while india's brahminized classes, like always, successfully managed to hijack the current elections for their own narrow, grubby ends, a few questions that remained unasked:
*what are they going to do about rural indians? a great majority of them have to move away from agriculture in the next 10-20 years.
*what are they going to do about universal education? more than a 100 million children of school-going age are not in school right now.
*what are they going to do about drinking water? around two hundred thousand children in one district, nalgonda, have withered limbs from drinking groundwater with high fluoride content. that's one district. while one paddy growing district in punjab probably uses/misuses more water, in one season, than the whole of delhi and its satellite towns in one year. or as much water as the whole of rural rajasthan probably drinks in more than one year. and to think that punjab doesn't consume even a fraction of the rice it produces.
* what are they going to do about hunger and malnutrition that over half of india's women and infants, among others, suffer from? luring punjabi farmers to produce more rice, so that more farmers in traditionally rice-producing states in the south and east lose their livelihood, and then looking away when the punjabi farmers commit suicide in droves isn't going to help. anymore.
*what are they going to do about primary health care in 6,00,000 villages? india has over 6,00,000 doctors of whom only 20,000 odd thousand work in the countryside. each doctor caters to around 60 villages, or 50,000-1,00,000 villagers. how about a doctor for every village, a tap and a toilet and electricity for every home? and schools and sanitation systems for every ward? that's primary healthcare according to the u.n. etc.,
*what are they going to do about people who work on medieval occupations like weaving to scavenging? probably around 50-75 million families depend on those occupations. and earn medieval wages.
*what are they going to do about immediate and sustained relief for the vast majority of workers in the unorganized sector (93% of the workforce in the country) who earn less than a dollar a day? social security for them would be useless if it comes in only when they get seriously injured. how about relief for today, this month, next month, next year- for as long as they can't retrain themselves to look for better work opportunities? or until better work opportunities are created?
*how about a mechanism for ensuring people who oppress dalits, women, children and others in every village are brought to justice as fast as ajmal kasab?
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5 comments:
On the spot. No one seemed to ask these questions at all. And whether you gave your vote to one or the other, these questions will remain unaddressed.
Great Post! Sigh!
banno,
thanks. your first comment here, i think. welcome :)
anu,
thanks. still thinking about your plans (in your last mail).
'The great greedy middle-class' is insulated and has hardly any interest in the welfare of poor.
The rich and the NRIs rarely think of 'payback'. Society has no concern for the poor.
Every day there are numerous incidents of mass suicides like women jumping in well with all children or committing suicides due to debt and lack of money, but they no longer get published.
These news come from rural areas and the families don't have kids studying in DPS or parents in software, so no paper considers it fit to publish them.
It's so frustrating indeed that these things are not the real issues for political parties.
adnan,
sorry for responding late.
'The rich and the NRIs rarely think of 'payback'. Society has no concern for the poor.'
yes, i totally agree with you. democracies elsewhere place a lot of emphasis on public health, education and social security- should india be considered a democratic society, i wonder.
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