Wednesday, October 21, 2009

An Unbelievable/Uncomfortable/Inconvenient Truth

Yesterday I came to know about an article related to P. Sainath, the 2007 winner of Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts and his studies as well as various published articles on Indian Poverty. The article titled "Uncomfortable Truth: P. Sainath reminds us that India is still a poor country" was published more than one year ago. The link to the same is here (http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/173677093_1.html). It is billion times more shocking than "An Inconvenient Truth", the documentary film on global warming. Nowadays due to media coverage as well as increase in public awareness, global warming has become the topic of discussion everywhere and people at least know what it is. But this "Uncomfortable Truth" about Indian poverty will probably give a shock to people from all over the world. Specially at a time when Indian economy is considered as one of the fastest growing economy and people projecting Indian economy as one of the most dominant one in coming years, people can hardly imagine that more than seventy percent of the Indian population is below the so called poverty line. However the Government report says a different story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India). It is difficult to say which one is true. But an extensive study made by a person like P. Sainath can not be ignored at all. I do not know how the Indian Government will react to it. But if it is true, it will surely show how fragile Indian economy is. After all, an economy which is surviving on just one fourth of the population can not be a stable economy although for a certain period it may show significant growth. I have just come to know that P. Sainath is coming to IIT Bombay sometime in November. I hope he will make the things clear to us.

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