INM MAGAZINE VOLUME 8 | FEBRUARY 2016
#Perspective
We often find ourselves to be in a dichotomy as to
whether there is any credibility in all the
criticisms and the pessimism towards the
possibility of a developed India or is it wise
enough to give in to the luring numbers that are
often found buoyant in select media. Well, the
reality that further worsens the prospect of this
un-attained feat is that the elected government
and the bureaucracy (read an extension of the
people in power, most of it if not in its entirety)
are clever enough to dent the possibility of the
electorate ever being able to come out of this state
of perplexity. A testimony to this lies in the fact
that according to the Central Statistical Office,
one of the highest institutional authorities on all
numbers projecting India, less than 30% of
Indians live below the poverty line with the
threshold set at Rs 32/day ($0.5) for rural India
and at Rs 47/day ($0.73) for urban India (after
having raised from Rs 26/day [rural] and Rs
32/day [urban]) as against the World Bank's
suggestive benchmark of $1.25/day (after having
lowered from $2/day).If we go by the World
Bank's standards that should ideally be followed
all across the globe, somewhere around 80% of
Indians should be considered poverty-stricken. Is
it then not appalling enough a fact that with 80%
below the poverty line India still manages to
c o n t r i b u t e t h e t h i rd - l a r g e s t n u m b e r o f
billionaires to the planet?
“India is the third largest economy (based on
Purchasing Power Parity) in the world just
after USA and China. Ironically, the above
crown fails to diminish the fact that in the
same India resides a third of the world's
poorest people (the highest for any country,
according to the Millennium Development
Goals Report 2014).”
India, an inherently agrarian economy, has seen
its fundamentals erode to the extent that an
occupation that accounts for close to 50% of the
livelihood contributes a paltry 16% (approx.) to
the Gross Domestic Product. This per se upholds
how the economy continues to misplace its
priorities there by showcasing a regressive trend
that takes it increasingly away from its aspiration
to become a developed nation. Even when it comes
to consumption, the economic model is
consistently frittering away its sustainability let
alone compounding its progress since 1991, a
period that marks the birth of a global India. To
cite a case, fossil fuel consumption that includes
coal, natural gas, petroleum and other liquids, has
seen a voracious increase in consumption from 7
quadrillion British thermal units to 23 quadrillion
British thermal units with an increasing
dependence on import of the same from 15% in
1990 to 38% in 2012. This vociferously points out
how domestic production capacity, although
being revamped at a steady pace, has been
completely outpaced by the energy demand of the
populace. It further indicates that the country is
in no position to sustain and feed the needs of a
burgeoning population which is soon to become
the largest in the world and that it is increasingly
losing control over it. Again, the situation is
headed for the worse. Not only does this reaffirm
the fact that we are backsliding but also implies
that any move towards ushering in radically
capitalist reforms to fuel an unfound and foolish
aspiration to embrace the conventional idea of
'development' can actually denigrate the already
struggling state of welfare (of course the minority
wealthy class is an exception). The reason for the
above mentioned is that with weak fundamentals
Figure 2: Source-www.cii.in
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