POVERTY IN INDIA - LOOKING FOR REASONS

Extract from an article of Jug Suraiya in Indian Times

Sixty-two years after independence, even as India boasts an economy widely acknowledged to be the second fastest growing in the world, there is another, alternative India which continues to be mired in the most appalling poverty. According to a recent World Bank report, 25 per cent of India’s population – that’s a projected 313 million human beings – will be living in “extreme poverty”, calculated at $1.25 a day, in 2015. India ranks only a little better than sub-Saharan Africa where the corresponding figure will be 37.1per cent, while that for China will be 6.1 per cent. In 1990, China’s “extreme poverty” population was 60.2 per cent, while that of India’s was 51.3 per cent. By 2005, totalitarian China had managed to reduce its figure to 15.9 per cent, while democratic India’s poverty quantum came down merely to 41.6 per cent. China had political dictatorship, but relative freedom from poverty; India enjoyed political freedom (at least in theory), but suffered under the brutal despotism of poverty.
This is not to argue the merits of dictatorship versus democracy. Without argument, democracy is better than dictatorship. If for no other reason than that in a democracy you can have a democracy-vsdictatorship debate; in a dictatorship you can’t. What can, and must, be argued, however, is that Indian democracy has tragically failed to protect so many of its citizens, for so long, from extreme economic degradation. The reasons for this – the many sins of omission and commission responsible for this shameful state of affairs – would fill entire libraries. But without going into details – where the Devil is said to lurk – it could, and ought, to be said that this national scandal clearly amounts to a case of massive and sustained malpractice on the part of all the governments elected into office since independence.
The answer to such questions is that our lawmakers see themselves, and have conditioned us to see them, as being above the laws they enact and enforce upon us. And till that changes, our much-celebrated dance of democracy will, for millions, remain a danse macabre. A dance of living death.