Saturday, March 8, 2008

India vs भारत

Today India has reached to such a highest stage of socio-economic dualism, that we should seriously think about our polity and economy.
As per the recent survey conducted by planning commission of India, 1% of Indians hold 31%of nation product while 60% भारतवासी earn less than 20 rupees per day, thus 66 crore people of India living are below the poverty line. These income disparities are not just regional, even within Mumbai 70% of the population lives in slum area under the unhuman living conditions.
This situation is only going to worsen as our economy is strongly based on the exploitation. There is a lot of competition in labour class and hence the labour is extremely cheap in India. And with the law of competition, where there is so tremendous supply for a long run the prices will remain the same. So there is no chance that 66 crore figure will go down in near future.
The policy makers in our country are in dilemma..though they rule this country, there is hardly anything they can about improving our economy, simply because the existing socio-economic set-up is beneficial to this ruling class. They have an easy access of black-money with which they can indulge themselves in selfish politics and earn lot of money.
Today India has a parallel black economy which is 150% more big than the existing "white economy". India is still feudal. Big farmers rule the rural area. 82%of farmers hold less than 2 acres of land, out of which 90% land is not irrigated and depends on mansoon. These small farmers do not get any loan from the financial institutions and are dependent upon the big lanlords/feuds for their yearly finance. This common farmer today is in debt trap. He is in dilemma..he has no skill to undertake non-agricultural job..no finance to carry out agriculture a business and no social support to fight with this situation.
People think that Population is the problem. In my opinion, "unskilled surplus population" ss a actual problem. With more than 60 years to our Independece, india still is not able to produce a workforce which can sustain the domestic industrial growth. Condition of Indian Industrial sector is bad. It contributes only 18% to our GDP. The 95% labour in this sector work in small scale industries and only 5% work in the organised industries. Though these 5% labours are in pretty good shape, the rest 95% are undergoing the worst form of exploitation where they work in less than 30 rupees a day. This will continue because this labour is in abundant supply and again this is an unskilled labour who can not be self-employed.
The service sector is doing well, contributing to 53% of indian GDP. There is a duality within this sector also. It consists of small unorganised services like barbers, porters, drivers, small shopkeepers etc which employ many and cause exploitation of these people, while the other part of this sector is for polished english-speaking indians who get very high salaries and are busy emulating Americans in their lifestyle and spend extravagantly (In economics it is called as conspicuous consumption which can not be utilized for development of economy).
In such grave situation, where majority of the population is poor, there exists no social infrastructure services like good schooling, hostpitals to these poors. People die because of curable diseases lik malaria, jaundice, TB etc due to unavailability of medicalo services (while the psuedo-intellectual rich/middle class people are more worried about uncurable aids).
The unscientific aprroach of having higher education in English has contributed severley to india's poor show. The one who does his schooling from vernacular language find himself in troubled water while doing the higher studies and this is the main factor which caused the abundance of unskilled labourer in India. The indian vernacular literaure remain out of touch from the science and technology. The majority of great indian languages with a glorius history are facing existence issue. Even hindi, the 2nd largest widely understood language in the world can not have a book published with a lot of 5000 copies.
All these factors broke the psyche of indians, they do not believe in their language, culture and can not aquaire any skills. They feel helplessness. The indian middle class is not takiing up its responsibility. This is a newly formed class which came up mainly from the lower class. Everywhere in the world, whenever the country made progress it was this class who contributed. In indian scenario, this class is busy emulating the western civilization and look down upon the poors of the India and its 5000 year old socio-cultural fabric. Instead of participating in nation building, it is busy in fulfilling his own aspirations and imaginations.

With all these issues, the high growth rate of India is going to help in improving the disparities between the classes and if our policy makers continue with this policy, soon we can find people of India turn to Nakshalism.

3 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Truly said. Though I think that this dualism has existed since the formation of Union of India. Whatever growth we might talk about be it 5% during the days of Socialist nature of country or today when we are talking about globalisation and Indian companies are making their mark in the world of business and corporates, but the truth is that our most of the population is still living in very unhuman conditions. The government comes up with schemes that lure everyone, but what when there is leakage in the delivery system of our model of Government and Administration. It is the responsiblity of the goverment to ensure that the advantage of the growth reaches to each and every citizen of the Union. Otherwise, whatever schemes might the govt make, how big and how luring it might seem, it is a failure if the system doesn't delivers who actually need to be benefited from these schemes.

Shailendra said...

My problem is with government is that, it should concentrate on infrastructure, health and education instead of coming with various populist schemes.
The indian economy might grow by 8-10% but it wouldn't cause economic development as we are failing at health/education/science and technology. Our vast population is still malnourished and unskilled which makes it useless in terms of employment and this has put heavy burden on agriculture which can not take it up due to its nature which is primarily subsistence farming.