- In India, there are roughly 800 million poor people going by the World Bank definition of $2 a day; that is 150 million households and an estimated credit need of Rs 240,000 crore (Rs 2,400 billion).
- In India, 600 million people do not purchase any form of energy (including wood or coal), while 400 million do not have a bulb to switch on at night.
- Food subsidy: Of three kilograms of foodgrain sent to the poor, only one kilogram reaches.
- India will spend more than $20 billion this year on inclusive growth – a third of this money will be wasted or stolen.
- Leaks in national social-security schemes (including PDS, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme [MNREGA], old-age pensions, healthcare) are likely to cost India $100 billion over the next five years (until 2015). This is about 40 per cent of the centre’s planned $250 billion (11.5 trillion rupees) total spend for the next five years on subsidies including old-age pensions, healthcare and the national jobs-for-work programme.
- About 40 per cent of India’s nearly 1.2 billion people have bank accounts. Of India’s 600,000 villages, only 30,000 have bank branches.
- According to UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report 2006, out of 771 million illiterates in the world, 268 million are estimated to be residing in India, which accounts for nearly one-third of the world’s non-literates.
- The government’s public information infrastructure project – to link every gram panchayats to broadband in three years – has a budget of 20,000 crore rupees.
- An estimated 50 million people have been displaced over the last five decades across India by dams, highways, ports, mines and other industrial developments.
- Across India, over 200 million people have no access to safe drinking water and more than 600 million have no access to decent sanitation”and these are conservative estimates.
- India is home to nearly 40 per cent of the world’s malnourished children and 35 per cent of the developing world’s low-birth-weight infants. Annually, some 2.5 million children die in India, and more than half of these deaths could be prevented if those children were well nourished.
- Access to healthcare? Nearly one million Indians die every year due to inadequate healthcare facilities and lack of access to healthcare. Forty per cent of the country’s primary healthcare centres are understaffed and fewer than one in five have a telephone connection.
These are 12 examples. These exemplify a lot of things, not
the least being apathy, inefficiency and myopia – not only on the part of the
political and administrative machinery, but also on the part of the citizenry
as a collective. There can be 12 corresponding viewpoints on these 12 examples;
there can be 120 viewpoints; and there can be 1,200 even. Or, there can be just
one. The point is to speak up. Can we?
