FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

[By Frederick Noronha] If you came across Verapaneni Brahmanandrao
Anand, the name wouldn’t strike you as familiar. But when a slim South
Indian was introduced to me at V.B.Anand — outside that age-old
resource of reading material, Varsha Book Stall in Panjim — the name
immediately struck a bell. My mind immediately went back to all those
scenic picture post-cards I had come across years ago. This was a
photographer one was just waiting to meet.

V B Anand’s claim to fame is that he showcased Goa (he
subsequently moved on to other areas) in a way few did. Not
only was his photography markedly superior, but he also moved
away from the low-quality, low-cost viewcards that earlier
dominated the market here.

How and why did he enter this field? “My father was a
photography. From childhood, photography has been a passion.
I was interested in it since my schooldays. Then, I joined a
fine arts college in Madras (subsequently renamed to
Chennai), and learnt painting and drawing. But I’ve stopped
using the brush and shifted to ‘painting’ with the camera,”
he explains.

Being an artist by training does help, he feels, specially
since ‘writing with light’ involves creating the right
effect, the right mood, and the apt composition in the world
of photography.

V B Anand has an interesting story of how he got involved
with the world of the viewcard. “I once went on a trekking
trip to Himachal Pradesh, that was around 1988. It was in my
college days, and I wanted to send some viewcards home to my
dad. But I simply couldn’t find any good ones. On returning
home, I mentioned this to my father, and he shot back to say,
‘Why don’t *you* make some viewcards of your own)?’”

As fate would have it, V B Anand already had made some very
good photographs of his trip to Kulu Manali (in Himachal).
“So I made some post-cards and took them back there there (to
market them). Then the craze started. There was a very good
response (to that set of cards),” he elaborates.

Back home, his sights next settled on Goa, which was suddenly
booming as a tourist-destination-in-the-making in the
‘eighties. “It was my second place (for entering the
viewcards market), starting from 1988. First I started with
six postcards. Now I have about 120 designs (on Goa). Goa
Tourism map also carries my photographs. Likewise, a lot of
Indian tourism offices also use my photographs,” he adds.

What are his most-liked settings in Goa? Without hesitation,
V B Anand replies: “Palolem and, in the north, Vagator. I
like nature and beauty more. People and markets also
fascinates me.”

Like many other visitors here, he finds the people here
“frank, loving and affectionate”. Is this for real? Or is
this just a case of running into what we expect to see? But V
B Anand also says he got an encouragement in Goa which cannot
be compared to the feedback in other destinations.

His cards were among the very first set of quality, if
higher-priced viewcards put out in India. At a time when
poorly printed cards were sold at fifty paise to a rupee, his
sold for many times that price.

Says he: “Earlier, the potentiality on this front (quality
viewcards) was not explored, and nobody seemed to know the
need of the customers.” Initially, his stockists were worried
about the price. “But when they put it out for sale, these
viewcards started moving fast. Many then stopped stocking the
cheap cards and started selling my cards,” he says.

After Goa, his next destination was the diverse south Indian
state of Karnataka. “I started there in 1989. And, after
that, almost every year I added one state. Tamil Nadu,
Kerala, later North India. Rajasthan, Delhi and Maharashtra
followed. Presently, I’ve started working in the east and
north east (of India). And Kolkata, Darjeeling, Orissa, Bodh
Gaya (Bihar), Varanasi (UP) too. Along with these, my main
interest is to collect pictures for coffeetable books,” he
said in an interview.

Is working in a new place, specially in a country as diverse
as India, really a challenge? Is it tough? Says V B Anand: “I
never felt anything, probably because I’m so involved in the
art. Taking photographs, so much so that nothing ever
disturbs me. Language is never a barrier while taking
photographs.”

“They say love is blind. I say the same of photography,” he
says, suggesting the love of the art blinds you to many a
problem. “I’ve been so much into it that I’ve never bothered
where I’ve been and what I’m doing.”

What are the main subjects he prefers to work on? Lifestyle,
beauty of the place and landscapes, and places of historical
importance are his priorities. “I prefer rural settings…
places that depict that the real Indian culture is there.”

Would he agree with the view that India is still a very
under-photographed place?

“There’s much to be done. In the meantime, we are also losing
our photography heritage. Abroad, they have better
collections (of early Indian photographs) than we ourselves
have of India. In Mahabalipuriam for instance, in 1870s,
there was an artist who has come and painted the place. But
these works are not in India, but in a museum in London. Why
not have similar museums collecting work here too?”

Of late, V B Anand says he’s beginning to feel comfortable
with digital photography. Says he: “Working with film
involves a lot of constraints. Now, one feels (a sense of
freedom). If you had ten rolls, you needed to think of 360
photographs. Now, if I go to any event, I take a thousand or
twelve hundred pictures.”

How does he store all this? On five cards that store a total
of 3.5 GB of digital photos! Once each is filled, he
downloads the pics to his laptop and then starts again!

When asked about his preferred camera, he shoots back without
hesitation: “Nikon”. His wife has been his strong supporter
in his pictoral mission, says V B Anand, and she has also
accompanied him on his travels.

His dad V K Rao died in 1990. He started in the career with
still photograph for the then influential world of the
movies. Then he left that and launched a portrait studio in
Mylapore, Chennai, in 1959.

“He was a pioneer of sorts and produced educational
film-strips for school students. These strips were made on 35
mm film. Instead of being sildes, they were on a film-roll.
Each film had differing educational content. For instance,
one would explain the growth of a butterfly. Teachers would
display these in schools, helping students to remember
better. That was in the ’sixties and ’seventies. A manual
projector with a fan cost just Rs 1200 or so then. Dad had
around 70 titles on different subjects,” recalls V B Anand.

His next mission? Possibly working on Indian architecture and
religious themes, with the foreign educational market in
mind. He’s also keen to look at travel CDs. Tamil Nadu
Tourism, he explains, has made eight CDs of his photographs
and supplied it to travel agents across the globe.

What are the nice and not-so-nice things about being a
photographer in India? “Returns (can be low). Abroad, if you
take a good picture, they pay you more. In India, that
doesn’t happen. India has both the talent and potentiality.
There’s a lot of scope for the new generation. Also, a lot of
good colour printing priesses are coming up, some of which
have international standards,” says he. V B Anand sees the
lack of respect for copyrights as one issue. “People copy my
photos and put it up on their websites, which in other
countries would not happen,” he adds.

His plans also include a coffee-table book on Goa, depicting
the beauty of the place and her people. Says he, with a
smile: “I feel I have contributed to promote tourism through
my postcards. The same happened with Varkala, beach near
Quilon in Kerala. I made postcards of the place, and started
selling in Kovalam beach, which is far south. Tourists
started enquiring about how to go to that place. Along with
the tourists the shop-owners also went. So I have now 40
card-outlets there now, selling my postcards.”

Photography is still an envied profession, he feels. It gives
him time to do things he loves and travel and meet so many
people. “Earlier, I visited Goa upto five times each year. I
would even come on long stints, and stay for 2-3 months.
Lately because I’m doing work all over India, my trips have
become less,” says he.

CONTACTS:
vbanand@hotmail.com
0938 1029496
vbanand.com

Viewing Indian journalism, as seen from the metros?

By Frederick Noronha

Its jacket terms it an “exciting collection of original
essays”, and to add weight to the claim this books has some
big names contributing to it. But surely an understanding of
Indian journalism needs to go beyond the metros and big
newspaper editors; for a country the size and diversity of
India, what we see of Indian journalism obviously depends on
where we stand.

That said, this is an interesting publication. Some 26
contributors discuss a range of thems, from media laws
(including the often-neglected in India right to privacy
against media intrusion) to the social role of journalists;
gender, caste and communal issues in journalism; journalistic
practice in war and peace; censorship and repression by the
state; the role of media technology and future trends; sports
journalism; urban reporting; and alternative media such as
community radio.

Editor Nalini Rajan is associate professor at the Asian
College of Journalism in Chennai. She says the book “is not
envisaged strictly as a textbook for a journalism school” but
more as a general collection reflecting trends and visions
within the profession. Her fifteen-page introduction gives a
fair idea of what the book is about.

BRP Bhaskar, formerly with the United News of India and many
Indian English-language newspapers — including the Deccan
Herald, during this reviewer’s longish stint there — takes a
large over-view of the growth of India’s press and the law.
Coming from a veteran, this is clearly an essay worth a close
reading, specially by anyone who has entered journalism in
the last decade or two.

>From the British control of the Indian media, to its takeover
by industrialists, and the lack of any mention of a free
press in the Indian Constitution… these are some of the
issues that get touched on. Then we move over to various laws
passed by the government — the Press (Objectionable Matters)
Act of 1951, the press commission headed by Justice G S
Rajadhyaksha, the attempt at a Daily Newspaper (Price and
Page) Act in 1956, the second press commission under Justice
K K Mathew in 1977, and more.

Bhaskar also looks at the growth of the regional and
‘national’ media in India. As an aside, one could perhaps
ask: do we really have a paper that really reflects the
diversity of the country, or are these just overgrown
editions of Mumbai and Delhi newspapers, pretending to do so?

N Ram, the blunt-speaking editor-owner of The Hindu and, in a
way, the Friedrich Engels of Indian journalism, has a reprint
of an earlier editorial titled here as ‘Defining the
Principles of Ethical Journalism’. He explains what his
family-owned newspaper stands for.

His unequivocally-described “five principles” stand as
inspiration both for its clarity and vision. These are:
truth telling, freedom and independence, the principle of
justice, humaneness, and contributing to the social good. But
how do these play themselves out in the day-to-day operations
of his influential Chennai-headquartered daily? Maybe we’ll
have to ask someone from his staff.

Harivansh is the editor of the editor of the Jharkhand-based
Prabhat Khabar for a decade-and-half, and makes the case that
a commercially-run newspaper can also play a sharp role in
development journalism. He claims his publication has been
doing just this by way of giving people “information on
science, information technology, economics and the
comparitive financial progress of different states”.
Interestingly, his paper has conducted “readers’ courts”,
where readers could interact with journalists, and discuss
ways of improving the product. In days when the
advertisers-rupee-is-all logic tends to predominate, such
perspectives come as a breath of fresh air.

“From the most backward region of Bihar, Ranchi — which is
now the capital of Jharkhand state — the almost defunct
‘Prabhat Khabar’ forged ahead and is today published from
five centres in three states,” Harivansh writes with
percpetible pride. He reminds us that being a journalist in
metros like Mumbai or Kolkata “is very different from being
one in Ranchi”. You bet! His narration of experiences in
turning-around a near-defunct paper have a lot of lessons for
anyone in journalism.

Engineer-turned-journalist, the Mumbai-based Dilip D’Souza
tells the story of what happens to those who dare to dabble
in investigative journalism.

Corruption and crime flourish in our societies because the
media pay too little attention, dig too infrequently and
rarely deep enough, he argues. (That the recent hidden-camera
sting operations have shown it hugely profitable, in
viewership figures too, to expose grand-scale corruption is
an issue which emerged only after this essay was penned.)

Besides, as D’Souza points out, stories are hardly followed
beyond initial reports. Crimes and scandals come at us at a
“fearful rate” too. More importantly, nobody of consequence
– in India’s nearly six decades of Independence — has been
punsihed for their crimes. Crimes themselves prosper despite
being exposed. (Bal Thackeray, named for instigating several
riots, rode to power in riots after 1995. Sukh Ram commands
adulation in his home state. Harshad Mehta, the prime figure
in the stocks scam, was not just never punished but became a
sought-after speaker and columnist in several publications,
as we are reminded.)

Investigators also themselves face vicious reprisals, notes
D’Souza. Just take the case of what happened to the Tehelka
after its dramatic pointing out of corruption when the BJP
was at the helm.

Mukund Padmanabhan, associate editor with The Hindu, focuses
on the right to privacy against media intrusion. He has
another take on the Tehelka investigation and says it stands
out “not very well”. He argues: “Even call girls (deployed by
Tehelka) have privacy rights and the contracts to hire them
for sex did not include permission to secretly film them in
the act.”

Valerie Kaye — journalist, TV researcher and producer — has
an unusual story about a two-week contract with the BBC while
filming in Argentina. That just shows the difference between
a media organisation’s image from the outside, and the
reality within. Darryl D’Monte, who could probably be called
the poster boy of Indian environmental journalism, writes on
“the greening of India’s scribes”. His chapter looks at the
growth and erosion of green writing in India.

It is D’Monte’s view — and one you can’t quite disagree with
– that since economic liberalisation of the 1990s, the
Indian media has “been more preoccupied with economic than
environmental issues, and there is no saying whether green
scribes will continue to flourish in future”. D’Monte has an
interesting story about how Anil Agarwal’s report on the
Indian environment came to be, following a visit to Malaysia
and the Consumers Association of Penang.

Indian Express associate editor Pamela Philipose looks at how
women’s activism prompted changes in news coverage in some
cases. V Geetha, an author, looks at gender, identity and the
Tamil “popular” press. One of the generes there is the
telling of female victim tales. “Part-sensational,
part-sincere and possessed of a will to ‘tell the truth’, ‘to
report the unreported’, this mode of writing has come to stay
in the Tamil media,” Geetha writes.

The Hindu sports editor Nirmal Shekar says sports journalism
can be “so different from” journalims. He sees it as “a
hybrid and a maverick, an island that revels in its
isolation, constantly celebrating its independence by
skillfully violating all time-tested norms of sound
journalism”.

Agricultural scientist-turned-journalist Devinder Sharma
finds agriculture to be a “missing dimension” in the media.
He writes bluntly, “Politics is important, but perhaps more
important is the role that the corporate houses play to woo
the political powers in a desperate effort to bring in a
genetically engineered food product or technology.”

Mumbai-based veteran development journalism Kalpana Sharma
has a chapter on urban reporting. She notes: “Cities are a
reporter’s dream. They represent the variety, the excitement,
the drama and the complexity that can yield endless stories.”
As anyone who worked beyond India’s four (or, at best, six)
metros should know, if you don’t work in a big city your copy
could simply be dooomed into non-existance. But then, there
is a challenge writing a good story away from the beaten
track too.

Sharma goes on to the new trends such as ‘celebrity
journalism’ and ‘page 3 journalism’.

This text also contains a number of other interesting papers
– lawyer Lawrence Liang on issues related to the new media
and so-called ‘piracy’; S Anand squarely raising blunt issues
of casteism in the newsroom (a rather insightful piece); M H
Lakdawala on the Urdu-language media; Praveen Swami on the
many flaws of defence reporting in India; Shyam Tekwani on
the risks of “embedded journalism”; Bindu Bhaskar on the
mainstream Indian media after the 1990s; Robert Brown on the
need to be “earnest as well as entertaining”; Robin Jeffrey
on “the public sphere of print journalism”; S Gautham on
alternative spaces in the broadcast media; and KP Jayasankar
and Anjali Monteiro in a almost-flippantly titled take on a
serious issue ‘Censorship ke peeche kya hai?’ about film
censorship.

Mahalakshami Jayaram writes on News in the Age of Instant
Communications; Stephen S Ross on Teaching Computer-Assisted
Reporting in South India; and Ashish Sen on Community Radio
– Luxury or Necessity? Anjali Kamat also has a text on
‘Youth’ and the Indian media. –Frederick Noronha, December
2005.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints,
Implications. Nalini Rajan (ed). 2005.Sage Publications India
Pvt Ltd. 81-7829-522-9 and ISBN 0-7619-3379-4. Paperback, pp
358, Rs 450.

[By Frederick Noronha] India, with its aspirations of being a global
super-power in the 21st century, has a long way to go if one takes the
rankings of the United Nations Development Programme which places this
country at 127th among countries worldwide in terms of the human
development index (HDI). India also ranks only 118th among all
countries in terms of its gross domestic product per head.

UNDP calls India (along with China) some of the most “highly
visible globalization success stories”. But it argues that
that both are “failing to convert wealth creation and rising
incomes into a more rapid decline in child mortality”. It
says that deep-rooted human development inequality is “at the
heart of the problem”.

Some more stark home-truths come out from the UNDP’s Human
Development Report 2005. For instance: India alone accounts
for one in five child deaths in the world, amounting to 2.5
child deaths annually.

India also has an income per capita similar to Honduras and
Viet Nam, but a far higher neonatal mortality rate in 2003.
Only 42% of Indian children are immunised. Someone born in
India can expect to live 14 fewer years than somebody born in
the United States!

Likewise, girls born in south Indian state of Kerala, which
is known for its better social indices, are five times more
likely to reach their fifth birthday, are twice likely to
become literate and are likely to live 20 years longer than
girls born in Uttar Pradesh.

Other shocking figures: In Tamil Nadu, for instance, HIV
prevalence rates higher than 50% have been found among female
sex workers.

South Asia, incidentally, has lower levels of poverty and
higher average incomes than Sub-Saharan Africa, but the
percentage of underweight women is four times higher in South
Asia and the child malnutrition rate is 20% higher.

Eliminating gender inequality in South Asia could reduce the
underweight rate among children less than three years old by
13 per centage points, and this translates into 13.4 million
fewer malnourished children, says the UNDP.

One survey in Rajasthan’s poorest districts found that over
half of health centres were closed during periods when they
were supposed to be open. Another survey based on unannounced
visits to health clincis found that across India, 40% of
clinics lacked a trained person on site at the time of the
visit.

Mortality rates among children aged one to five is 50% higher
for girls than boys in India. “If India closed the gender gap
in mortality between girls and boys aged 1-5, the country
would save an estimated 130,000 lives, reducing the overall
child mortality rate by five percent,” says the UNDP. As the
UNDP puts it, these young lives are lost each year “because
of the disadvantage associated with being born with two X
chromosomes”.

Here is cause for concern too: “India’s capacity to
redistribute the benefits of higher growth through the fiscal
system is constrained by a tax-to-revenue ratio of only 10%.
After two decades of growth, that ratio has not increased.”

Then, there’s the harsh truth, even if it goes against the
current neo-liberal orthodoxy: “Market protection has helped
India emerge as a global force in the automobile components
sector, with output at $4.2 billion in 2001 and exports worth
$800 million. High import barriers created an incentive for
foreign investors to locate in India and build alliances with
local firms. These barriers were reduced slowly, in start
contrast to Latin America.”

What more: India combined deep tariff cuts with an improved
growth performance in the 1990’s. But, the higher growth path
predates import liberalization by a decade, and tariffs
remain relatively high. So is an ‘open’ economy necessarily
good for growth and human development? This, says the UNDP,
remains a “deeply ingrained” idea.

Since 1990, India has reduced its average tariff from more
than 80% to 20%, enabling firms to obtain the imports needed
to sustain an “increasingly dynamic growth process”. “One of
the problems in India may be that import liberalization has
not gone far enough in some areas. Tariffs on inputs for
manufacturing are far higher than the world average,
hindering the competitiveness of products that rely on
imported inputs,” adds the UNDP HRD2005.

India’s software sector accounts for 16% of exports and
provides jobs to half a million people. Two-thirds of exports
go to the US, and another quarter to Europe. Almost half of
these exports — valued at over $3 billion in 2002 — are
delivered on site by professional staff.

BARRIERS, GLOBALLY: But globally, there is the reality of
access barriers including some immigration-related issues,
and “onerous” visa eligibility. For instance, would-be
importers of Indian professional services are required to
conduct prior searches in domestic labour markets to prove
that no alternative labour supply is available.

They also have to meet wage parity requirements. This means
that employers have to pay the wage prevailing in the host
country (thus negating cost advantages), while foreign
workers have to contribut to social security schemes (to
whose benefits they are not entitled).

Software engineers are also required to meet minimum
experience requirements — five years in the UK and three in
the US — to pass through cumbersome procedures for work
permits. In addition, there are quota restrictions on how
many workers can enter, and complex “economic needs” tests to
be passed!

India is one of the world’s fastest growing export economies.
Its exports are rising at more than 10% a year since 1990.
But it still accounts for just 0.7% of world exports.

Likewise, India’s strengthened “intelletual property” rules
will delay the entry of generic drugs, driving up prices. One
estimate for India suggests that costs to households
associated with higher prices for medicine will increase by
some $670 million, almost double the current spending on all
anti-bacterial medicines.

New threats emerging include serious epidemics breaking out
in “several Indian states”. India is rated as being “in the
front rank of high-growth globalizing countries” but only to
a more modest degree when compared with China.

“India is widely off-track for the child mortality target.
The annual rate of decline in child mortality fell from 2.9%
in the 1980s to 2.3% since 1990 — a slowdown of almost
one-fifth…. Developments in India and China have global
implications. India alone accounts for 2.5 million child
deaths annually, one in five of the world total,” says the
UNDP.

Bangladesh has overtaken India in terms of child-mortality
rate reduction. If India had matched Bangaldesh’s rate of
reductio in child mortality over the past decade, some
732,000 fewer children would die this year. Clearly, the UNDP
argues, there is still a “huge scope” for the rapid
reductions in child deaths in India (besides China).

There are other statistics too lending cause for concern.

Female mortality rates remain higher than male upto the age
of 30, reversing the typical demographic pattern. These
gender differences reflect a widespread preference for sons,
particularly in the north Indian states. Girls are valued
less than their brothers, and are often brought to health
facilities in more advanced stages of their illness, taken to
less qualified doctors, and have less money spent on their
healthcare, says the UNDP.

“Gender inequality is one of the most powerful brakes on
human development. Women’s education matters in its own
right, but it is also closely associated with child
mortality,” cautions the UNDP. “Apart from being less prone
to undernutrition, better educated mothers are more likely to
use basic health services, have fewer children at an older
age and are more lilely to space the births — all factors
positively associated with child survival. As well as
depriving girls of a basic right, education inequalities in
India translated into more child deaths.”

Four Indian states account for more than half of child
deaths. These are: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar
Pradesh. By contrast, states like Kerala have a wholly
differing gender record.

“Translating economic suceess into human development advances
will require public policies aimed explicitly at broadening
the distribution of benefits from growth and global
integration, increased public investment in rural areas and
services, and above all political leadership to end poor
governance and address the underlying causes of gender
equality,” adds the UNDP.

It sees encouraging signs “that this leadership may be
starting to emerge”.

It points to the 2005-launched $1.5 billion National Rural
Health Mission, targetting some 300,000 villages with a focus
on the poorest states of the north and north-east.
Commitments have come to hike public spending from 0.9% of
the national income to 2.3%.

Spending on education has also been increased. States like
Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have notched up rapid
progress in education, sometimes by increasing incentives,
such as free school meals, scholarships and free textbooks –
aimed at increasing the participation of poor households.

In Maharashtra, a three-year pilot project covering 39
villages extending basic ante-natal care programmes through
home-based care provisions and simple clinical interventions
cost just $5 per person covered. Infant mortality fell from
75 deaths per 1,000 live births from 1993-95 to 39 deaths
three years later. Morality in an adjacent district had
meanwhile declined from 77 deaths per 1,000 live births to
only 75 only over the same period.

It’s not a question of how much is spent and what services
are available. Even where public health services are
available, they are often not used by the poor. For instance,
in India, a large share of demand s direccted towards
“poorly-qualified private providers”.

One survey in Rajasthan’s poorest districts found poor
households used private health providers even when nominally
free public services were available. One reason: over half of
all health centres were closed during period when they were
supposed to be open. When facilities are open, they often
lack a trained staff member on site. For India as a whole, a
survey found that 40% of the clinics lack a trained person on
site at the time of unannounced visits.

“Political leadership of a high order will be needed to
address these challenges. Failure to provide it and to extend
health and education opportunities to all, regardless of
wealth and gender, will ultimately act as a constraint on
India’s future prospects in the global economy,” says the
UNDP bluntly.

On the positive side, South Asia has generally “much lower
levels of inequality” than Latin America and Sub-Saharan
Africa. It also notes that India continues to be a “thriving
democracy”.Integration into global markets has enhanced
wealth creation, generated economic dynamism and raised
living standards for “many millions” in India, apart from
China.

India’s Kerala state has an urban death rate lower than that
for African Americans in Washington DC. UNDP also praises
Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme. It says: “Since
the mid-1970’s, it has provided agricultuwral labourers and
small farmers with up to 100 days in paid employment on rural
works programs. Women account for just under half the
beneficiaries. Extending the program to the whole of India
would cost an estimated 0.5% to 1% of national income in
transfers to 40 million rural labourers and smallholders. If
effectively targetd, this would lift most of the recipients
above the poverty line.”

UNDP also notes that in West Bengal, the agricultural incomes
rose following tenancy reforms and the recongition of the
land-rights of the poor.

Is there cause for hope? At the 4% annual per capita growth
rate achieved since 1980, incomes double every 17 years. With
the 1% per capita growth rate India experienced in the two
decades before 1980, it took 66 years for incomes to double.

Says the UNDP: “Because incomes have been growting more
rapidly in China and (less spectacularly) in India than in
high-income countries over the past two-decades, the average
gap has been closing in relative terms. This reverses a trend
towards increased global inequality that started in the 1820s
and continued until 1992.” But on 2000-05 growth trends, it
will still take India until 2106 to catch up with high-income
countries.

Over the past two decades, India has moved into the “premier
league” of world economic growth. High technology exports are
booming and India’s emerging middle-class consumers have
become a magnet for foreign investors. But the pick-up growth
has not translated into a commensurate decline in poverty.
Improvements in child and infant mortality are slowing. India
is now off-track for these millenium development goals
targets.

Some of India’s southern cities may be “in the midst of a
technology boom”. But one out of every 11 Indian children
dies in the first five years of his or her life, due to a
lack of low-technology, low-cost interventions. Malnutrition
has hardly improved in the past decade. It affects half of
India’s children. About one in four girls and one in ten boys
do not attend primary school. Extreme poverty is concentrated
in rural areas of the northern poverty-belt states — Bihar,
MP, UP and West Bengal. Income growth has been most dynamic
in other states, urban areas and the service sectors. Rural
poverty has fallen in some states like Gujarat and Tamil
Nadu. But nationally, rural unemployment is rising,
agricultural input is increasing at least than two percent a
year, agricultural wages are stagnating and the growth is
virtually jobless.

But there’s also bad news globally for the fight against
poverty. UNDP admits that as government prepare for the 2005
UN summit, the overall report card on progress “makes for
depressing reading”. It adds, “The promise to the world’s
poor is being broken.” (ENDS)