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Issue 10 Vol I, February 28, 2006analysis Too
Many Distress Signals
This small-protected forest, the last vestiges of the beautiful Shivalik lay close to the multi million Chandigarh Information Technology Park, the new symbol of prosperity that will usher India into a major world power. Close by are the sprawling golf courses and Raj Bhawans, no more than three kilometers. Thousands who live nearby and the migrant labourers unprotected by labour laws, know nothing about the upcoming sprawling glass houses or proposed five star hotels and the visiting dignitaries. What they know is the small wages they manage from the contractors and the fear that they shall soon have to move away to build another urban conglomerate. The same fate awaits their children, who now play around unmindful of the squalor of the shanties, where dogs and cats aside cows are their companions. Chandigarh is not alone. Travel anywhere to Delhi, Mumbai, Banglore, Kolkata or any other metropolitan or major city, the slums greet you. The people who endure this miserable existence of suffering the squalor account for 30 to 35 per cent of the population all across the Indian cities and towns. They are the poorest of the poor whom villages cannot sustain and forced out of their rural habitat to eke out small living and lead a filthy and neglected life, more wretched than the rural environment.
How these two pictures mismatch. There is admittedly a long relationship between development and equity. It is true India has made tremendous progress in many areas of economic activity. But something is surely amiss. In India, relatively low inequality figures actually imply the number of rich is very small. Only the top one or two percent are affluent, but the lower stratum of the distribution starts almost immediately after that. These are followed by the middle classes, 15 per cent or less. There is then the huge number of people living below the poverty line, with 35 per cent Indians spending less than a dollar a day and 80 per cent spending less than two dollars a day in 2002. In comparison, the less-than-a-dollar criterion places less than 2 per cent of the population below the poverty line in Malaysia and Thailand, 16.6 per cent in China, 8 per cent in Columbia and 8.2 per cent in Brazil. A report by Council for Social Development [CSD] warns, since the economy was liberalised 1991, disparities and inequalities have sharpened and regional imbalances widened to a point where social instability has come under a serious threat. There are daily protests and strikes all over the country. It is also demonstrated in the rising crime graph and increase policing. Since India attained freedom the spending of internal security has increased by thousand times. This is also expressed in large number of suicides of farmers in Andhra, Punjab, Haryana and Vidharba region of Maharashtra. This report focuses on health, education, and urban governance, the condition of women, communal relations, social integration, inequality, population mobility, decentralisation and social security and reveals startling facts based entirely on official statistics. Look at the health sector. India accounts for 17 percent of the world's population where 36 per cent of the world's poor survive on less than one US dollar a day, 68 percent are afflicted with leprosy and 30 percent of people suffer from tuberculosis. India also accounts for 26 percent of the deaths that take place all over the world which are preventable with vaccinations during childhood. There are interesting facts about poverty alleviation. While the proportion of poor people came down from 55 per cent in 1973-74 to 26 per cent by 2000, the progress was impressive in only three states -- Punjab (from 28 per cent to 6 per cent), Haryana (from 35 per cent to 9 percent) and Kerala (from 60 per cent to 13 per cent). But within these states there are wide disparities. In three poor states in Eastern India, the poverty ratio declined far more slowly -- from 66 per cent to 47 per cent in Orissa, from 62 per cent to 42 percent in Bihar and from 51 percent to 36 percent in Assam. Paradoxically Punjab and Haryana were the worst performers when it came to their child sex ratios indicating a high incidence of female foeticide, which is illegal in India. There were only 796 female children for every 1,000 male children in the under-six age group in Punjab, 808 in Haryana and 837 in another prosperous state, western Gujarat -- a classic case of mismatch between economic and social indicators. Punjab and Haryana clearly indicated that 'economic growth does not necessarily lead to social development.’ The relationship often drawn between democracy and social development is rather tenuous. The distribution of poverty in India's hierarchical society is disturbing and remains skewed against traditionally, disadvantaged sections of the population, including tribals and Dalits. The disadvantaged sections accounted for 75 percent of the total number of poor people in 2000. The social problems of contemporary India are the result of a complex nexus between the factors of exclusion and inclusion that are rooted in the history, values and cultural ethos of the country. Government policies meant for the poor have been indiscriminately generalised and the situation has been compounded by rampant corruption and mismanagement of scarce resources. No wonder a third of the world's software engineers and a quarter of the world's undernourished live here. The policies of globalisation and economic liberalisation have undermined the role of larger societal norms as well as that of the state. As Nobel Prize winner Indian economist Amartya Sen points out: the government has started scaling down, if not retreating from, its constitutional responsibility of providing public goods in such essential areas as education, health, sanitation and housing. | ||||||||||||||||||
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Conservative
Government Dogged by Controversial Appointments THE honeymoon seems to be over very fast for the Conservative government in Canada. Less than two weeks after announcing his cabinet, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative caucus is facing low morale, following his controversial appointments of a Liberal, David Emerson and an unelected party functionary, Michael Fortier to his Cabinet. Canadians are not very happy with the Prime Minister's more controversial cabinet appointments. Throughout the election campaign, Stephen Harper talked about ethics. Unfortunately, on the first day of his government, he has opted for political expediency over acceptable ethics. Many Canadians wonder firstly why Harper decided to bring Public Works Minister Michael Fortier into Cabinet through the Senate, and secondly why former Liberal minister David Emerson was sworn in as Mr. Harper's International Trade Minister. Former industry minister David Emerson said his decision to defect from the Liberals and take a cabinet post in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government was made to better serve his constituents. But there are no takers for this illogical statement to justify defection from one to another party. He had sought as Liberal. Even some of his own Conservative MPs, like Ontario MP Garth Turner, have been openly critical of Mr. Emerson's appointment. Following the appointment, Mr. Turner hinted that a former Liberal should be expected to seek re-election as a Conservative before joining cabinet. On his blog site on the Internet, Mr. Turner joked that his openly expressed opinion about the appointment of a Liberal to the Conservative cabinet would not sit well with Prime Minister Harper. "After today, I'm expecting the (Conservative) whip will be assigning me a renovated washroom [for an office] somewhere in a forgotten corner of a vermin-infested dank basement in Ottawa," he said. "That should go well with my seat in the House of Commons that will be visible only during lunar eclipses." "David Emerson has his own decisions to make, so does Stephen Harper, so do I", Turner wrote in his blog. "So, back to the business of being positive." Several Conservatives joined Canadians of all stripes in expressing concern about the Prime Minister's decision to appoint someone to the Senate after stating, during the campaign, that he was in favor of elections for the Upper Chamber. The new Public Works Minister Michael Fortier added fuel to the controversy when he made clear he wasn't a candidate in the last election because he "didn't want to run." The controversy surrounding Emerson erupted in large part since many Conservatives, including Stephen Harper, were quick to denounce the dramatic decision by Belinda Stronach (MP for Newmarket-Aurora, Ont.) to cross the floor and go from being a Conservative MP to a Liberal Cabinet minister last spring. Some hypocrisy indeed. Former Liberal MP Don Boudria thinks that the blame for Mr. Emerson's decision to cross the floor should be pinned on Prime Minister Harper and not Mr. Emerson. "Did Harper not know that only 18 per cent of the voters in Vancouver Kingsway voted Conservative less than a week earlier? The answer is yes. Therefore, it is Stephen Harper who is responsible for this appointment.” Boudria said. "This is Prime Minister Harper's decision, and he should be answering for it." |
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SOUTH ASIA POST INC. |
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HOW
about sparing a thought for this? Every day scores of women and children
trudge to the small forest near the Sukna Lake, Chandigarh- the city
beautiful, collect whatever dry twigs they can lay their hands on and crawl
back in the evening with these bundles of dry wood on their heads. It helps to
warm their hearth and prepare some food. These poor migrants live under
constant threat of eviction and survive only courtesy local political leaders
for whom they are just pawns. They regularly pay them to stay put and also
taken to booths as herds to vote. India’s, modern tri city of
Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula, planned with great care and imagination have
not spared any thought for them. Newspapers churn out columns about the
problems of crime, filth and health these people create for the urbanites.
Utter nuisance is the common refrain except some stray reports when these
people cry for wages, water supply or place to build hutments.
And
yet, there is an exuberant picture being painted of India. The country is said
to be shining and by 2020 would be a super economic power with a booming
market economy and a control over information technology, besides a large
nuclear arsenal. Some newspapers assure us that except China, there
shall be hardly any competitor by 2020. We are assured Indian economy is
heading towards an eight per cent annual growth rate. And, this is expected to
persist for a while. Some predict that it would go up further. It has
just become double digit and there is much chance of it touching dizzy heights
in coming decades. Rapidly changing face of the Indian city with its emerging
shopping malls, multiplexes, sky-scrapers and fly-overs built on uprooted
slums and evicted shanty towns is a clear proof of this ‘rich India’. The
euphoria among the foreign investors, keen to put their money into the Indian
market, at a range they had never done before, authenticates this claim.