Today's Editorial in the Times of India
(A nice balanced account that underlines the futility of the debate between the "India sinking" and "India shining" lobbies. - Sujeet)
Glass Half Full [ 30 Dec, 2006 0000hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
The India story is for real. We heard business houses and international leaders say it, now the findings of the National Sample Survey Organisation bear this out.
Engel's law, which says that as family income rises the proportion spent on food declines, is actively at work. Urban India spent 43 per cent of its total consumption expenditure on food in 2004-05, against 64 per cent in 1974-75.
In rural areas, this share has fallen from 73 per cent to 55 per cent over three decades.During the same period, the number of poor fell from about half the total population to 22 per cent.
Within the food basket, the share of cereals has fallen in favour of milk, beverages, vegetables and meat products.
While urban India has been living it up, the condition of rural India has improved as well. With the New Year around the corner, it is time to put the usual rhetoric of despair in perspective.
Earlier, there were islands of plenty in a sea of penury; now, we are on our way to reversing this picture. Fifteen years of moderate-to-high growth have reduced poverty by 15 percentage points.
While growth can create inequality, as the World Bank has pointed out in the case of India, it certainly tends to lift everyone.
Reforms unleashed entrepreneurial spirits in services in particular. If rural India has looked up despite a productivity crisis in agriculture, it is because of growing trade and urban-rural linkages.
Branded goods are available everywhere, in no small measure due to the sachet revolution. In a year of farmers' suicides, let us not forget that the bottom of the pyramid is better off than it was in the days of garibi hatao.
Where do we go from here? As Joseph Stiglitz points out, India was in a position to take advantage of the global shift towards services, thanks to its investment in higher education in earlier years.
It needs to consolidate here, by increasing access to quality education in order to address the skills shortage in manufacturing and services.
India's savings, at 29 per cent of gross domestic product, should be mobilised for the creation of both physical and educational infrastructure.
An economy on the move, however, is faced with a major embarrassment: According to the National Family Health Survey-III, 75 per cent of all infants between six and 35 months of age are anaemic; over a third of children up to the age of three are stunted and a sixth too thin for their age. We cannot afford to lose a generation like this.
Let's make schools centres of both intellectual and physical nutrition and focus on governance problems in this respect on a war footing.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges