CB Bureau- 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?