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The New India

Jill

India has seen tremendous growth in the past decade, and certain segments of its population have seen their lives improve dramatically. That certainly deserves recognition and applause. But in looking at the Indian success story, let’s not forget that many Indians have been left behind:

But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country’s $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report’s Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country’s market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country’s growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Celebrating success is important. But buying into myths of universal success, without taking steps to improve the situation fo everyone, is dangerous.

Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.

7 thoughts on The New India

  1. Ah, but you see, those people don’t matter. Government doesn’t care about the great unwashed hordes. And much of India’s success has come from US companies off-loading jobs which is creating more poverty in the US.

    Damn the wealthy with their don’t give a shit attitudes.

  2. I seem to recall that the Economist divides China into two for the purposes of many “per capita” sorts of question. The first half consists of the prosperous coastal provinces, the second consists of all the inland (poor) provinces. From memory the first is not far off (S) Korean levels of economy while the second is fighting it out with Laos and Myanmar for poorest East Asian state.

  3. Celebrating success is important. But buying into myths of universal success, without taking steps to improve the situation fo everyone, is dangerous.

    Is there any example of universal success … ever? India is a country of well over one billion people, 2/3 of which live in villages. Though rural in the technical sense, these villages embrace a backward form of economic and cultural life that makes progress a tad difficult.

    Walk through any of these villages and you’ll see hundreds of able-bodied men just sitting around, doing nothing, unemployment running rampant. If there is any other suggested solution to creating a half-billion jobs, aside from going through with market reforms, I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, India is doing pretty well considering it had been shooting itself in the foot for 40 years with some ill-branded protectionism, with a tad of waffling on the Cold War, not to mention having fought four wars and dealt with unending communal strife.

    Like I said, I’d like to hear more about what India can do to help out the people that are being left behind and how this apparently runs counter to the current market reforms.

  4. This is a very wrong perception. Any economy, nomatter how large or small has strata.
    Take any city in the world. There are the utter poor [those who live off of soup kitchens and donations ] homeless , squatters etc.
    There is crime. It transcends to the smallest of Villages too.
    And If you look carefully Americans are not that much richer. They just have access to more variety in their purchase choices. More than half of the country doesnt have proepr health care.
    It is ridiculous how people start analyzing China and India as if they were some alien economies with weird behaviors.
    -anon. indian

  5. This articles hits the heart of the issue of the significance of India’s progress applied through the country. Our progress and economic prosperity should trickle down to all walks of life, and not to the 0.1% of the population. Right now, the rich are getting richer, and poor are staying poor. The politics is masking their failure through claims of psuedo-prosperity. We need a complete overhaul of our political system to make pending changes to improve the condition of the impoverished.

  7. The Socialist Government caused India to be one of the poorest nations in the world for almost 50 years. Finally the governmant liberalizes and some sort of an economy pops up and people actually want to revert to to old ways? India does need to develop a manufacturing industry in order to help the poor masses with no jobs but they also need to expect that it will be a long hard road as it struggles to form an economy that is on par with the world leaders. Seeing growth in the economic sector is an amazing thing and it will help to raise the standard of living for all the people in the long run, not just the rich(for example look at the US’s standard of living for the poor, amazing compared to a third world country). They need to liberalize as much as possible and fight the communists and socialists at every step unless they want 100 million more of their citizens to be living on less than a dollar a day.

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