Number of Villages - 640,000 (6.4Lakh), Total urban Population - 27.9%, Total Rural Population - 72.1% (as of 2003)
We have 6000KM of Coast line but per capita seafood is less than 0.5Kg (65% of the population is non vegetarian) finally in this 2004 budget taxes on Poultry, Eggs and meat products was lifted... I didn't know why they wanted to tax only people who ate meat products all these days...
If you look at FAO statistics, The average protein intake of a person in the developed world is around 100gr per day. In china it is 85.9 and in India it is 58.4gr. I know.... this doesn't reflect the actual scenario, the top 20% will have more then 150gr while the bottom 30% will have less than 10gr a day.
As per a 2003 statistic more than 50% of the children under the age of 3 are severely underweight. 74 per cent of Indian children in the 6-15 age group are anaemic, affecting their mental and physical growth.
When a child is born, the top portion of the skull is not completely closed. it actually consists of 3 bones called Fontanels that close in like the shutter of a camera as the child grows.. in the first year. In the BPL families (300 Million) due to serious under & mal-nourishment, the fontanels of the new borns don't close properly in time... leading to a complete disfigurement of the face which some times help them in making good beggars...also in many cases leading to fatalities adding to the infant mortality rates.
Malnutrition poses a continuing constraint to India's development. Despite improvements in health and well-being, malnutrition remains a silent emergency in India. The World Bank estimates that malnutrition costs India at least US$10 billion annually in terms of lost productivity, illness, and death and is seriously retarding improvements in human development.
Despite a decade of polio initiatives under India's immunization program, India accounted for more than two-thirds of polio cases reported worldwide in 1998. It is a race against time. Someone in the world dies of TB every four seconds. A third of those afflicted are Indian. Most victims are aged 18-40. TB's burden on the Indian exchequer is more than $3.3 billion (Rs 14,850 crore) every year.
Despite some improvement, India's women remain significantly more malnourished than men. In addition to the many pressures placed on women, they must contend with significant gender discrimination and the associated factors of poverty, hunger, malnutrition and overwork. An extreme but common expression of gender inequality is sexual and domestic violence perpetrated against women. These forms of socio-cultural violence contribute to the high prevalence of mental problems experienced by women. Among the 30 million mentally ill majority are women.. over 7 million suffer from Schizophrenia and the awareness about this ailment in India is among the lowest is in the world. The social stigma attached to any kind of mental illness, apart from causing lost productivy (in big numbers) also prevents people from knowing that this could be passed on to the children from mother or father....
Is there no good news? yes, there is... lets take our Green Revolution, the Most successfull green revolutoin in the world. Every body else failed to acheive our results.
Green Revolution
We have come a long way from the Bengal Famine of 1943 (4 Million people died because of administrative mistakes) to the Suicide deaths of farmers in AP, TN, WB....... From importing 14000 tonnes of wheat a day (there was a ship leaving every 10 mins to India from a US port with Wheat at the height of imports - to avoid another famine in late 60s under LBJ) to producing 13 Million tonnes of wheat a year.
In 1995,India exported $625 million worth of wheat and flour and $1.3 billion worth of rice while millions of it's poor went with out. We'll discuss this more in the economy section. Remember that this happened after opening up of the economy.
Inspite of the green revolution we have 300 million people who cannot eat 2 meals a day. some scholars argue that its our pathetic PDS and some economists say even if you fix the PDS how can the population afford the food if they don't have the money to buy it. Which is true, the green revolutoin was a sucess but it didn't solve our problem. That should also be discussed in the economy section.
I wonder why no one ever asked the question "Why did it take us 20 years (1947 - 1967) before we thought of other methods to increase Agri productivity". I'm sure there will be a lot people out there trying to Justify this.
When Subhramaniam ordered several thousand tonnes of High Yeild Variety (HYV) Wheat seed from Latin America, The communists staged a walk out in the parliament and threatened a nation wide strike.... if not for a strong Lal Bahadur Shastri... they say we would have never seen the green revolution.
When you read about the green revolution a lot of questions come up in mind, Why did we focus on only increasing the farm land for the first 20 years after independence and not think any other methods like growing 2 crops a year or using better seeds. Why does it have to wait till we faced another famine to bring a C Subhramaniam and a MS Swaminathan to solve the problem? It should bother us to know that in simplistic terms (not to degrade the effort by all those involved) all it took was to use better quality seeds and doing 2 crops a year using better irrigation methods for the Green Revolution to happen and we couldn't think of this 20 years ago... I know... its not the ability to think.. its the conditions.... I think if we find an answer to "why we failed in the first 20 years" we will probably be closer to finding an answer for most of the other problems. Similar events happened in 1990 to create economic liberalisation. Both these times there was change in the leadership and the problems became very grave.
The other sucess story is our dairy development
Dairy Development - Operation Flood
Operation Flood I think should be studied far more deeply than the Green Revolution not only because of the business ideas that churn out of it.. but also the ideas to defeat the politician-business man nexus to help the farmers....
after all, where can you find a business plan that will have a 120 times RoI for the next 10 years.... A World Bank audit shows that of the Rs 200 crores it invested in Operation Flood II, the net return into the rural economy has been a whopping Rs 24,000 crores per year over a period of ten years, or a total of Rs 240,000 crores in all. No other major development program has matched this input-output ratio.
you can find the details everywhere. Again lets not get complacent because of successes like this... it took 34 years (after Independence) to get to this stage in dairy development. and we still have to remember the 300+ Millions and also my example family (family of 5 with annual income of Rs.12K - who are not in the 300Million) are not geting the protein they need.
I never knew I could stretch my 2 cents this far... :-)
let's talk more about the sanitation conditions and may be PDS etc. before we move on to education....
total Population with access to proper sanitation: 28% (This include both urban and rural as of 2003)
more later...
-keshav
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