April 7, 2006

Obituary: Death of development

If at all I created an unrest amongst those money worshippers through my last post which proclaimed 500 bucks as not a torrential sum, I would like to present them with this and vindicate myself. I read this article today morning as I picked up TOI with due reluctance after a substantial time gap, only to find a budding parallelism between us (me and TOI) along with a surprise (ahh not again !!) of seeing others who think like me. But unlike me, their thinking has a very mammoth structure( kahan 500 aur kahan 1Cr !! ). Big difference isn't it.

As you might have read by now and even if not, the article says that its not surprising since
after all the Indian economy is booming. Most definitely. Because I can very proudly boast myself being somewhere at the center of the testimony to this statement. Who else if not for India's youth(and that too in IT industry) can be a proper witness to this boom. And for those who still disapprove of this - I would tell them that a Crore is now a middle class term, that even the service class people can now think of buying Mercedes, that luxury cars have kicked off Maruti 800 to the sub-urban roads, that people are prosperous even without worshipping Laxmi and yes that the sensex is moving under the pull of anti-gravity.

But does this all even make sense to those who will disapprove, to those who are completely untouched by this rapidly changing face of urban India, to those who are committing suicide
because of lack of money in a 'booming economy' - because for them a crore is something like a room full of currency notes, for them Mercedes is a car from another planet and Maruti 800 still qualifies as a 'Car' - some thing that runs on four wheels, for them money is just another manifestation of 'Laxmi' and sensex for them is maybe an abbreviation of sensual-sex.

I might be sounding pessimist, in trying to paste this all-groovy face of new India with an ugly and scraped one. But it remains an equally important yet ignored facet which we cannot override or run away from. Not disparaging the overall growth and development that India has achieved in a sudden burst of industrialization over a short period of time, but this evolution has segregated the population in a concerning manner. Rich have become more richer, poor more poorer that too to an extent of ending their lives because of poverty.

This disjoint set of people who have not been benefitted but rather infact exploited for the sake of development of another set is the one which actually needs to see the daylight of the enthusiastic achievements of India. 'Incomplete knowledge is dangerous' goes a popular saying, but I would say an incomplete and broken development which is not all round and that does not benefits all is perhaps more dangerous instead 'fatal'.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

oye..r u planning to become chief-editor of hindu.:).itni serious post..