You and I don't belong to the real India. We are 'First/Second World' citizens living in a Fourth World country. Well, a significant majority of our wonderfully diverse country is Fourth World. When I say you and I, I mean people who have the time, money and ability to access the damn Internet and blog on crazy topics that don't mean a thing to a billion of my fellow countrymen.
Read this great article in the Business Standard if you don't get what I mean. Some stats from the piece that puts the whole reservation thing into a very different perspective:
- 49% of ALL births in India happen to girls below the age of 20! How shocking is that? How absolutely pathetic is that?
- 125 million (!!!) children have near zero access to any school education. So much for a shining India and an economy growing at 8% p.a.
- Atleast 60 million children do not have access to two meals a day.
- 49% of Mumbai, India's richest city with land prices rivaling New York and London, live in slums!
Shocking, mind numbing and I feel ashamed. Can I do something about it? Can you? Just a little?
2 comments:
Ashok,
Thanks for bringing this up on your blog. I was terribly disturbed reading the stats as well. I wrote to the author Arvind Singhal and he had a few suggestions as to how you, me and other 'privileged' blog users can make an impact. Here is what he had to say:
Dear Harsha,
Thanks. To illustrate what many of us can do without having “surnames” like Birla, Tata, Godrej, and Ambani, I am mentioning the following. It is not for taking any personal credit, but more as an illustration as to how we can make some small effort even as we are fully engaged in our professional lives …
1. My wife and I support - financially through our own contribution as well as through fund raising, and time (my wife gives 1-2 days a week) a "Dispensary" (a primary healthcare clinic) located bang in the middle of an affluent residential location of South Delhi that also has many slum dwellers and servants / other poor. This dispensary - on an average - takes care of over 100 poor patients a day at no cost to them (including even tests / X-Rays / medicine)
2. I have established and manage a foundation that takes care of educational needs for gifted but poor children (we have two students who are in top engineering institutes in India - one a daughter of a poor taxi driver and another a son of a household servant; plus two other girls who have been supported through school years for the last 8; more will be taken up in the coming years)
3. I propose to acquire some agricultural land in the hills of north India to use that as a laboratory for developing some "best practices" and then see how they can be disseminated to villages in the close vicinity so that some improvement could be achieved in terms of productivity (and incomes) for the really poor farmers in those areas.
4. My wife and I support a very active charitable institution that looks after educating poor children through Balwaadis and also old-age homes. We do that by giving them some "professional" input as well as by raising funds for them on a periodic basis.
The net impact of these efforts is negligible compared to the need, but this has given me the confidence that if a million such efforts are made, the impact will be amazing.
Best wishes,
Arvind
Thanks again for writing about this.
Regards
Harsha
Harsha - I wrote an email to him as well - got exactly the same response! He must have a standard email - good for him though. He is making some people live better. Hopefully we can do our bit as well.
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