Overall
goals & statistics
Updated Oct0
9
Two million slum children die
every year
The Observer, Sunday 4
October 2009
A devastating report by Save the Children, due
out on 05 Oct 09, accuses the country of failing to provide
adequate healthcare for the impoverished majority of its one
billion people. While the World Bank predicts that India's economy
will be the fastest-growing by next year and the country is an
influential force within the G20, World Health Organisation
figures show it ranks 171st out of 175 countries for public
health spending.
The Save the Children report says nearly 9 million children die
worldwide every year before the age of five. India has the
highest number of deaths, with China fifth. The charity
accuses the world's leaders of a scandalous failure to meet the
Millennium Development Goals, agreed in 2000, to cut child
mortality by two- thirds between 1990 and 2015 and calls for a
sharp increase in health spending.
Child mortality rates have doubled in India's slums. In Rajasthan,
Surma lost her son Parmesh to easily preventable diarrhoea at only
four years old. Source: Save the Children
Link to this video
Nearly two million children under five die every
year in India – one every 15 seconds – the highest number
anywhere in the world. More than half die in the month after birth
and 400,000 in their first 24 hours. Malnutrition, neonatal
diseases, diarrhoea and pneumonia are the major causes of death.
Poor rural states are particularly affected by a dearth of health
resources. But even in the capital, Delhi, where an estimated 20%
of people live in slums, the infant mortality rate is reported to
have doubled in a year, though city authorities dispute this.
Save the Children says millions of mothers and
their babies are simply not getting the skilled medical care they
need, and the poor, in particular, have been left behind. "For
many poor parents and their children, seeking medical help is a
luxury and health services are often too far away," said Shireen
Miller, its head of policy and advocacy in India. "The
difference between rich and poor is huge. In a city like Delhi it
is more stark because we have got state-of-the-art hospitals and
women giving birth under flyovers. The health service has failed
to deliver. They are supposed to reach the poorest, but they have
not."
India's state healthcare system is supposed to
be open to all, offering access to government-run hospitals. The
reality is that, while government hospitals often offer high
standards of care, they can be overcrowded, and if they are short
of the required medicines patients are asked to pay for them
themselves. In the meantime, private health care has surged and
now accounts for the majority of India's medical provision, giving
access to world-class facilities for those who can pay or who can
afford private insurance premiums.
According to the UK India Business Council,
about 50 million middle-class Indians can afford private
healthcare – a growing number but still a tiny fraction of the
overall population – while the country still lags behind
other developed countries, with only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000
people compared with a global average of 4. Many
slum-dwellers are too far from hospitals to make use of their
facilities, because they cannot afford to use private
auto-rickshaws to reach them and there is no public transport.
Instead they turn to quack doctors – a slightly cheaper option,
but because they are unregulated and notoriously unreliable, one
fraught with dangers.
According to the report, the national mortality
rate for under-fives in the poorest fifth of the population is 92
in 1,000 compared with 33 for the highest fifth. The national
average is 72.
Delhi's health minister, Kiran Walia,
has blamed migration into the city for its problems, but many
poorer families simply feel that they are shut out by the system.
Selma Shakil's son, Muzzamil, died in July after she was turned
away from a government hospital. He was a year old. She sat on the
hard wooden bed in the tiny room in Bhagwanpura that is home to
her two surviving children and her crippled husband and dabbed at
her eyes with her headscarf. "It was shattering for us. We were so
happy when he was born, he was so happy and playful. I would give
everything to get him back, but we can't," said Shakil, 27.
========================
PAKISTAN
STATS
From
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23559
by
Adaner Usmani Znet 06Jan10
Extract
An appalling 85% of the population lives on less than
$2/day.[22] With some 49% of the government's revenue locked up in debt
repayments,[23] and the ink fresh on a massive IMF bailout package
(repayments start in 2011-2012), further austerity and retrenchment are
almost certainly in store.[24]
Refs
22
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=203404.
23
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=202866.
24
http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=25541.
More
from the link
========================
India's
Millennium Development Goals
unlikely to be met
Times of India 12 Sep08
Eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
were adopted at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. Halfway into the
period timeline (2000-15), India seems to be slipping on most of
the goals. The global economic slowdown, climate change and rising
food prices will make the task of meeting the goals even more
difficult.
Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
The problem of hunger persists in India with
over 200 million people lacking access
to enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. Over 50
percent of the children in the country are malnourished and of those,
about 20 percent are severely malnourished.
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Within primary schools, gender parity is at 95 percent in six
out of 10 regions.
In India, however, lack of access to water and sanitation has an
adverse effect on girls' attendance at secondary schools.
Since almost two-thirds of the world's 110 million children out of
school are girls, ensuring their education is a top development
priority. Also the gap between men and women is higher among rural
areas and for Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
In India, socially debilitating customs
and patriarchal mindsets curtail women's basic rights. Fear and
shame prevent many women from speaking out against the declining sex
ratio, foeticide, infanticide, domestic violence, dowry deaths, rape,
sexual harassment, HIV/AIDS vulnerability Issues and trafficking in
women and children.
Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
In India, 1.7 million infants die every
year and an additional one million die before they reach their fifth
birthday. More than 64 percent of infant deaths occur in the
first month of life and a majority of them die in the first week.
The main killers are asphyxia, premature birth, diarrhoea, pneumonia
and other respiratory infections. Around 30
per cent of newborn babies have low birth weight and therefore
face high risk of death.
Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Reduction of maternal mortality depends on the availability of
skilled attendants at birth. Currently in India, skilled providers
attend only 42 percent of births. In India, while the target value of
maternal mortality is 109, the 2001-2003 figure was 301. By current
trends, India is unlikely to meet the target on maternal health".
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS malaria and other diseases (public health)
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India;
each year over 1.8 million people contract
TB and about 450,000 die from it. Also one in 630 people is
infected by malaria. According to reports of the National Aids Control
Organisation (NACO), India had 2.3 million
people infected with HIV.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability (water & sanitation)
Around 40 million households in rural
areas do not have a safe source for drinking water and over 100
million rural households live without access to sanitation facilities.
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for
development
India in the past few years has seen the initiation of Multilateral
Debt Relief Initiative and with recent findings urging developed countries
to increase development assistance to meet committed targets by $18
million a year till 2010, India may meet its financial aid requirement
---------------------------------
From Open Letter to PM M SIngh by academics/Activists (incl N Chomsky)
See Sanhati.com or my email dated 09 Nov 09 to ND (about
the uncaring state)
Grinding poverty and abysmal living
conditions has been the lot of India’s Adivasi population together with
increasing state violence since the early 1990s…
We fear that the government’s offensive is an attempt to crush popular
resistance in order to facilitate the entry of corporations and to pave
the way for unbridled exploitation of the natural resources of these
regions.
“The post-colonial Indian State, both in the Nehruvian and neo-liberal
variants, has failed miserably to solve the basic problems of poverty,
employment, housing, primary health care, education, inequality and social
discrimination of the people of the country.
About 77 percent of the Indian population
live on less than Rs. 20 a day; that
is less than US $2 in purchasing power parity terms.
Even 62 years after political independence,
only about 42 percent of Indian households have
access to electricity. About 80
percent of the households (a staggering 800 million people) lack safe
drinking water…”.
[More in
www.sanhati.com]
==============================
Development statistics
Time
magazine reported in 05 Oct 2009
that "110 million households
[about 600 million people or 55% of India’s population] remain without
access to a toilet and ¾ of the country’s surface water is contaminated by
human and agri waste. More than a half a million children die each year
from preventable water- and sanitation related diseases like diarrhea,
cholera and hepatitis
---------------------------
[Devinder Sharma,
India's poverty line is really a starvation line
Countercurrents.com 23 Dec 09
and ZNet 01 Jan 10]
A
report by an expert group headed by Suresh Tendulkar, formerly chairman of
Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, now estimates poverty at 37.2
per cent, an increase of roughly 10 per cent over the earlier estimates of
27.5 per cent in 2004-05. This means, an additional 110 million people
have slipped below the poverty line in just four years.
The number of poor is multiplying at a time when the number of
billionaires has also increased. Economic growth however does not reflect
the widening economic disparities. For instance, the economic wealth of
mere 30-odd rich families in India is equivalent to one third of the
country's growth. The more the wealth accumulating in the hands of these
30 families, the more will be country's economic growth. A handful of rich
therefore hide the ugly face of growing poverty
If these 30 families were to migrate to America and Europe, India's GDP,
which stands at 7.9 per cent at present, will slump to 6 per cent. And if
you were to discount the economic growth resulting from the 6th pay
commission, which is 1.9 per cent of the GDP, India's actual economic
growth will slump to 4 per cent.
Anyway, the complicated arithmetic hides more than what it reveals.
Poverty estimates were earlier based on nutritional criteria, which means
based on the monthly income required to purchase 2,100 calories in the
urban areas and 2,400 calories in the rural areas. Over the years, this
measure came in for sharp criticism, and finally the Planning Commission
suggested a new estimation methodology based on a new basket of goods that
is required to survive - includes food, fuel, light, clothing and
footwear.
Accordingly, the Tendulkar committee has worked out that 41.8 per cent
of the population or approximately 450 million people survive on a monthly
per capita consumption expenditure of Rs 447. In other words, if you break
it down to a daily expenditure, it comes to bare Rs 14.50 paise.
I wonder how can the rural population earning
more than Rs 14 and less than say even Rs 25 a day be expected to be over
the poverty line. It is quite obvious therefore that the entire effort is
still to hide the poverty under a veil of complicating figures.
India's poverty line is actually a euphemism for a
starvation line
Counter Punch November 20, 2009
Labor Strife in India -
A Hindu Version of the UAW
By DAVID MACARAY (a
LA playwright and former union rep and author of “It’s Never Been
Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”
"Despite
the economic gains India has made over the last thirty years, India is
nowhere close to establishing even a fledgling “middle-class”. The
reality of India is that poverty and misery continue to haunt the
sub-continent.
The
reality: 400 million Indians are illiterate, universal rural
electrification (promised to be in place by 1990) is still out of reach,
infant mortality rates and child malnutrition are alarming problems, and
non-union factory workers are still being exploited. "
Income
statistics:
After
60 years of independence, it is ‘shameful’ to find over
a third of the
people earn less than $1 a day and can barely meet their basic needs while
over two-thirds earn $2 or less a day.
[In fact, the
Financial
Times
online (30 Jan 08) estimated that up to 90% of the population makes do
with $2 or less.]
While the growth rate
has been high, the
benefits of growth have accrued mainly to the cities while the rural
sector continues to stagnate.
80%
of Indians live on just or under Rs 20 a day (Arjun Sengupta Committee Report).
See Badri
Raina, Hindu Terrorism, ZNet 19Nov08
41.8 per cent of the population (about 450 million people) survive on a
monthly per capita consumption expenditure of Rs 447, that is, a bare Rs
14.50 a day (Tendulkar committee)
See Devinder Sharma
article above.
The
World Bank reported in Oct08 that in 2005 an estimated
1.4 billion people in the ‘developing world’
lived on less than $1.25 a day, the
new measure for poverty line.
This figure is 400 million more than the Bank’s 2004 estimate of 985
million (less than a billion). Another 1.2
billion people live on between $1.25 and $2 a day. So 2.6 billion lived
on less than $2 a day in 2005. (See
WSWS.org ,
02 Sep 08)
The 2005 estimates are
based on surveys conducted in 116 countries and interviews with some 1.23
million households. Martin Ravallion and S Chen, of the World Bank’s
Development Research Group, in their study entitled, “The Developing
World is Poorer than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight
Against Poverty,” note that “Alas the incidence of poverty in
the world is higher than past estimates have suggested.”
The most dire conditions exist in Sub-Saharan Africa. After a
quarter-century (1981-2005: the percentage of people living in absolute
poverty in that region remained unchanged; some 50 percent of its
population subsists on $1.25 a day or less.
The actual number of
the extremely poor in Sub-Saharan Africa almost doubled, from 200 million
in 1981 to about 380 million in 2005. “If the trend continues, a third of
the world’s poor will live in
Africa by 2015. Average consumption among poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa
stood at a meagre 70 cents a day in 2005.”
In South Asia,
numbers living on less than $1.25 per day has decreased from 60 to 40
percent over 1981-2005, but because of extremely uneven economic
development, the numbers of destitute
increased from 420 million in 1981 to 455 million in 2005
For India, over a third live on less than $1.25 a day and over
two-thirds on less than $2 a day.
East Asia
was the poorest region in the world in 1981. In China the number of people
surviving on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 prices dropped from 835 million
in 1981 to 207 million in 2005. A quarter of a century ago, the report
states, “China’s incidence of poverty (measured by the percentage below
$1.25 per day) was roughly twice that for the rest of the developing
world; by the mid-1990s, the Chinese poverty rate had fallen well below
average.”
Health & education statistics
i)
On the Global
Hunger Index (GHI), a measure of poverty & hunger,
India ranks way down at 96 among 119 developing
countries included in the report of the Washington Food
Institute (Rediffusion News, 12 Nov 2007).
Even Nepal is four notches higher at 92, Pakistan 88, Myanmar
68, Sri Lanka 69, China 47.
The report warned "India's
GHI indicates alarming levels of hunger.
The lack
of improvement in India's GHI
ii)
According to
a UNICEF report (Apr 2006),
40% of the world's malnourished children are Indians
While overall child malnutrition has declined,
1 in 2 Indian
rural children still go hungry.
70% of the children are anaemic. 6000 children die a day.“
According
to the first-ever India State Hunger Index
(ISHI), Madhya Pradesh has the most severe
level of hunger in the country, followed by Jharkhand and
Bihar.
Punjab and Kerala scored the best on the index. The ISHI measures hunger
on three leading indicators and combines them into one index. The three
indicators are prevalence of child malnutrition, rates of child mortality,
and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient.
When Indian states are compared to countries in the 2008 Global Hunger
Index, Madhya Pradesh ranks between
Ethiopia and Chad.
Punjab,
the best-performing state, ranks below Gabon, Honduras, and Vietnam.
Amartya Sen wrote (Argumentative Indian, Penguin 2005):
"Half of all Indian children are chronically
undernourished and more than half of all adult women suffer from anaemia.
India’s record is among the very worst in the world….There are food mountains on the one hand
but the distribution system is inadequate.”
iii)
India has the largest
number of illiterates in the world.
Amartya Sen wrote there are not
enough primary schools and facilities available are often limited. Teachers
go absent, most when the children are from lower castes.
There’s a sharp class division between teachers and poorer families.
P. SAINATH
reported in CounterPunch (20 Mar 09) that
in 2008 India's Human
Development Index dropped
to 132
for 179 nations.
[It was 126 in 2006] Each year since 1990, the UN Development
Programme computes this index, as a part of its Human Development
Report. The
HDI
“looks beyond GDP to define well-being.” It is based on
1) a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy at birth);
2) education status (measured by adult literacy and enrolment in primary,
secondary and tertiary education).
3) GDP per capita measured in U.S. dollars at Purchasing Power Parity
(PPP).”
Little
Bhutan,
this tiny Himalayan nation, clocks a notch above us at 131. India also
lags behind the Republic of the Congo,
Botswana,
and Bolivia
(this last often called Latin America’s poorest nation). The Occupied
Territories of
Palestine
(torn by conflict for 60 years) are also ahead of us.
Sri Lanka,
devastated by war for over two decades, still logs in at 104 -- 28 rungs
above India.
Vietnam
suffered horrendous devastation in the 20-year war waged by the United
States. Decades after, its agriculture is yet to recover from lethal
bombing, and the destruction of its vegetation from deadly poisons. Yet
Vietnam clocks in at 114 wile China stands at 94.
iv)
Half the women are anaemic.
India leads the
world in the number of women dying in childbirth – 117,000 in 2005. This
means a maternal
mortality ratio of 450 deaths per 100,000 live births. The
Pakistan figure is 320, Sri Lanka 58 and China 45 (one tenth of India’s).
v)
17,000 farmers
committed suicide in 2006
and the total for the decade 1997-2006 was 166,000.The total
had exceeded 180,000 by 2008. It rose to nearly 200,000 a year later
http://www.counterpunch.com/sainath01222010.html