J’ai lu un article aujourd’hui. En anglais. Pour vous dire.
Le journaliste Praful Bidwai dresse le portrait de son pays. Je vous en glisse ici quelques extraits.
[…]
In the Institute’s Global Hunger Index, India belongs to the bottom fourth of the world’s nations, with a rank of 94 (among 118 countries). This score is even lower than India’s relative Human Development Index rank (126 of 177 countries). India’s hunger index rank is way below China’s (47), and lower even than Pakistan’s (88). (In HDI, by contrast, India stands six ranks higher than Pakistan.) One reason for this abysmal state of affairs is that almost one-half of India’s children are malnourished and underweight.
Qui disait que la Chine et l’Inde deviendront les deux prochaines puissances mondiales?
Besides chronic hunger, another index of India’s poverty has recently received media exposure through a report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Based on National Sample Survey data, this shows that a frightening 77 per cent of our population lives on a pathetic Rs.20 (half a U.S. dollar) a day. This brings out the depth and pervasiveness of poverty in India far more starkly than official “poverty line” numbers, measured in calorie consumption, based on extrapolation from the prices of a certain basket of goods.
À New Delhi, avec 20 roupies, tu peux consommer 4 chais. ou 4 cigarettes. (Les plus futés d’entre vous ont devinés que le prix d’un chai ou d’une cigarette est identique. Bravo.) Le repas complet le moins cher que j’ai trouvé à Delhi (roti et ragma shawla, qui consiste en un peu de riz et un plat de beans en sauce…) coûte 18 roupies. Ok, les Delhiites paient sûrement moins cher… mais quand même.
The 77 per cent translates into some 840 million citizens. Their subsistence is simply incompatible with any notion of human-level existence with dignity. Clearly, we are condemning the vast majority of people to live wretched, impaired or disabled lives under which they cannot develop their elementary potential as human beings.
840 millions de personnes sur 1100 ne mangent qu’un plat par jour dans un pays qu’on qualifie d’économie émergeante.
L’article est disponible ici… et voici, simplement pour votre bon plaisir, trois autres petits paragraphes…
[L'auteur de The Second Partition: Fault-Lines in India’s Democracy], Patwant Singh describes “how little the destitute and the deprived, the homeless… the ill and malnourished, the oppressed and abused, count for in democratic India. The hospitals turn away the grievously hurt, refuse to admit mothers so they can deliver their babies…. The slum-dwellers who painstakingly built their homes with torn gunny bags, discarded scraps of plywood… pieces of tin, tarpaulin or whatever, can find their homes burnt to the ground overnight in mysterious fires or bulldozed within hours by municipal authorities. And then, lo and behold, apartment buildings start coming up…”
The author speaks angrily of the elite’s “inhuman indifference to the agony and despair of fellow humans”. He asks: “Does it stem from the absence of intelligent thinking…? Is it possible that the genius of India’s people… cannot implement a nationwide food-for-work programme that can put the poor to work, feed them and rekindle hope in them?”
Says Patwant Singh: “Of course Indians have the capabilities and … experience to deal with difficult problems.” But to do this, he argues, India will have to reverse its Second Partition – between the privileged classes, and the “hundreds of millions of people put to the outer fringes by their affluent counterparts”.
