Reflections on India

After reading Sean Paul Kelley's "reflections on India" @ http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620 I had to sit down and collect my thoughts...Thanks Sean to make me go back to the blog board after a log gap.....

Sean started with "the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation"....When France and many others are backing India for UN SC seat.....UK's new government wants to please India for its looming economy and every American company dreams to open a office in India, to be called truly global...Sean must have faced some real tough days in India to pen this article and deny the facts....

Though I don't deny most of the observations made by Sean, but this writing is coming across more of his personal frustration of digesting the fact that ………How come a country without following the conventional western path of development of cleanliness, paranoidal hygiene, sophisticated infrastructure, discipline and the rest of it……..Is able to post 9% growth year on year, able to make billion dollar international acquisitions, able to make President Bush run around the whole globe as India’s brand ambassador for the nuclear deal, able to be the software and the back office hub for the whole of the word, including many companies in Texas, Sean’s home state….

For long, the western idea of efficiency, of order, of precision has been mouthed out loud. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list.So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.

Sean says…..”It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies…….. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number…….” I really want to know the names of the hotels where Sean faced that…..If Sean found it difficult to get a SIM card in India……then He should never try the same in Switzerland….As getting a pre-paid SIM card in Switzerland (among the top 10 most developed countries as per HDI) takes more documents then a visa application….let alone dreaming for a post-paid connection….To book a train ticket, Sean should have used the internet…..I will help you in all these mundane things next time Sean ! After living in a country where a few motor companies have fooled and destroyed the whole public transport system…I can imagine that, It must be difficult for Sean…..

But having said all of that….I accept all the other observations with the great ‘Indian’ humility…..Just give us a few more years….We are only 63 years old as a independent nation…..Americans took very many years to establish the basic civil rights for its citizens, even being a free nation from more than 200+ years….Europe has seen the worst plagues in the world in the past owing to unhygienic conditions……Even today America is the worst polluter and highest in per capita emissions……Income disparity is worse in America than India (Based on GINI coefficient)…

Comments and reflections like these are surely useful for us to tighten the grip further…..I will just request author’s like Sean to do a more intelligent comparison while writing their observation…..India, which is 14 times more populated than Ethiopia, with India’s wide cultural and linguist differences may not learn much with other references…..Those comparisons will only have editorial value for the sake of a eye catching headline....

Religion and Development : Hungry for Researchers....

In spite of the fact that more than 90% of the people in the world follow some or the other religious belief system, the academicians and researchers in the development field are still acting innocent towards the strong co-relation between religion, faith and international development. Human beings wear a plural personality. They wear the identity of their countries, castes, languages, gender, age etc. Development researchers and policy makers, try hard to find the common factors among communities and countries to unite them but often fail to do so because of this vast plurality. Belief in one or the other religion or faith is the only common factor running across the global population, which researchers fail to acknowledge.

Development studies has given birth to many wonderful development approaches in the last 60 years of its inception. Human beings are the center of all the development approaches. For any development approach to succeed in policy and practice, we need honest and selfless contribution from many human beings. Unfortunately no development approach came out with the mechanism to produce good, honest and dedicated human beings. Religion and faith have the answers to this, which development researchers are rarely daring to explore.

‘Display’ of ‘morality’ lies at the core of the current international development practice. North, after exploiting south for many years wants to act ‘moral’ in the form of a donor. Forced global governance equations keep this relationship going. Religion has the power and wisdom to convert this forced morality into the basic human nature but unfortunately development researchers are still contented with their triplet of economics, politics and anthropology. For example, there is very little, if any discussion in the mainstream development debate on the interrelation between religion and development. Though a few noble initiatives like ‘Religion and Development’ (RaD) research program in University of Birmingham are trying hard to carve a space in the mainstream development research arena, but largely this arena is still hungry for researchers...

Doctor, Please don’t kill me !!!!

Let me try to enter in a doctor’s clinic, Let me have a peep into his prescriptions and let me check the stocks of our druggists in India. Why they prescribe us a particular medicine? Why for a trivial running nose, our prescriptions run into four to five medicines? Why druggists are always eager to sell us a substitute?

Let me turn back some boring but very important pages of history. In 1970s, Hathi Committee was commissioned to study the operations of multinational drug companies vis-à-vis indigenous companies and public sector undertakings. The committee's recommendations, released in 1975, very strongly recommended issuing licenses for formulations of only 117 drugs which the committee considered sufficient for the treatment of the majority of diseases in India. Very recently WHO has added to the list based on the current scenarios of diseases in Indian environment and now that list contains around 450 essential drugs, which are sufficient for medication for all the possible diseases in Indian environment. BUT still today, In the absence of a clear, comprehensive and rational drug policy, we continue to see a distorted pattern of drug production and the proliferation of non-essential, irrational and harmful drugs. Indian markets are flooded with over 100,000 formulations; there is no system of central registration of these formulations.

Pharma sector is the only sector near to the “arms trade sector” to register profits of the order of thousands of percentages. Where do these profits go? Pfizer says it goes into the R&D. Do you believe this? I don’t. Apart from some proportion going in the R&D of new drugs, it goes into greasing the druggists and the doctors to prescribe these tons of non-essential and obsolete medicines in the huge unregulated markets like India.

A country where around 84 crore people live below Rs 20 a day, where only 35% of the population visit any form of formal medical practitioner, where even WHO has said that about 450 formulations can cover all the prevalent diseases in India, we have allowed more than hundred thousand formulations in the market. Even small and developing countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Brunie have tough regulations for non-essential medicines to be sold in their market let alone US and EU, which have banned them decades back. But we are a super generous nation. We welcome all and we have very kindly allowed all those obsolete and non-essential formulations to be sold in our Indian market. There is a huge list of these obsolete medicines which are banned in the international markets and even in the home countries of many pharma MNCs operating in India, but are being openly prescribed and sold in the Indian market.

Many steering and standing committees have been established to study and report the anomalies in the Indian drug market. All of them have recommended to stop this flood of non-essential and obsolete medicines immediately in the Indian market. Many of the reports have stated to the extent that these non-essential and obsolete medicines are killing more people in India than the diseases. But pharma companies with their huge profits have enough money to stop and twist these reports before they even reach to the roads leading to the Indian parliament.

I don’t know when and which government will have the guts to take any action on this powerful pharma lobby. Doctors of my country! Let’s defeat this lobby by killing the demand for these non-essential and obsolete drugs. Please don’t prescribe me these drugs, next time I come to you with a sour throat. Doctor, I always see a life saver behind that white coat. Please don’t kill me.

ये पेंसिल है या, बस एक लकड़ी का टुकड़ा
मुझे क्या पता, मैं तो ठहरा कबाड़ी

तमन्ना उठी कि इस पेंसिल को भीचूं
और आज इससे कुछ लकीरें तो खीचूं

लकीरें मेरी तुमसे ये पूंछती हैं
ये क्यों नासमझ हैं, ये क्यों बेतुकी हैं

मेरी इन लकीरों की चीखों को सुन लो
कचरे से मुझको उठा के तो देखो

चुनता हूं प्लास्टिक की बोतल और पन्नी
मुझे पेंसिल और कॉपी पकड़ा कर तो देखो

नंगे पैरों बहुत चल लिया अब
स्कूल के जूते पहना कर तो देखो

कलेक्टर ना सही, तो कुछ तो बनूँगा
छोटा सही, एक मौक़ा दे के तो देखो

-- शांतनु गुप्ता

Sam says: Let's redefine Human Development

Prof. Alex asks the class to introduce themselves and tell the class more about their countries. Sam and Simmi are very excited to tell about their countries.

Simmi: I am Simmi. I am from Norway. I worked for World Bank for 7 years. My country has a very high Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.968.

Sam: I am Sam. I am from India. I worked for a grass root NGO for 6 years. My country has a low HDI of 0.619

Prof. Alex: Can any one of you explain, what is HDI for the understanding of the class

Simmi (Jumps in): The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index combining normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring human development as per UNDP.

Alex: Thanks Simmi

Simmi continues…: The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of "human development", which usually also implies to determine whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country.

Sam: But…….what about happiness, what about suicide rates, what about family cohesiveness, what about problems created because of over consumption and what about per capita CO2 emissions. Does HDI account for these?

Sam continues: Western societies create labels and cram them up the media pipes and bombard us with those labels of third world, poor, bad living conditions, dirty, uncouth. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list. So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.

Sam continues: Let’s redefine the HDI today. Let’s include the positive measures like family cohesiveness per capita, happiness per capita, spiritual development per capita in HDI. Let’s include the negative measures like suicide rates per capita, money used for arms per capita, CO2 emissions per capita in our measures of HDI. Let’s redefine our narrow limits of rationality and correctness. Let’s be free from the set boundaries of political and academic correctness and achieve the greater heights of real human development.

With a sense of revolution in the head, Sam wakes up. It was a nice dream and Sam is looking forward to making it a reality.

Sam in "Human Rights" Lecture....

In this town of animals and birds, the most ‘in thing’ these days is to learn about the debates happening in the human society. They wonder all the time that what are human beings studying and researching in their universities these days ? Today Prof. Simmi, the lamb will take the lecture on “Human Rights” and the best student of the class, Sam, the chicken is all ready with his questions.

Simmi: Morning Students ! These days human beings are talking a lot about Human Rights. They say - Human rights refers to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.

Sam: Wow ! that’s Nice…

Sam: But why is this topic so ‘in’ these days ?

Simmi: mmm....That’s lil difficult to say, but it seems they are divided between North and the South OR you can say Developed and Developing. So the developed countries have exploited the people and environment enough to develop themselves and now they wanna dump the concept of human rights to the whole mankind to feel good and to wash off their sins.

Sam: Wow ! that’s clever…

Simmi: Lots of international laws are passed for the universal achievement of human rights.

Sam: Wow ! How inclusive…

Sam: But what about the women, lower caste people, physically and mentally handicapped people ? Are they also included in these human rights ?

Simmi: Yes they are. It’s for everyone irrespective of caste, creed, sex and physical or mental status.

Sam: Wow ! How Just !

Sam: But then why are we NOT included in this ? They beat us, kill us and eat us all the time?

Simmi: My Dear, That’s why it’s called “Human” Rights. They know how to play with the language.

Sam: Shit ! That’s mean

Simmi: Let them learn to at least respect each other. And then we can expect anything else from them.

Sam: Ok...Let’s Wait

Let me fly....

With mixed and confused feelings I boarded the flight from Bangalore, India. In last 8 years I flew many times from Bangalore as an IT & Business Consultant. So why am I anxious this time? British Airways is a reliable airline, they serve decent food. ..So what is it that’s troubling me?

After spending 8 years in the corporate world I am going back to the classrooms as a student. I am making a paradigm shift from the corporate sector to the development sector and going to pursue my MA in Governance and Development in IDS, University of Sussex. Will I be able to adjust, behave and mold myself as a student? With all these mixed feelings I landed in Heathrow airport and from then on it’s a different life…..

The first week started with some introductory sessions on Banking, Security, Union, Career services etc…some informative, some repetitive. Later in the week we were greeted and addressed by International office, Vice Chancellor and his team. It gave me a feeling of being important and helped me to get into the student mode a little quicker. Then came the vibrant Fresher’s fair to lighten the environment further on a nice sunny day. The week concluded with a grand party for the international students at Brighton Dome, where we got the opportunity to meet city’s mayor and many more students. By now I have started trying my amateur cooking, hands on laundry and other daily chores.

Just before writing these thoughts I have finished one of my course readings. Without notice, without effort, I am already a student…..tracking timetables, running from one lecture room to other, taking notes, meeting professors and new students and remembering loads of new names of fellow student from various nationalities.

I am enjoying being a student after 8 years. I am experiencing that university offers various means of expression. Academics, social clubs, sports clubs, theater groups, student union….there is so much to do in this one year. I am feeling as if I got wings after eight years of captivity in a corporate jail.

Let me fly…and enjoy my flight.