One has to just look across from a top floor of a multi-story apartment of Mumbai that symbolizes Indian's economic growth and see the shanty towns, slumps and abject poverty in which millions of poor live in worse conditions than rats, dogs and vermins living in gutters and sewers.
After 62 years of independence, India has achieved kuch nahi - nothing - for the 650 million Indian rural poor who live in abject poverty and cannot afford one meal a day, and are trapped in a miserable world without any prospects. They were poor 61 years ago and are even poorer now after 61 years despite India's rapid and steady economic growth of 8% for the last 10 years. Last year, the Asian Development Bank released a report confirming that despite the boom, the gap between the Indian rich and poor has widened beyond belief. One of the reasons for this gap is bad planning, failure to invest in health, education and social welfare, which has left hundreds of millions of poor Indians without any hope and dangerously low on survival prospects in their iniquitous society riddled with the Hindu caste system. The majority of these rural poor living in grinding poverty earn as little as 40 pence 80 US cents a day doing every menial job available when they migrate to towns and cities looking for work, and have to live in the worst slumps seen in the world. This poverty trap will never be broken in India as long as its poor are treated as untouchables and sub-humans.
India is fast becoming a shameless and gutless society following in the footsteps of Western insidious materialism and capricious capitalism. India's democratic system has miserably failed and let down its poor whereas it has immensely benefited the privileged few and rich. The wealthy and emerging middle classes are so oblivious of the miserable existence of the poor and do not even wish to look into the abject poverty in which they live. Indian Democracy is a deception and a delusion which has allowed lewdness, immorality and dishonesty to flourish for the benefit of the capitalists and dishonest politicians.
