In five-star hotels on Mumbai’s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai literary festival: famous authors and notables from India’s Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.
It is Children’s Day in India. On page nine of The Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted owing to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent. Statistics such as these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.
The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India’s foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi river, people are forced to defecate in ditches, by the roadside. Half the city’s population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when “India Shining” was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party’s propaganda that it was “liberating” India’s economy and “way of life.”
Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless “growth” was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and the Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a “tiger,” and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the “world’s largest democracy,” they would vote and remain invisible. Full story...
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It is Children’s Day in India. On page nine of The Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted owing to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent. Statistics such as these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.
The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India’s foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi river, people are forced to defecate in ditches, by the roadside. Half the city’s population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when “India Shining” was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party’s propaganda that it was “liberating” India’s economy and “way of life.”
Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless “growth” was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and the Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a “tiger,” and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the “world’s largest democracy,” they would vote and remain invisible. Full story...
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