The Canadian Parvasi-issue 52

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The International News Weekly June 29, 2018 | Toronto 06
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Recent evidence suggests India is
beginning to crack its poverty problem
India has held, for the longest possible time,
the unenviable record of having the largest
number of people living in extreme poverty.
Recent research suggests that’s no longer the
case, and if current trends persist the absolute
number of Indians in extreme poverty – defined
as an income below $1.90 per person per
day – will also drop sharply. That, of course,
would be reason to celebrate. The aim should
also be to quickly enhance the living standard
of large numbers who remain economically
vulnerable.
If all this is to be realised, policy makers
need to heed lessons from domestic as well as
global experience. Poverty has declined since
the 1970s but the watershed was 1991-92. Since
then poverty not only reduced at a faster pace,
urban growth has emerged as a significant
influence in reducing rural poverty. A couple
of conclusions are inescapable. Economic
growth matters. It influences poverty reduction
through two channels. One, it increases
the purchasing power of large swathes of population.
Two, it provides governments with
additional revenue to make strategic interventions.
The rapid expansion of India’s social
safety nets over the last two decades is an
outcome of economic growth.
Another positive phenomenon benefiting
India has been globalisation. A fact seldom
acknowledged is that globalisation has
decreased global inequality, particularly in
the last decade. Poverty declines in India and
China have contributed substantially to this
trend. In this context, it is in India’s interest
to do all that it can to preserve a system which
created the best living standards we have ever
experienced.
The primary vehicle to raise overall living
standards will remain economic growth. In an
evolving situation where globalisation is under
attack, policy has to focus on unshackling
wellsprings of growth at home. It is self-defeating,
for instance, to shackle the farm economy
with laws restricting cattle trade and slaughter
or retain an overbearing regulatory structure
for business.
A lesson from China’s success needs to be
emulated. Around 40 years ago, China was
overwhelmingly poor. If every percentage
point of growth in China has lifted more people
out of poverty it is partly because people
were better equipped to tap opportunities.
Put simply, education will be the key to India’s
future economic growth and well-being.
Government needs to get its education
policy right. Times news Network
Most Dangerous For Women?
Foreign media constantly single out India for more
opprobrium than other countries
Amrit Dhillon
New Delhi: So India is
the most dangerous place
in the world for women,
according to a survey of
550 experts on women’s
issues by the Thomson Reuters
Foundation. One of
the reasons for this assertion,
apparently, was the
level of sexual violence
against Indian women.
So, let’s start with
some comparative statistics.
Most comparisons
are odious, rape comparisons
are more odious than
most, and no comparison
in this article is intended
to minimise the magnitude
of the crime. But
comparisons are the only
way to understand whether
it is right for India to
be constantly singled out
for more opprobrium than
other countries.
Something very odd
has been going on in the
Western media’s perception
and portrayal of rape
in India, something that
is matched only by their
own positively skewed image
of themselves. The 550
experts seem to have been
hiding under a rock, reading
only the papers that
give wall-to-wall coverage
of rape in India while quietly
ignoring the epidemic
in their own backyard.
The per capita figures
for rape for 2010 (nothing
more recent is available
on the net) are: India – 1.8
(per 1,00,000 population);
Germany – 9.4; the UK –
17; Norway – 19.2; the US
– 27.4; Sweden (yes, the
most advanced society
on earth) – 63.5. The last
beggars belief, even if we
assume that the definition
of rape is much more
stringent and reporting is
infinitely easier than elsewhere.
So what are we talking
about when we say
India is ‘the most dangerous
place in the world for
women’? India is deemed
by much of the foreign media
to be the rape capital
of the world but the same
media seem to be able to
handle high rape figures
in their own countries
without experiencing the
same outrage and horror.
Even after taking into
account the fact that the
real figure for India is undoubtedly
much higher
owing to the factors that
stop women from reporting
it, statistics for the
other countries are troublingly
high.
On Tuesday, the CNN
website reported the ‘India
is the most dangerous
place in the world’ story
and said: “India has long
grappled with the issue
of sexual violence.” Oh
yeah? Pity America hasn’t
started grappling with its
rampant epidemic.
When UK figures reported
a 20% rise for rape
in London, there was no
BBC World bulletin running
a headline story on
this shocking figure and
what might be the social
and cultural factors
that produced the British
beasts who committed
these crimes against
women. Yet the same
programme often holds
discussions on rape in India
with anchors shaking
their heads mournfully
about the vileness of it all
and asking what exactly
is it about Indian society
that can produce such villainy.
In reporting the 20%
rise in February, the Independent
merely noted
the news quietly with a
headline that went: “London
sees 20% rise in rape
reports in a year, but
police admit they ‘don’t
understand’ the reason:
‘There is something going
on with sexual offending
in London that we don’t
fully understand’ said the
police.”
What a temperate,
calm response to an astonishing
surge in rape.
There was no broad discussion
or analysis of culture
or male behaviour,
no hand wringing, no
anguished revulsion, no
self-hating editorials. But
when it’s rape in India,
journalists and anchors
hammer away confidently
at everything they find to
be retrograde about Indian
society, namely its
brutish men and sickening
patriarchy.
While the British press
have been bemoaning
rape in India for several
years now, the Rape Crisis
Centre website says that
“Approximately 85,000
women and 12,000 men
are raped in England and
Wales alone every year;
that’s roughly 11 rapes (of
adults alone) every hour.”
This, just a year after
the 2012 Nirbhaya gang
rape in New Delhi. Yet
in their reporting of this
crime – admittedly singular
because of the sheer
inhumanity of her tormentors
– no one thought
to say ‘Oh, and by the way,
we’ve got a bit of a problem
here at home too.’ The
same depiction of India
as demon country continued,
notwithstanding the
results in 2014 of a major
EU survey showing one in
three EU women experienced
some form of physical
or sexual abuse since
the age of 15.
It is bewildering why
educated and well-informed
journalists in Europe
and America fail to
be aware of what they are
doing when they report on
rape in India in one fashion
– with great blasts of
moral righteousness – and
on rape in Europe and
America in another.
Is it the desire for easy
sensationalism? Is it a
certain latent racism that
makes it easier for the media
to portray India as a
rapists’ paradise? Is it ignorance?
Surely not when
the statistics are available
on all manner of reliable
websites? Is it some nefarious
strategy to deflect
attention from their own
shortcomings?
None of these seems
in the least bit plausible.
It remains a mystery. The
purpose of making this
comparison is not to suggest
for a moment that,
just because America or
anyone else has a higher
per capita figure of rape
than India that it somehow
lets India off the
hook. Not at all. Each rape
in each country is a loathsome
crime.
The tragic fact is that
rape is widespread all over
the world and the West is
no exception. So the sooner
the Western media start
treating it as a universal
crime found (sadly) in all
cultures and societies at
present, the better it will
be – for efforts to deal with
the crime and for the sake
of intellectual honesty.
The writer is a freelance
journalist
Source Credit: This article
was first published in The
Times of India.
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