The hideous urban slums and villages I passed bore powerful testimony to the failure of ‘urban renewal’ and the Prime Minister’s ‘new deal to rural India’. These changes have not happened at all. If they had, Mumbai’s outer suburbs would not look like hovels swimming in a sea of garbage and our filthy villages would not look like settlements that should be prohibited for human habitation. Clean water Prime Minister? What are you talking about? When did you last spend a night in a village? Check with Rahul-baba who may have learned from his poverty safari that even the poorest of the poor buy bottled water in our urban slums because of the failure of Government to deliver this most fundamental human need.

The key to change in the view of your ever humble columnist is compulsory primary education and common, minimum standards of public healthcare. Unless we achieve drastic changes in these two areas we can forget about India ever catching up with the rest of the world. Education and healthcare are state subjects, but if the PM had created a task force to provide us with new effective models of primary education and primary healthcare, there is no reason why state governments would refuse to accept them.

The Prime Minister’s old friend, Amartya Sen, put it more eloquently than I can when he said in a recent lecture in Delhi that malnutrition and the absence of healthcare and education for the poor were ‘momentous manifestations of severe injustice’ in India. The situation is so bad that in the week of Independence Day a Mumbai newspaper carried heartbreaking pictures of starving children in a city suburb. Their father was quoted as saying that he could only afford to feed them on a day that he earned at least Rs 50. This happened no more than four times a week.

... contd.