Try this for growth Ram.
5 ISSUES THAT REMAINED BURIED ( Tehelka) 1 } RIGHT TO FOOD The republic of hunger A country that has 70 percent of the population depending upon agriculture for its livelihood and where rats eat a major portion of the foodgrain in its overflowing godowns (60 million tonnes last year), has 320 million people going to bed without food and 10,000 dying of hunger-related pangs every day, as experts point out. Ninety-nine percent of adivasi families in Jharkhand and Rajasthan are facing chronic hunger this year. Also, 2005 hasn't been good for the farmer, ironically, under the upa regime that claims to stand for the aam aadmi. At least 250 farmers committed suicide in Yavatmal in Vidarbha, Maharashtra this year alone. In the past five years the region has seen 850 suicides by farmers. Ninety-three percent of the suicides reported were due to overriding debts. Since 1997, 25,000 farmers have committed suicides across India - 4,500 in Andhra Pradesh alone, while thousands of children have died in Melghat/Nandurbar in Maharashtra due to malnutrition and absence of administrative support. The right to food remains elusive for millions of Indians but the establishment remains as cold-blooded as ever. 2 } UNORGANISED WORKERS One Gurgaon too many They constitute 90 percent of the labour force in India, but they have no unions, no rights, no social safety nets, no provident fund, no pension, no job security, no schools or health centres for their children, no future or hope. Instead, they are the eternal victims of the latest profit-making ventures of the Indian and mnc fat cats: retrenchment, contract labour, ad hoc and low wages, mass sacking. And if they protest, they are brutally assaulted, as the cops did with the workers in Gurgaon: globalisation's latest glam doll. 3 } STREET KIDS Death of a newspaper boy They have black eyes and smiles which spread like sunshine: but their hands have shrivelled, and so have their bodies, and they are out there in the cold, homeless, imagined communities of an imagined homeland. Street kids: they work at the traffic crossings, as child labourers, ragpickers, hounded by the police, brutalised, packed in ugly, perverse juvenile homes, even adult prisons, left to die in a democracy where President Kalam says that the children are the future of the nation. Which children? Of which country? 4 } FEMALE FOETICIDE One by one they went away The longing for the male child and scorn for the girl in India has drastically increased in the last decade, more so in prosperous parts of the country. Rich states like Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat, among others, witnessed a drastic decline in the child sex ratio from 900 girls for every 1000 boys in 1991 to less than 8oo girls in 2001. Fatehgarh Sahib, a district in Punjab, has the lowest child sex ratio with 754 girls for every 1,000 boys. In Haryana's Kurukshetra district, the child sex ratio has fallen from 860 girls to just 770. In Rajkot, the decline was from 914 in 1991 to 844 in 2001. Posh southwest Delhi shows an abysmal child sex ratio of less than 845 girls. In the last 10 years, 70 districts in 16 states and union territories have recorded a 50-point plus decline in the sex ratio. The ratio has gone down to 800 girls for every 1,000 boys. Amniocentesis, originally intended as a prenatal test, is now widely used, illegally, to determine the sex of the foetus and abort it if it happens to be female. But the medical and political apparatus doesn't care. 5 } RIGHT TO SHELTER It's a rich man's world When the Congress-ncp government in Maharashtra tied its laces for the ridiculously ambitious plan of turning Mumbai into Shanghai, slums were the first casualty: 90,000 people marooned and their homes bulldozed. The poor found shelter under the open sky in graveyards and garbage dumps. When they protested, led by Medha Patkar, they were brutally crushed. Whenever the question of encroachment on public land was raised, the poor were targeted, as also in Delhi and other metros. Hundreds of homes razed overnight, thousands rendered homeless in a flash. For the hard working, honest, poor people who run the unorganised sector of India's neo-liberalised cities, and serve elite households as domestic and skilled workers, it was yet another signal that this democracy does not belong to them. Compare their tragedy with the massive media and political attention for the 18,000 swanky, illegal structures being demolished in Delhi! _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
