Such a spoilsport

Development Report to poop our party, and separate fact from fiction.

Here are some of the tedious little details we need to factor in : Nearly 47.7 per cent of Indian children are malnourished and 2.5 million actually die of starvation. Forty million kids will never go to school, and another 30 million must work to survive. Meanwhile, 380 million of us subsist on less than a dollar a day, over 100 million are jobless, 24.71 million homeless, and 300 million still live in darkness. Two million of us die each year from sanitation-related diseases like diarrhoea, and nearly two-thirds of us have no access to clean drinking water or toilets.

No wonder we’re slipping steadily on the UN’s Human Development Index to rank 128th out of 177 nations. Compare this not only to France (10), the US (12), and the UK (16), but to Cuba (51) Libya (56), China (81) or Botswana (124). Clearly, we’ve lost the plot. But hey, let’s not be too hard on ourselves! With a population of one billion there’s only so much do-gooding our trillion dollar economy can do. Right?

Not quite, I’m afraid. After all, you don’t have to be a strategist to figure out why a country with a food surplus has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa. Why the government is spending crores to subsidise management institutes for the upper classes while state-run municipal schools are in a shambles. Or why we are boosting medical tourism when we desperately need more primary health centres.

The answer, of course, is not population, but policy; not economics, but attitude. You see, at the heart of India’s inequitable human development is the belief that, as citizens, we are, in fact, unequal. Not just in our entitlement to basic survival needs, but also to social justice, human rights and civil liberties.

I believe it is this attitude, not population or poverty, that sets us apart from the Developed World, where every citizen feels empowered to live with dignity, and be an equal partner in nation building. That’s why we may never really belong to this elite club.Specious? Imagine, just for a moment, the following scenarios in any civilised nation:

•A group of rioters admits to butchering, decapitating, dismembering and raping fellow citizens on camera. Their leader is a chief minister who continues in office and runs for second term

•Members of a political party fire on, kill, and terrorise villagers who are opposing a development plan, while the central government looks on mutely

•Public buses in the country’s capital regularly run over and kill waiting passengers, but are allowed to continue their operations

•The municipal corporation of the country’s finance capital unanimously passes a resolution to hand over the city’s most important public market to a private developer at a flagrantly undervalued rate. The resolution is passed in less than five minutes

Sounds familiar? Let’s face it: India may shine, but our progress report is not exactly epic. The only way we can rewrite it is by making every Indian a central character.

farah.baria@expressindia.com