FURTHER READING ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND EQUITY IN INDIA:

See previous posts on India through our labels: 

(1) "Electricity Crisis Hobbles an India Eager to Ascend":

For all those who suffer from crippling power cuts in cities like this, there are others who have no connection to electricity at all. According to the Planning Commission of India, 600 million people — roughly half the population — are off the electric grid. For this reason, it is impossible to estimate accurately the total national shortfall.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/world/asia/21india.html?_r=1&ei=5087%0A&em=&en=5dc37682f8d1c7c8&ex=1179806400&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

(2) ''India Lags Behind West on Health Issues'':

Nearly half of India's children are malnourished, putting the country in the same league with some of the world's poorest countries despite its dramatic economic achievements, a government survey showed Friday.
 
...Preliminary figures from the National Family Health Survey highlighted persistent gaps between the health of rural and urban India, and between health awareness among men and women, who in many parts of the country remain second class citizens.
The most glaring problem in the 2005-2006 survey was the health of children. With about 46% of children malnourished -- a negligible improvement over the last survey, conducted in 1998-99 -- India is in the same league with nations like Burkina Faso and Cambodia. In China, Asia's other rising economic power and the country India often compares itself with, only 8% of children are underweight.
 
The improved infant mortality rate -- down to 57 per 1,000 births from 68 in the previous survey -- remains dramatically lower in Western nations. In the U.S., for instance, it is seven per 1,000 births.
 
Health in the countryside lagged far behind cities in every c! ategory where a comparison was offered. The rural infant mortality rate, for example, was 62 per 1,000 births, compared to 42 in urban areas.
 
AP printed on www.wsj.com, February 9, 2007

(3) NYT "On India's Farms, a Plague of Suicide":

Here in the center of India, on a gray Wednesday morning, a cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house.
 
The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income.
 
Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer.
 
Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.\! html?ei=5070&en=89114da7fd054f52&ex=1160020800&pagewanted=print

(4) ''Caste Away'' ("Dalit" means "untouchable"):

Estimates of the number of Dalits with skilled jobs and steady salaries in India's New Economy vary from tens of thousands to around 100,000, according to employers, workers, experts and government officials. That's out of a total Dalit population estimated at about 167 million, or about 16% of India's total population of 1.03 billion.
 
"Caste Away," by Paul Beckett, WSJ, June 23, 2007

(5) FT op-ed on massive structural inequality in India:

The survey does collect data on wealth. The Gini index for asset distribution inequality in 2002 was 63 (out of 100) in rural India, and 66 in urban India; the corresponding figures for China were 39 and 47 respectively. These data do not include ownership of human capital. In India, educational inequality - crudely measured as the Gini index of years of schooling in the adult population - is 56. This is not only much higher than in China (37), it is significantly higher than in most Latin American countries (Brazil is 39), and many African countries, not to speak of the US (which scores 13).
 
India's traditional caste system arguably makes it one of the world's most socially unequal countries. When one combines social and economic factors, India's inequality is at the higher end of the world scale.
 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/93a5dbd4-263b-11db-afa1-0000779e2340.html

(6) Former chief economist at the IMF, Ken Rogoff, compared inequality in China and India:

But caste-bound India's record of exclusion is worse. Perhaps only one in five persons are integrated into the global economy. For every call center employee, there are many more people still eking out a subsistence living on the land. Whereas China probably has about 450 million people in its globalized economy, India has at most 200-250 million. It is this difference, more than anything else, that sets the two economies apart.
 
What can India do to close the gap? Its biggest shortcoming is its lack of roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure, where the contrast with China is just stunning. If your products can't get to the global economy, you cannot conquer it.
 
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff12

(7) FT op-ed by Amartya Sen "Can life begin at 60 for the sprightly Indian economy?":

India faced two huge problems of governance. The first one was government over-activity in areas of work in which its presence was overbearing, but where its ability to mess things up was truly gigantic. The so-called "licence Raj" made business initiatives extremely difficult and put them at the mercy of bureaucrats (large and small), thereby powerfully stifling enterprise while nurturing corruption. The going has sometimes been rough but the direction of policy change has been unmistakable from the early 1990s onwards (if still a little slow in many assessments), endorsed even by successor governments run by other political parties.
 
But India also had a second problem that needed to be addressed urgently. This was the problem of government under-activity in fields in which it could achieve a great deal. There has been a sluggish response to the urgency of remedying the aston- -ishingly under-emphasised social infra-- structure - for example, the need to b! uild many more schools, hospitals and rural medical centres - and developing a functioning system of accountability, supervision and collaboration for public services. To this can be added the neglect of physical infrastructure (power, water, roads, rail), which required both governmental and private initiatives. Large areas of what economists call "public goods" have continued to be under-emphasised.
 
The radical changes in the 1990s did little to remedy the second problem.
 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d09c62dc-49fe-11dc-9ffe-0000779fd2ac.html

(8) FT article highlighted the difference between China and India vis-a-vis infrastructure spending:

India lags far behind other Asian countries in infrastructure investment. While China spent 10.6 per cent of gross domestic product on infrastructure, or $150bn (€117bn, £79bn), in 2003, India spent less than 4 per cent, or $21bn, in the same year.
 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/fb054588-2633-11db-afa1-0000779e2340.html