As India toasts economic gains, 260 million poor left behind

By Tim Sullivan
The Associated Press

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"The Golden Year," a major newsweekly proclaimed in a recent cover story. "The Feel-good Year," another magazine declared. Politicians and headline writers battle it out for the most frequent mentions of the greatness of 2003.

The stock market is bouncing around near record highs, foreign exchange reserves have topped $100 billion and malls are being built by the dozen. India's growing middle class is coming into its own amid a surge in conspicuous consumption.

And India is celebrating with an orgy of self-congratulation.

"If it is good news, it must be India 2003," Deputy Prime Minister Lal Advani declared in a speech.

In a country still stereotyped as being little more than teeming slums and chanting holy men, columnists now offer advice on taking advantage of low interest rates to get home loans. But the teeming slums are still there, along with disease, rampant unemployment and an ever-widening divide between rich and poor. India's president counts 260 million Indians, one-quarter of the nation, as poor.

So some here wonder if the burst in Indian optimism — which ties together everything from a booming economy to a slick government ad campaign and excellent monsoon rains — simply forgets a large percentage of the country.

"They are advertising the 'shining India' and the $100 billion forex (foreign exchange) reserves and the big roads being constructed and the path of the great economic boom, etcetera," said Swami Agnivesh, a Hindu theologian and social activist. "All that gets falsified when we look at the conditions of the rock bottom 200 million people in this country."

Those conditions are often miserable. New Delhi alone has an estimated 200,000 homeless people. Across the country, there are 41.6 million people — four times the population of Belgium — registered at unemployment offices.

Over the past weekend, two dozen homeless people died of the cold in northern India, where temperatures dipped to 35 Fahrenheit — frigid for a nation where heat kills hundreds of people every summer. The government's response was to open a few shelters and to tell the homeless not to sleep on the pavement.

The upper tier of India's economy is forging ahead, fueled by a vibrant high-tech culture.

For India's newly rich, shopping for some of the most exclusive Western brands, there is little connection to the rural, agricultural world that most of the country still inhabits.

"Any Tom, Dick and Harry can buy Moët and Chandon," an Indian importer recently sniffed to the magazine India Today. The champagne, at $155 a bottle, is far more than millions of Indians earn in a month.

For the lower tier of the economy, things are far different.

The northeast Indian state of Assam was wracked by violence recently as ethnic Assamese attacked migrants from the poor, Hindi-speaking state of Bihar who had come to the region in search of work. More than 50 people were killed before the violence ended, and 3,000 Biharis fled to the protection of camps set up by the government.

Economists debate just how much India's economic surge actually benefits India's poor. Overall, though, many of the statistics look good. The per-capita income has reached $480, up from $370 just four years ago, and there's an economic growth rate of more than 7 percent.

In the quarter from July to September, the Indian economy recorded the fastest quarterly growth in five years, expanding by 8.4 percent, the government said Wednesday.

The government has celebrated the booming economy with a newspaper and television campaign highlighting what it calls "India Shining." The highly successful campaign has clearly helped drive the sudden surge in public optimism.

"You've never had a better time to shine brighter," promise the ads, filled with smiling, attractive, well-dressed Indians cheering everything from the robust stock market to better software jobs for women.

The well-packaged, multicolor advertisements are unusual for India's Hindu-nationalist government, which often heralds its successes with cheap-looking newspaper ads filled with headshots of various cabinet ministers.

The campaign "is about seizing the moment," said Prathap Suthan, national creative director for the Indian branch of Grey Worldwide, the agency behind the ads. "If you want to buy a car, this is the time. If you want to invest in the stock market, this is the time.

"Poverty and things like that, I don't think that's the way to look at it," he said. "I think the country is forging ahead."

The ads are aimed at "anyone who can read and write," he said.

That, perhaps more than anything, may reflect just how much of India is really shining, because although literacy rates have gone up in India in recent years, 35 percent of the country remains illiterate.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company