Garibi hatao ?

Mera bharat mahan ?

India shining ?!!?

The GDP is allegedly 7%, but industrial growth has dropped from 13% in 1995 to 6.3% in 2003-2004

Foreign exchange reserves are more than 100 billion USD but liberalization measures allow Indians individually to invest 100mn USD overseas which could lead to capital flight in times of financial panic ….another SE Asian crisis!

Stock markets are booming!!...in a country where 65% of households do not have a bank account

The fastest growing sector in India is inequality- Ambani earns Rs 9 cr per yr, 30,000 times more than the annual wages of a landless labourer in Kalahandi which is Rs 3000

ANIL AND MUKESH AMBANI

On the whole about 54% women and 75% men are literate in our country

Out of approximately 200 million children in the age group 6-14 years, only 120 million are enrolled and the net attendance figures is just over 60%

Every year lakhs of rural migrants enter cities and work on construction sites, etc for pittance

The lowest 10 per cent of the urban population in India, 37.49 per cent are engaged in casual labour and 41.34 per cent are self-employed, suggesting that a vast majority of the urban poor are vulnerable to uncertain incomes

860 million Indians still go to sleep hungry very night

Contribution of various sectors to Air Quality in major cities

• Obviously vehicular traffic (72%) is playing havoc with the environment and as a result, with the health of people• Most of the vehicles in question here are private. In a city like Bangalore out of 18 lakh vehicles only 4000 form the public bus transport. 14 lakh are two wheelers while ----- are four wheelers.• Incidentally the 3000 odd buses service 56% of Bangalore’s population, while the remaining population use private vehicles.

72 % - Vehicular Traffic

8% – Domestic

20% - Industrial

CORRUPTION SHOULD BE STOPED

Female foeticide on the rise over the past 6 yearsInfant mortality rate is as high as 70 per 1000

births (83 and 84.22 for SC and ST respectively)Percentage allocation of GDP for health dropped

by 35% in the last decadeIndia is one of the only 3 countries where

maternal mortality rates are on the riseMore than 21% of India's urban population live in

slums, 23% of urban households do not have access to toilet facilities and nearly 8 % of urban households are unable to find safe drinking water

India's information technology sector accounts for about 2% of the GDP. By contrast, trade and hospitality alone account for 15 % of GDP

In external sector accounts, software exports ($7.2 billion) still contribute less than remittances, mainly from poor workers in the Gulf ($8.1 billion).

Even if the ITES/BPO business grows five or eight-fold over the coming five years, as optimistic projections estimate, its contribution to India's GDP will remain relatively small

Of about 3.5 lakh workers in IT services and outsourcing in India, 1.85 lakh people are in Karnataka - mostly in Bangalore, the city where largest number of jobs were lost in the industrial sector (more than 3 lakhs)

While the average earnings are pretty high, compare this with the earnings of 8000 “pourakarmikas”, those who keep the city clean, earn between 1000 and 1800 per month

Indian companies have developed very few finished, marketable software products, instead they develop components or sub-packages/assemblies/programmes that go into the final products made and marketed by US companies.

Thus, a good proportion of the sub-programmes in Windows 95 and 98 were developed by Indian engineers. But it's Bill Gates who skimmed off the profits!

The ITES like call centres, medical transcription and BPOs, which are now growing at twice the speed of software exports, employ young women and men who work long hours, practising cultivated foreign accents to sell products they have never seen or give invisible customers information they don't remotely comprehend (eg about a restaurant's location in Memphis, Tennessee).

This alienating work, and low levels of acquired skills and wages (compared to their counterparts abroad) are turning college graduates and enthusiastic youngsters into mindless cyber-coolies

Country with the largest number of malnourished children India one of 17 countries where number of undernourished

increased substantially in the late 1990s 1/5th of India’s population suffers from chronic hunger In the past few years the Supreme Court has more than

once pulled up six states over starvation deaths Last five years has seen a slide-back to levels of hunger in

rural areas not seen for over 50 years 17 million tonnes of surplus food is exported at below

poverty prices every year. And the rest is fed on by rats in Food Corporation of India godowns.

Farmer suicides over the past years has become a regular occurrence – 3000 farmers annually in Punjab, over 2000 farmers in a single district Anantpur in AP in 2002, 478 farmers in Karnataka in 2003 (between April to November)

As in the past few years India has slipped from rank 124 to 127 on HDI (human development index) ladder. Israel occupied Palestine would be a better place to live in for some Indians.

INDIA SHOULD STAND UP AGAIN AND MAKE OUR COUNTRY MORE POWERFUL.