"Sustainable holistic growth and development for all"

Where we are going - are we really progressing?

Poverty crushes the human spirit. Three billion people - half the world's population - lives on less than $2 per day, unable to meet their most basic human needs. Malnutrition, lack of health care, substandard housing, and illiteracy breed desperation, disease and daily suffering. Poverty traps future generations in a vicious cycle without hope or opportunity. In an increasingly globalized world, no one is immune to these problems.

"India is one land, but the rich and poor exist on apparently different planets. Virtually unreported are some awful daily realities: the rate of malnutrition in children under five is a shamefully high at 45%. Less than a third of India's homes have a toilet and most women have to wait until the dark of evening to venture out to answer the call of nature. The talk of making poverty history sounds hollow in India, a land which is home to a third of the world's poor and where some 300 million people live on less than $1 a day."

Even in macroeconomic terms, India is poor and small. It holds a sixth of the world's population but accounts for just 1.3% of world exports of goods and services, and 0.8% of foreign direct investment flows.

Even the investment that is trickling in is becoming more and more capital intensive rather than labour intensive. Hence the propaganda that investment is creating more jobs is being proven to be utterly false in India.

In urban India, the phenomenon of liberalization is playing havoc with city dwellers. As India's famous novelist and social activist Arundhati Roy put it, "This project of corporate globalization has created a constituency of very rich people who are very thrilled by it. They do not care about the hawkers being cleared from the streets or the slums that are disappearing overnight. India is not coming together but coming apart because liberalization has convulsed the country at an unprecedented unacceptable velocity."

Presently, half of Delhi's 14 million inhabitants live in slums and 18,000 structures outside of slum clusters have been deemed illegal. But if this capitalist aggression is devastating the lives of the workers and the urban poor, it has had a more devastating effect in the villages where 70% of India's population lives. As Roy says, "where India does not live, it dies."

There have been reports of the phenomenon of endemic farmer suicides across India. In some states it worse than in others. The arrival of new pesticides, genetically modified crops and swanky tractors that soak up increasingly expensive fuel have pushed up the cost of production. The last vestiges of Indian government support and subsidies were withdrawn a few months ago. The result is that Indian farmers have been impoverished in just a few short years. Many have borrowed to stay alive - first from the banks then from the usurious moneylenders.

Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley is also facing resistance from the tribes and Dalits (lower castes) whose forms the backbone of the insurgency. About 770 million people are not part of the market for which these economic policies have been brought into play. According to a survey conducted by the Goldman Sachs investment firm, India has a population of 1200 million yet only 58.5 million have a yearly income of $4,400 per annum. This shows the limits of the market and the exclusion of a vast majority from its mechanisms. In reality in the last 15 to 20 years only a small minority has benefited anything from the economic cycle unleashed by these market reforms.