) INDIANS HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO OVERCOME THIS PROBLEM...

BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE PROUD TO BE BEGGING FOR FORIGEN AID..???

SHOULD I REPAT MY ARTICLES

INERNATIONAL BEGGERS AND BANGLADESH PLEGED FOR INTERNATIONAL AID ETC. ETC.. LOL

 

[IndianSuperpower]

Little insight into indian poverty


7,000 slums in Dharavi sold for Rs 700 cr - Mumbai - City - NEWS - The Times of India

 

[idune]

Poverty in Madhya Pradesh: What statistics don't tell

There is a big discrepancy between the government figures for people living below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh and the actual reality on the ground. The government cannot bury its head in the sand if it wants to eradicate poverty.

CJ: Sachin Kumar Jain Wed, Sep 12, 2007 00:00:00 IST

The matter is not too old for the sands of time to have covered it. On this date, while addressing the people from the public forum of the Indian Marketing Development Federation, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan said two important things. He said that 38 per cent of the people in Madhya Pradesh are leading their lives below the poverty line officially. Actually this number is as much as 60 per cent of the population. He also said that while a lot is being said about development and even if big companies like Reliance Industries set up industries here and earn profit, it does not actually benefit the poor of the state. The clear meaning of the chief minister’s statements is that actually we are hiding the poor status of a large chunk of the society and despite a number of developmental activities, their benefits have not reached the poor.

December 27, 2006: The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of the Indian Government released its 505th report based on the 61st survey round conducted between July 2004 and June 2005. This report analyses the monthly expenditure per person in the country. This shows that the 47 per cent of the rural populace in MP spends only Rs 12 per day. As against this, the 43 percent urban populace spends Rs 19 per day. The democratic government in the country has decided that the minimum of Rs 365 per month (Rs 12 per day) is necessary to live in the country in present circumstances.

Sikroda village is based in the Pahargarh block of Morena district. The BPL Survey found not a single bonded labourer in this village. But when a research team reached the village in March 2004, many persons admitted that they were working as bonded labourers. Government officials denied this information. Later, in July 2004, researchers read in newspapers that 20 bonded labourers were liberated from the village.

For the 2.2 million families who are living below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh, the BPL is the line that passes below the affluent and above the poor. Though in realty, the politics of poverty is presently far more important than any other issue, somehow our state does not want to look at the poverty existing here. The state avoids it as they avoid in Sikroda. Actually, just as a special vision is necessary to perceive beauty, similarly an objective and strong political will is necessary to look at and admit poverty.

The simple point is that poor people exist and poverty is clearly manifested, but the central and the state government does not want to identify or accept them. It is proven now that the government is trying its best to hide the poor people and is trying to sweep them under the carpet. The format of the BPL survey has been finalized in a manner that minimum people are included in the list.

Following this too, the survey process to identify people below poverty line (BPL) has severely impacted people’s rights. First of all the government came out with an order to identify those people as poor who do not get enough to eat or who work as bonded labourers, but this did not happen. The negligence of the surveying teams was so high that either they did not take the pains to visit the interior or remote villages or completed the formalities sitting in the courtyards of some affluent person in the village. Due to this discrepancy, several genuinely poor persons were deprived of their place in the BPL list. For this the government made another provision that such left out families should put forth their claim and get their name included while getting deleted the names of undeserving families. Here the government officials did the mistakes but the punishment of taking animosity with the powerful and affluent of the village was given to the poor people. Despite this, as many as 11.42 families presented their claims and the government had to admit that 8.71 lakh of these families should have been in the BPL list of 44.77 lakh families, which meant that about 25 percent of the names included were those of undeserving people. As per the studies by non-government organizations, only 37 per cent of the deprived people have presented their claim, which means that more than 25 lakh families were affected by the gross negligence of the government.

The state governments identify the poor people residing in the particular state as per a policy-based process of the union government. No state government has the right to set its own norms for identifying poor or drawing developmental schemes for them. How many poor families reside in MP? This is decided by the union government on the basis of the directives (or rather pressure) of the international financial organizations like the World Bank – that have clearly lost the vision of actually perceiving and feeling the poverty. The irony is that the government (which we term as welfare state and as per the constitution the government is responsible to safeguard and preserve the basic rights of all persons in the country) has officially divided the society through the BPL and now the welfare schemes are extended to only those persons who fall into the category of poor as per the government’s definition.

The government has managed to bring about this division, but in the last ten years it has not been able to ensure that a humane and just process of identifying all poor is in place. When the BPL survey was completed in 1997-98, ironically uniformity was noticed in all areas of the country that the government officials (BPL surveyors) kept the land-holders, tractor owners, house owners and politically powerful people in the top of the BPL list. Since the government has already decided that only a fixed number of people are to be included in the BPL list, the genuinely poor got deprived of getting into the list and lost the constitutional protection of the government. After five years, the government announced that poverty had declined by ten percent in the country and by 5.5 per cent in MP.

This announcement could be considered as the most inhuman in the context of human development because the recently released National Family Health Survey III statistics negate the claim of the government on reducing poverty. In about eight years’ period (1998-2006), the per cent of anemic women in MP went up from 49 per cent to 57 per cent and only 14.9 per cent infants get mother’s milk immediately after birth (because the bias with mothers and their food insecurity in the patriarchal society is a big challenge). The percent of anemic children has gone up to 82.6 per cent from 71.3 per cent in this period of rapid development. If poverty has reduced, then the question is that why malnutrition and anemia has increased in the state? And the heartbreaking fact is that till now malnutrition, discrimination, social exclusion and food insecurity are not considered as indicators of poverty. Now the background paper of the 11th five- year plan prepared by the Planning Commission of India lauds the slogan of Inclusive Development, but still the issues of women, children and exclusion are avoided on the political front.

The Planning Commission and the Indian Government also believes the statistics provided by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) and this organization mentions that 50 per cent of the farmers in state are in debt and the average debt per farmer is as much as Rs 20000. The painful truth is that the issue of health has not yet become a political index of human development. The government has also not included this in the indices of the BPL survey although in MP every person has to spend as much as 75 per cent of the expenditure on health from his own pocket while the government bears 25 per cent of the cost and that too on the overheads and staff salaries. In the context of indices, existence of a household lavatory has come up as a big challenge and as many as four per cent of the people have been impacted by this. To treat a disease, it is very necessary to accept that there is a disease and only then one can move on to the process of treatment. The same principle applies to problems like poverty. Unless the government accepts the reality, the problem will not be solved.

Poverty in Madhya Pradesh: What statistics don't tell

 

[IndianSuperpower]

Idune bhai at least tell us what you wanna say with these articles.

Yes we are poor we know. Now what is the point you wanna make.

 

[IndianSuperpower]

Point he is making that he want to immigrate to India,as he hates B'Desh and love India. He dreams, eat, sleep thinking of India also he wants to finish his thesis on Indian poverty thats y working hard to find article to compltete his thesis as there is no good university B'desh...

He can get airtime in Pakistan after Brass Tacks with the name Grass tacks. But we will have to find one more Bharat Verma also make them fight like street d.........

 

[jeet]

I wonder wheather Dr.Idune is reading this article before Cut copy Paste in Dpk forum.. I bet he is not..
But he is getting a sense of achievement by posting this because his country hasnt achieved anything in so many years for him to be proud of .. so he is searching happiness somewhere else..
Poor guy... God bless u...

 

[Omar1984]

Sunday July 12, 2009

Poverty grows in India’s economic miracle

I have no doubt that the financial meltdown has not affected India as much as it has other world economies. Industry is looking up. And so are some other sectors. The overall scene holds hope. Yet, the answer to the question I am seeking is: Why poverty in India is so indelible that the hike in economy, 7 to 9 percent for the last seven-eight years, has had little impact on the living standards of roughly the lower two-thirds?


Our GDP has more than quadrupled since 1950, from 8.4 per cent to 39.1 per cent. But the needle of poverty line is stuck more or less at the same point where it has been for many years. It is not coming down. Again, the per capita income has increased from Rs. 5,708 to Rs. 25,494, more than four times, but without changing the fate of some 40 crore people who are worse than before because the prices have soared beyond proportion.

Economic surveys and budgets mean little when there is no dent in poverty. The big talk that India is being taken to Bharat is empty because not even half of the villages in the country have electricity and those which have do not get it for days. Water is a long haul. Doctors and teachers are becoming a rare sight in rural areas, although the claims made by the centre and the states about providing education and health facilities are increasing day by day.

Still more shocking is the report of a government panel, recommending that 50 percent of India’s population should be given below poverty-line cards, which entitle its holders cheap food grain. That means 50 percent of India’s population is still below the poverty line, that is, the earning is less than $2 (Rs 90) a day. But even these figures would not have been available if the Supreme Court had not appointed its own committee, headed by Food Commissioner N.C.Saxena, to find out the veracity of the government claims. The Planning Commission still places the line of poverty at 28.5 per cent. However, the recent Arjun Sen Gupta committee report says that 70 percent of the country’s population does not earn more than $2 a day.

Apart from the discrepancy, the ever-growing dilemma is where has the additional money earned or earmarked by the government gone? There are two possibilities. One is that the lower middle class has become the upper middle and the upper middle class has become the elite rich. But the fact is that the rich have become richer. The Forbes magazine, which regularly lists the top rich people in the world, is having more and more Indians among the first 15.

The other possibility is the reality. The amount which travels from the government in the shape of cash or food grains gets reduced to a trickle when it reaches the supposed beneficiaries.. There are too many middlemen and too long the transmission line which do not let the benefits flow freely and reach the targeted people. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi said that only 15 per cent of the allocations got to the people for whom they were meant.

The proliferation has gone up. No amount of effort, if exerted, has made little difference. The 15 percent appears to have got reduced to 12 per cent and the share of the poor is decreasing constantly. Take ration-card holders. They do not get food grain prescribed for them. The shopkeepers, part of a long chain of corrupt paraphernalia, do not give them full rations or say that they have not received them from the government. Rice, wheat or kerosene oil is diverted to the black market. This is purchased by the haves.
The entire system is creaking with corruption. The government machinery does not work until you grease it and it has to be done at every step. It is easy to say that those who offer graft are equally to blame. But their problem is that they cannot go ahead without bribing the horde of babus.


India’s remarkable economic growth has not alleviated rural poverty. Pic anonlineindia.com
There is need to appoint a high-power commission to find out where the extra money has gone. Thousands of crores of rupees have been allocated to the aam aadmi programmes. But everybody knows that this money has not reached the right quarters. After the completion of two Five-Year Plans, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was pilloried in Parliament that despite the increase of 42 percent in national income, the living conditions of the poor had remained the same. He appointed a committee headed by a progressive P.C.Mahalanobis to find out the answer.

The committee found that the concentration of economic power in the private sector more than what could be justified as necessary on functional grounds. Yet, the committee wondered how far this is an inevitable part of process of economic development, how far it can be justified in terms of economy of scale and full utilization of scarce managerial and entrepreneurial resourcesand how far the growth which has taken place is unhealthy and anti-social in its consequences.

Even though the radicals found the report as the grist for their propaganda mills, they could not make a convincing case against the private sector because the report itself was not categorical in its observations. However, Ms. Indira Gandhi, when she came to power, used the report to put restrictions on the activities of the private sector. One can hardly expect anything from the Manmohan Singh government which is all for privatization. I am still seeking the answer where does the government money go?

http://sundaytimes.lk/090712/International/sundaytimesinternational-02.html

 

[dabong1]

Y
BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE PROUD TO BE BEGGING FOR FORIGEN AID..???

SHOULD I REPAT MY ARTICLES

INERNATIONAL BEGGERS AND BANGLADESH PLEGED FOR INTERNATIONAL AID ETC. ETC.. LOL

Do tell us then why you indians went "begging" to the ADB and the chinese govt stopped the asian development bank for giving you "charity"........stop begging yourself first then tell others.......or is getting a loan-funds not begging.

 

[dabong1]

Yes India is a land of abject poverty...but guess what.....Indians are not going out to the world.....asking for Donations so that we don't miss out our next loan repayment ....so you guys enjoy...you India Poor sessions....

Why go "begging" to the ADB only to be told by the chinese that you cant get no "donation".

 

[gubbi]

Its heart breaking to see any child going through such hardship. But indians and their own govt chest thumping on their wealth and spending billions of dollars for armament ignoring their own people.

What can one say about such heartless, brutal acts?

What to do? Ve are like this only!

Nice picks idune. Good to know thou shall remain but an armchair general all thy life, not for the want of bravado but for the want of an ability to decipher data logically!!