http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/869143--india-economic-power-house-or-poor-house?bn=1 India: Economic power house or poor house? India’s economic miracle is a perfect example of how appearances can be deceiving. The dominant narrative on the country goes like this: as the fourth largest economy in the world, with a steady annual growth rate of close to 9 per cent, India is a rising economic superstar. Bangalore is the new Silicon Valley. Magazines such as Forbes and Vogue have launched Indian editions. The Mumbai skyline is decorated with posh hotels and international banks. There are numbers to back up this narrative. The average Indian takes home $1,017 (U.S.) a year. Not much, but that’s nearly double the average five years ago and triple the annual income at independence, in 1947. The business and technology sector has grown tenfold in the past decade. Manufacturing and agriculture are expanding, and trade levels are way up. India is also on the up and up in terms of human well-being. Life expectancy and literacy are steadily rising, while child mortality continues to decline. The poverty rate is down to 42 per cent from 60 per cent in 1981. While 42 per cent still leaves a long way to go, India’s situation seems rosy compared with that of, say, Malawi and Tanzania, which have poverty rates of 74 per cent and 88 per cent, respectively. If we examine these statistics in real numbers, however, a different narrative emerges, one the Indian government likes less. With a population as big as India’s, 42 per cent means there are some 475 million Indians living on less than $1.25 per day. That’s 10 times as many facing dire poverty as Malawi and Tanzania combined. It means India is home to more poor people than any other country in the world. To put it another way, one of every three people in the world living without basic necessities is an Indian national. The real number is probably even larger. The recently launched Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a more comprehensive measure of deprivation than the current “poverty line” of $1.25 per day, uses 10 markers of well-being, including education, health and standard of living. The MPI, developed by the Poverty & Human Development Initiative at Oxford University, puts the Indian poverty rate at 55 per cent. That’s 645 million people — double the population of the United States and nearly 20 times the population of Canada. By this measure, India’s eight poorest states have more people living in poverty than Africa’s 26 poorest nations. A 10-year-old living in the slums of Calcutta, raising her 5-year-old brother on garbage and scraps, and dealing with tapeworms and the threat of cholera, suffers neither more nor less than a 10-year-old living in the same conditions in the slums of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. But because the Indian girl lives in an “emerging economy,” slated to battle it out with China for the position of global economic superpower, and her counterpart in Lilongwe lives in a country with few resources and a bleak future, the Indian child's predicament is perceived with relatively less urgency. One is “poor” while the other represents a “declining poverty rate.” What’s more, in India there are huge discrepancies in poverty from one state to the next. Madhya Pradesh, for example, is comparable in population and incidence of poverty to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. But the misery of the DRC is much better known than the misery of Madhya Pradesh, because sub-national regions do not appear on “poorest country” lists. If Madhya Pradesh were to seek independence from India, its dire situation would become more visible immediately. As India demonstrates, having the largest number of poor people is not the same as being the poorest country. That’s unfortunate, because being the poorest country has advantages. In the same way a tsunami or earthquake garners an intense outpouring of aid and support, being labelled “worst off” or “most poor” tends to draw a bigger share of international attention — and dollars. When Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan in 1971, it was the poorest country in the world, so poor most economists were skeptical it would ever succeed on its own. But being labelled “dead last” worked in its favour: billions of dollars in aid money flooded in, and NGO and charity groups arrived in droves. The dominant narrative of Bangladesh at the time was of a war-ravaged, cyclone-battered and fledgling country on the brink of famine. That seemed to help rally the troops. No doubt India’s government wants the world to perceive the nation in terms of its potential and not its shortcomings. But because it’s home to 1.1 billion people, India is more able than most to conceal the bad news behind the good, making its impressive growth rates the lead story rather than the fact that it is home to more of the world’s poor than any other country. Still, at least part of the blame should be placed on the way poverty is presented on the international stage. If the unit of deprivation is a human being, then the prevalence of poverty should be presented in numbers of lives. If we know precisely how many billionaires India has — 49 in 2010, double last year’s number — than we should also know precisely how many people live without basic necessities.
http://the-diplomat.com/indian-decade/2010/08/27/india-vs-china/ Literacy rate and the poverty rate are integral / quantifiable components of an economy. Literacy China's literacy rate is 94%, india literacy rate is 66%Poverty China's poverty rate hovers around 7%, India's at 30%,
India has a better government structure in the long term than China, but like China it has a long road ahead.
latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-india-hide-20101002,0,7025038.story India hurries to hide its poor Officials want slums and beggars out of sight for the Commonwealth Games. Critics say they expected more from a nation that has long prided itself on its humanitarian policies. By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 1, 2010 The government people came one night in late September and built a partition covered with bright blue plastic sheeting and adorned with cartoonish tiger mascots and "Come Out and Play" slogans. It hid the slum known as Coolie Camp on the airport road where the foreigners pass. Irfana Begum, 40, who collects garbage, must now lug her three-wheeled bicycle over about 300 feet of rocky ground to get to the road and make her living. Begum, a 15-year resident of the slum, squatted in the dirt in a dusty sari, her bare feet adorned with toe rings. "They're trying to pretend that poor people don't exist in India, for their image," she said near a pile of plastic and glass bottles, cardboard and used vinyl sheeting. "It really makes us angry," she said. By hosting the Commonwealth Games, a mini- Olympics that begins Sunday and is to be attended by 71 nations, India hoped to propel New Delhi into the ranks of world-class cities such as London and New York and mirror Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympics. But amid bad planning, alleged corruption and shoddy workmanship, crews have barely finished the main sports venues, let alone various urban renewal projects. The result, residents and experts say, is an effort to hide the impoverished, including those in this slum near an athlete training center. "I'm so appalled and angry at this," said Harsh Mander, a member of the ruling party's National Advisory Council after passing the cheerily camouflaged Coolie Camp. "Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of, but government and middle-class elements want to hide it." The government has tried to rid the capital of beggars, and has used two "mobile court" trailers, with police and judges in tow, that grab and sentence panhandlers. Many receive one-year detentions in "beggar homes" or are temporarily exiled to neighboring states, leading to bureaucratic squabbles over who they "belong to." Authorities have also cracked down on an estimated 300,000 street vendors, a significant burden on families who live hand to mouth. Daulat Ram, 50, a handicapped barber who lives in Coolie Camp, has seen his business decline precipitously since he was forced off the main road. Most cities that host such mega-events resort to window dressing. Seoul expelled 720,000 people from their homes before the 1988 Olympics and shuttered dog-meat restaurants. Eight years later, Atlanta issued 9,000 arrest citations for the homeless. Athens removed hundreds of Roma, also known as Gypsies, before the 2004 Games. China went even further before the 2008 Olympics, forcibly relocating about 1.25 million people, removing political "troublemakers" from the capital and tearing down traditional hutong neighborhoods. Although India's efforts for the Oct. 3-14 games pale by comparison, activists say they expected more from a nation that has long prided itself on its humanitarian policies. Civic groups said New Delhi's anti-begging law, modeled on 1920s British colonial-era statutes, has been applied indiscriminately. "It's been used to catch anyone: a dirty man, a person without skills, someone who's just hungry," said Sanjay Kumar, an activist with a civic group working with the homeless. "These aren't offenders. They're victims." The municipal social welfare minister, Mangat Ram Singhal, told local reporters: "When we make Delhi a world-class city, it will be compared with other world capitals. One does not come across beggars in other countries. Why should there be beggars in Delhi?" Poverty and begging in India traditionally were nothing to be ashamed of, but the push to hide them reflects the changing values of the members of an emerging middle class, said the advisory council's Mander. "It should be more important what we're doing than how we're seen," Mander said. The blue Commonwealth Games partitions, made of vinyl, wood and steel, follow earlier plans to shield "unsightly" areas with bamboo screens. One legislator even proposed screening off the entire fetid Yamuna River. The suggestions produced an outcry in parliament and were eventually dropped, only to see the idea revived in its present form. The move to hide parts of the city underscores why India should change its approach to urbanization, said Jeb Brugmann, a Toronto-based urban planning consultant and author of a book on Mumbai's slums. Rather than view shantytowns as embarrassments to be bulldozed or hidden, the government should support them with sanitation and basic services, knowing that — as happened in London and New York a century ago — these areas could eventually become middle-class communities. "Slum residents are investing billions of dollars in small increments," Brugmann said. "The Indian government needs to harness that." Back at the Coolie Camp slum, Begum's neighbor, Lakshmi, a maid who uses one name, bemoaned the growing social divide. "The rich are getting richer and nothing's left for the poor," she said. "We're treated like garbage." Begum looked over at the barricade, which has forced her children to walk farther to collect refuse and means they miss their lunch. "We'll just put up with it for the next several days," she said. "If they don't take the barrier away afterward, maybe we can recycle the wood and the plastic and make a little money."
Environmentalists are taking notes since this is the best examples of low carbon footprint. Bicycles and recycling? This is what they want the new America to be. Why is India trying to advance in consumerism when they're saving the earth as-is!
I think the difference between a poor person in Madhya Pradesh versus one in Malawi is that Madhya Pradesh is more likely to create jobs and schools next year. Nevermind that those in Madhya Pradesh are able to go to the next city and find a job. For example, as Banglore grows, someone will ultimately decide to start a company there (creating jobs) and perhaps set up that company's factory in Madhya Pradesh (creating more jobs) citing the less expensive labor force. Once there's a little more income, there's going to be more demand for schooling and that market will expand as well. So on and so forth. Also, there will also be more outrage as the state/city is closer to the media spotlight, and someone is more likely to shed an indepth llight on it (as the OP's article has done). It will happen eventually. This also reduces the need for giving someone some fish, versus teaching them how to fish (as the saying goes). Whereas if you're in Malawi, you better pray for a miracle. You're just always begging for fish. I don't mean to belittle anyone's terrible situation ofcourse, but the reality is that given the option, I'm pretty sure everyone would rather be in Madhya Prasesh where geography and politics are less of an obstacle to progress.
As someone currently living in China and has traveled a bit within the country, I'm going to have to call major bull on those numbers. The rate is definitely higher than that if you take into account the rural population. That said, I do believe in general the Chinese are more literate and richer than Indians. My old German roommate's girlfriend visited her friends both in India and in China. She has been to the largest cities in both countries. And she pretty much thought India doesn't even hold a candle to China in terms of modernization. If anything, she painted India in a very depressing light. Basically obliterated all of my preconceptions about India quickly advancing into a world power.
