Denial, delusion, dishonesty. What was your intention when you wrote:

You talk about starving children. On what basis do you claim starvation is a problem in India? What if I say hunger is not a problem in India? India is one of the biggest food exporters in the world

Similarly first you claimed India was doing far, far better than most asian countries:

India’s performance has been quite neat in the past 10 years – and far far better than most Southeast Asian countries. Not only that, India’s economy is far stronger and stabler than most in Asia

Now you are making (the usual discredited) excuses for India being a laggard compared to other countries:

population and India’s commitment to democracy and personal freedoms is definitely one of the reasons why we do not match up statistically with other countries

First get your story straight. Then explain why numerous other nations who have made a “commitment to democracy and personal freedoms” do not have any problem matching up “statistically with other countries”?

Sorry, I meant Asia.

In any case regardless of what you might have to say, as an Indian citizen hailing from a middle-class family myself, all I have to say is that there has been a marked improvement in the past few years. Whether it is the housing boom, or the surge in the sale of cars, or even the IT industry. All of my friends who are graduating from colleges in India have jobs lined up. True, you could point at Bihar and claim otherwise, but things happen one at a time. For a country that was systematically impoverished over 200 years, things don’t happen overnight. But they are headed in the right direction.

Your argument, that could basically be summarized as “India sucks, and Indians are a people incapable of achieving anything”, still doesn’t make sense or serve any purpose. May be it doesn’t matter to you, which is understandable.

I am afraid the one needing education here is you. Perhaps you can learn from Nobel Laureate in Economics, Amartya Sen:

http://www.indiatogether.org/2006/jan/ajo-hunger.htm

“About 320 million Indians go to bed without food every night, and recent data suggests this already alarming situation is getting worse. Despite the magnitude and intensity of this problem, it remains on the margins of policy planning, public action, intellectual discourse, and media coverage”

“The recent reported increase in the number of Indians suffering from hunger and undernourishment is alarming, especially since the first National Family Health Survey (1992-93) had revealed that India was already one of the most undernourished countries in the world. About half of all Indian children are classified as undernourished, a large percentage of them born with protein deficiency (which affects brain development and learning capacity, among other things). And the 50th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS 1993-94) had established that there was no food security system worth the name in this our land.

Catchy slogans like India Shining, India Rising and, now, India Everywhere ring somewhat hollow when eminent economists like Patnaik and Amartya Sen affirm that India’s record on the hunger front is not very different from and, in some ways, even worse than that of the popular global icon of extreme deprivation, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). As Patnaik put it, “A large segment of the rural masses in India … have been already reduced to the nutritional status of Sub-Saharan Africa.” On the basis of data from the NSS (1999-2000) on calorie intake, she estimated that about 40 per cent of the rural population was at the low absorption level of the SSA average. According to Sen, “Estimates of general undernourishment – what is sometimes called protein-energy malnutrition – are nearly twice as high in India as in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

There seems no denying the fact that chronic hunger persists on a massive scale in the country even while the government spends millions of rupees in vain efforts to maintain “surplus” stocks in overflowing granaries and exports “excess” grain at highly subsidised prices.

Despite the magnitude and intensity of the problem of endemic hunger, it remains at best on the margins of policy planning, public action and intellectual discourse, not to mention media coverage. According to economist Jean Dreze, “The most startling aspect of the nutrition situation in India is that it is not much of an issue in public debates and electoral politics.”

Your explanation, I take it, is that Indians are genetically or culturally predisposed to filth, is that it?

I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at over here.

India’s performance has been quite neat in the past 10 years – and far far better than most Southeast Asian countries. Not only that, India’s economy is far stronger and stabler than most in Asia. There has been a significant improvement in living standards, and this is a first hand observation/experience. China has a horrible human rights record – take the One Child Policy for instance. Things like these can only happen in a country where freedom is curtailed. Try searching for India, on the other hand, is taking a constructive path towards progress.

What do you mean by “spending blood and money to keep it big and backward”? What alternatives are you saying India should opt for? When you analyze India’s “sorry performance since independence”, let me remind you that India is hardly a failed system. If you know anything about economics, you’d have known that there hasn’t been a single famine in India since independence. India’s huge population is simply because of the fact that average life expectancy shot up because of great improvement in health care standards after independence. If you call India a failed system, you are totally wrong. Neither do you account for the economic liberalization of the 1990′s.

You talk about starving children. On what basis do you claim starvation is a problem in India? What if I say hunger is not a problem in India? India is one of the biggest food exporters in the world – thanks to the Green Revolution that made India self-sufficient in terms of food.

I don’t see any coherency in such views. Please educate yourself before your go out on such a rant in the future. Also, I think its a good idea to make constructive arguments.

1. “We have a huge population. Thats holding us back”

2. “We are too crowded. That’s the problem”

3. “We are a democracy. It’s much harder to get things done”

Sorry guys, these excuses dont fly either. Democracy hasn’t held back the development of numerous nations. Neither has population density (think of Japan and the Netherlands which are far more crowded than India). And there is no correlation between size and success. The sole superpower is a large democracy. China is 30% larger than India and far ahead in the Human Development Index.

If you think democracy is to blame, why cling to a failed system? If India is too big to govern, why spend blood and money to keep it big and backward? At least for the sake of the millions of starving children and the millions of little ones in bonded labor, shouldn’t India look for alternatives? I think it was Einstein (not sure though) who said: insanity is doing something that doesn’t work over and over again.

http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/tos/index1/C88/

This woman is hysterical or at least I found it to be.

Briunna, I don’t know where you got the 2 billion number from, but population is just one factor. The major factor is money. Japan, for instance, is one of the most densely populated countries (some 300 million people in a state the size of California, is it?), but no one would in general complain of filth and public urination when visiting.

So it is. I think people automatically start to develop some kind of civic sense once a system is put in place. Say for example, even about 7-8 years back traffic in Delhi was one of the worst in the world. However, in recent years, with the spur on highway construction and broader construction, there has been a marked change.

Also, for people who point at Southeast Asian countries and compare it with India, I’d say look at their populations. Singapore is a country with a size and a population that is less than Delhi. Same goes with Hong Kong and Taiwan. The set of problems that India faces is of a much more enormous scale than any of these countries. I do not mean to say that we have been doing a great job so far. But to compare India with Sri Lanka, or Phillipines does not make sense. Ratings do not make sense just by themselves. Its like judging musicians based on MTV rankings.

I’s also like to bring to everyone’s attention the fact that India is quite possibly the most free country as compared to most of the other countries that Sathya and others point out. In China, for example, it is easy for a dictator to order a new highway built, or have all the poor people thrown into the countryside. Think of how free a country Singapore is. India, on the other hand, has maintained a democratic system despite all the problems that accompany it – the biggest of which is getting things done instantly.