India Addresses Poverty Situation...Or not?

Finally! We've been learning about a lot of the problems in India but have yet to see many resolutions to the problems we inspect; however, it seems as though India is finally taking action against the immense poverty that wracks the nation. According to Any Madgavkar of The Economic Times, "India has had encouraging success in reducing extreme poverty: the official poverty rate has halved from 45% in 1994 to 22% in 2012. It's time to set the country's sights on a new horizon, helping as many as 580 million people build a more economically empowered life."

A research institute, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), has recently developed an "Empowerment Line, a new measure of the consumption required for an average Indian to fulfill eight basic needs: food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, healthcare, education, and social security." Madgavakar believes that extreme poverty can be eliminated by the year 2022 if India chooses to focus on job creation and higher productivity. This is a menacing task but the author believes that three tasks must be accomplished in order to eradicate the current poverty situation. First, "India needs to add another 115 million non-farm jobs over the next decade, with the manufacturing and construction sectors, along with labour-intensive services, such as tourism, forming the backbone. Second, India's farms need to double their rate of productivity growth rate in order to bring farm yields in line with those in other emerging Asian countries. And lastly, India needs to revamp the way it delivers basic services so that every rupee of increased public spending can go further."

Ideally, these should be manageable tasks for India; however, with the immense corruption within the government, can we really believe that this is in India's near future?


http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/comments-analysis/india-from-poverty-to-empowerment/articleshow/30705158.cms


Is India really up to the task of altering some of its foundational industries to ensure that each person is entitled to human dignity? Why or why not?


The fact that this situation is being addressed, however, is definitely a step in the right direction. Is this an "Westernization" of culture that is accompanying industrialization in modern-day India?