India is touted as an emerging super power alongside China. It certainly is a vast country, geographically, and after China, has the largest population in the world. But a super power?
Writing an op-ed piece in The Age newspaper, Amrit Dhillon, puts into sharp focus why the claim to super power status is far-fetched.
"While the rich consume luxury goods and the middle class buys fancy cars and gadgets and holidays in Bangkok, they blind themselves to the reality for 700 million or so immiserated Indians. In their vainglorious dinner-table talk about ''superpower'' status, they forget that a country that cannot meet a poor person's most basic needs - enough food, clean drinking water, and electricity - has no business aspiring to superpower status."
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"This is the reality: about 400 million Indians have no electricity; India has more mobile phones than toilets; millions of children are not in school; most cities have no sewage treatment systems; no major city has a continuous water supply; disease is rampant; infrastructure is pitiful; and a UNICEF report released this month says there is acute malnutrition and hunger among the urban poor, with 54 per cent more infants dying from among the urban poor than from the urban non-poor. Another UNICEF report found that 93 million Indians live in urban slums, on pavements and construction sites.
Yet should anyone plead that the poor have been left behind they will be subject to heated criticism. It hurts the pride of Indians to be reminded of the country's poverty. But the existence of poverty itself does not hurt their pride.
Economic growth rates of about 8-9 per cent over the past few years have been justifiably praiseworthy. But the benefits of this growth have been confined to the middle class and the rich."
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