Convinced

I've become really passionate about India over the past few years, and this has only been highlighted and further developed by my past and present experiences here.

Right now, I'm reading In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (2007), and this book has encapsulated several of the reasons why I find India so fascinating and why I believe that India will continue to be a big part of my life well into the future.

Below are some excerpts from the book:

• "...India in the twenty-first century remains home to more than a third of the world's chronically malnourished children as defined by the United Nations, and has an average life expectancy and literacy rate that lag pitifully behind many developing countries, most glaringly China. Roughly 750 million of India's 1.1 billion people continue to live in villages, almost half of which lack access to all-weather roads, and countless numbers of which (India has 680,000 villages) are not within reach of effective primary health-care centers or well-functioning elementary schools. Almost half of India's women do not know how to read or write, and a large proportion of those who are technically literate can do little more than sign their name" (9).
• Referring to the rural agriculturalists: "The average landholding is just half an acre, barely enough to feed the family and very rarely enough to produce a surplus for the market....By 2001 more than a third of India's rural households depended on nonfarm income for their livelihoods" (44).
• "Less than 10 percent of India's dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy, which Indians call the 'organized sector.' That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only about 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax, a low proportion by the standards of other developing countries" (47).
• "Because of its strong and large university system, India's scientific and technical capacity is ranked third in the world, behind the United States and Japan but ahead of China. In contrast to India, China has spent a much higher share of its budget on elementary schools for people at the bottom of the ladder. India produces abotu 1 million engineering graduates every year, compared to fewer than 100,000 in both the United States and Europe. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65 percent. China's is almost 90 percent" (51).
• "...Uttar Pradesh [the province where I am studying Urdu]...is home to 8 percent of the world's poorest people..."(60).
• "[Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister from 1984-1991] estimated that 85 percent of all development spending in India was pocketed by bureaucrats" (78).
• "Higher rates of economic growth have contributed to a steady reduction in poverty: the proportion of Indians living below the official poverty line fell from more than 40 percent of the population in the 1980s to just under 26 percent by 2001, But that still means that in 2006 almost 300 million Indians can never be sure where their next meal will come from. They also live with the probability that more than one of their children will die from an easily preventable waterborne disease. Almost a million Indian infants die of diarrhea every year" (80).
• "India spends less on primary health care as a proportion of gross domestic product than does almost any other developing country" (80-81).
• Concerning corruption in the judicial branch: "Many of the judges are quite openly available for hire to fix cases in exchange for cash in the knowledge that it is almost impossible to dislodge them from their posts.... To remove a judge from the Supreme Court, you need a two-thirds majority of votes in parliament, the same margin as needed to amend the constitution. It has never happened" (93).
• Concerning inefficency in the judicial branch: "But perhaps the biggest problem is the gigantic backlog of suits in India, which in 2006 amounted to 27 million cases. At the current rate at which India's courts wade through proceedings, it would take more than three hundred years to clear the judicial backlog" (93). Furthermore, "Almost $75 billion is tied up in legal disputes. This would amount to roughly 10 percent of India's gross domestic product in 2006" (94). Backlog in the courts is thus a detrimental economic cost.
• "Almost 100 of Indias 545 members of parliament in New Delhi have 'criminal backgrounds,' which means that have been indicted for one or more crimes, but not convicted. Once they are elected, it is virtually impossible to convict them, which is one of their main incentives for entering politics in the first place" (117). Moreover, "Of the almost one hundred alleged parliamentary criminals, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh [the province in which I'm staying] account for by far the largest share" (118).