Damn! Does the United Nations have to be such a spoilsport?

I mean, just when we thought the India Story was becoming an international bestseller — what with our annual growth rate of 9.2 per cent, and the prospect of becoming the world’s third-largest economy — along comes the UN’s Human

Development Report to poop our party, and separate fact from fiction.

Here are some of the tedious little details we need to factor in : Nearly 47.7 per cent of Indian children are malnourished and 2.5 million actually die of starvation. Forty million kids will never go to school, and another 30 million must work to survive. Meanwhile, 380 million of us subsist on less than a dollar a day, over 100 million are jobless, 24.71 million homeless, and 300 million still live in darkness. Two million of us die each year from sanitation-related diseases like diarrhoea, and nearly two-thirds of us have no access to clean drinking water or toilets.

No wonder we’re slipping steadily on the UN’s Human Development Index to rank 128th out of 177 nations. Compare this not only to France (10), the US (12), and the UK (16), but to Cuba (51) Libya (56), China (81) or Botswana (124). Clearly, we’ve lost the plot. But hey, let’s not be too hard on ourselves! With a population of one billion there’s only so much do-gooding our trillion dollar economy can do. Right?

Not quite, I’m afraid. After all, you don’t have to be a strategist to figure out why a country with a food surplus has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa. Why the government is spending crores to subsidise management institutes for the upper classes while state-run municipal schools are in a shambles. Or why we are boosting medical tourism when we desperately need more primary health centres.

... contd.