IS INDIA REALLY SHINING ?

While Indian industries are blooming, sensex shooting, bulls roaring on Dalal street, metro cities modernize with malls, nightclubs, flyovers, I still land up questioning myself “Is India really Shining?”,when several are living on streets and pathetic slums, several are dying due to hunger, diseases, severe cold of winters, or scorching heat of summers. Still dirty scantily clad children of poor labourers play in unhygienic environment and have never been to school. Still agriculture depends on monsoons and farmers commit suicide on crop failures or debts. Many villages are still without electricity and level roads.

In the visionary mosaic of India’s conglomeration, the crevices are yet to be filled.

Is the area of progress just the urbanized India, when approximately 55% of our population is on or below poverty line? They say our GDP rate is growing, but I’m apprehensive about the whole business of averaging. How can someone give genuine figures of India’s total wealth, when there is a gigantic gap between the poor and the rich. India is flourishing in agricultural sector and it is due to the obdurate hard work of the farmers, who are statistically getting poorer day by day.

In Jaipur, where on one hand, we are looking forward to travel in metros in coming years, the municipal corporation has recently demolished a long established bangle manufacturing body, that was a source of income for several families of low economic stratum. In many parts of our country, people, struck by poverty, ingest certain inedible things, like rat meat, insects, grass, mango kernels, or even dry mud to quell their hunger and sustain themselves. In Tamil Nadu, family members, vexed by the poor financial grades, resort to the practice of senicide (the killing of the elderly).They call it thalaikoothal.

While India adds profits to its economy by exporting numerous leather goods, textile goods, agricultural products, medical appliances, there are millions starving, several dying due to insufficient clothing or medical facilities. It is a disparate fact that most of the slums in India are located boundaring the sky-scrapers in the flourishing cities. The prospering MNCs in urban India have led to the extirpation of the venerable traditional colonies of our under-privileged Bharat.

I don’t presume our nation is shining when the actual hand behind the achieved heights are crushed to poverty. The time-honoured heritage and savoir-faire of our incredible Bharat are lost in the glint of the affluent urbanized India. A country shines not just by the procurable resources or the scored heights but by the way its people use the availabilities and impute to those actually responsible for the accomplishments. Our working culture need to be changed. Yes, being an Indian, I’m glad that India has Mukesh Ambani, the 4^th richest man on the planet, but how can we neglect that it also has the poorest man in the world too?