Some Views
Posted : September 12, 2004 at 10:43 am [IST]
T N Ninan wrote an article “India, the 1% society” in Business Standard on September 11, 2004 and has come out with some good conclusions.
” The percentage of people below the poverty line showed a drop from 35.4 per cent in 1993 to 26.4 per cent in 2000 — a 9-percentage-point drop in seven years, or roughly 1.3 percentage points annually.
” The literacy rate improved from 52 per cent in 1991 to 65 per cent in 2001 — once again, at the rate of 1.3 per cent of the population every year.
” Life expectancy improved by 0.7 years annually, moving from 58 in 1991 to 65 a decade later — which actually works out to about 1.2 per cent on the base.
” The average rate at which the key social indicators improve in the country works out to be slightly more than 1 percentage point each year.
And further.
” India’s human development index (put together by the UN Development Programme) has gone up by 0.323 points- from 0.254 to 0.577, in the 30 years to 2000, which makes it an annual improvement of almost 1.1 per cent of the potential maximum on the index.
” India’s rating of UNDP’s Gender Development Index moves up from 0.250 to 0.563 between 1970 and 2000, which too makes it an annual improvement of fractionally more than 1 per cent of the potential maximum.
Interesting, this 1 per cent figure seems to hold fairly steady, irrespective of whether the economy is growing rapidly or slowly, whether it was the stagnant decade of the 1970s, or the more rapid period of the 1980s and 1990s.
In the same issue, Surjit S.Bhalla wrote about his comments on the reactions on population increase in India for different communities that appeared recently.
Main concern should be education, and health care, and poverty, especially of women. And with development, population growth will decline.
This has happened around the world, across religions, across space, and across time.
” The fertility rate (average number of children per woman) was 6.1, 4.1, and 2.9 in all-Muslim Bangladesh for the three years, 1980, 1990, and 2002.
” The corresponding numbers for all-Muslim (fundamentalist?) Iran: 6.7, 4.7, and 2.
” The numbers for Hindu-dominated India: 5.0, 3.8, and 2.9.
” The decline in Pakistan is less, but nevertheless there: 7, 5.8, and 4.5.
The National Family Health Survey for India for 1998-99 shows that once the education of the mother, and standard of living are controlled, the same fertility pattern are observed in all community..
- Indra
Category: Religious/Social issues |
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