When the exhausted world is fast asleep
Then at the new-dusk of the New Year
We too shall celebrate
Our New Year
– Anant Bhatnagar in
"Hum bhi manayenge naya saal"
The battle of statistics is depressing in the Indian intellectual arena. Last year, the N C Saxena panel of the Ministry of Rural Development reported that half of the country's population was below the poverty line. A member of the Indian Planning Commission then reasoned that 80 percent of the rural and 64 percent of the urban population could qualify as poor. Meanwhile, the Arjun Sengupta Committee found that about 836 million people (77 percent of the country's population) subsisted on INR 20 a day or less. It corroborated the findings of the National Sample Survey Organisation, which calculated that the average Indian spent just INR 440 or less on food each month. According to the estimates of the World Bank, 41.6 percent of Indians – the decimal point is perhaps for technocratic authenticity – live on less than USD 1.25 a day, the international poverty line. These are tough numbers to take in alongside an aperitif.
A few other figures can enliven the dinner conversation in metropolitan India. Karan Johar's My Name Is Khan grossed around INR 500 million in India and about INR 900 million worldwide by the end of its opening week. A fortnight before the national budget, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee boasted that the Indian economy could cross the 7.2 percent growth rate estimate for the 2009-10 fiscal year. Along the same lines, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called upon trade and industry to take growth figures to double digits. Counting on that uplifting number, India – believed to be the world's largest buyer of weaponry presently – is planning to spend some USD 100 billion upgrading its military over the next decade.
Then, there are other numbers and facts no one wants to mention. One out of every two Indian women and children are malnourished. Crime is rampant. The Maoist insurgency is spreading like a prairie fire, and the communal mindset has consumed the cosmopolitan Gujaratis and Maharashtrians. Sensitivity for the agony of the oppressed has hit rock bottom: Colin Gonsalves, a Delhi-based lawyer, noted recently that the average conviction rate in cases of atrocities against Dalits has sunk to one percent.