India's rural reality
India's rural reality is gloomy, and the people came in drove that helped ousting the previous BJP led government. The article published in The Toronto Star describes what is the harsh reality that millions of poor are facing in India. The writer provided some painful real life examples, especially in Andhra Pradesh where many farmers in the recent years had committed suicide due to mounting debt and the overall desperation from poverty. Please read this article from the following location: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1085264104990&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
A copy of this article is posted below:
India's rural reality
Far from a personality contest, election was about impoverished masses venting their frustrations
MARTIN REGG COHN
OGLAPUR, India — The earth is cracked after three years of drought, the roads are potholed after decades of neglect and the electricity is blacked out from one day to the next.
To survive, people eke out a living on barely $2 a day.
Ramaiah Kanukuntla couldn't manage even that. Rather than cast his ballot to defeat his government this month, the 40-year-old farmer consumed a plastic container of deadly pesticide to take his life.
He died by the village water well, leaving behind his wife and three children — and 150,000 rupees (about $4,600) in debts.
The first rumblings of the political earthquake that struck India this month emanated from thousands of sunbaked farming villages like this one. Kanukuntla's death was part of an epidemic of suicides in the state of Andhra Pradesh, 1,200 kilometres south of the national capital, New Delhi.
Overwhelmed by debt and despair, as many as 3,000 farmers are estimated to have killed themselves in the state since 1997, according to newly elected Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, who made these people's plight a major campaign issue.
The election outcome stunned much of India's urban elite, but came as no surprise to farmers at the bottom of the social ladder.
India's rural masses make up 70 per cent of the country's 1 billion population, and they voted decisively for the Congress party led by Sonia Gandhi — whose nominee for prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was sworn in yesterday with his party's coalition allies.
The plight of farmers like Kanukuntla should have served as an early warning to incumbent state and national politicians that a seismic shift was taking place on the ground.
Now, the new Congress-led government is vowing to heed those concerns by stressing economic development "with a human face."
For all the fuss of the last week, when the media and the outside world focused on the political intrigue in the capital — would Sonia claim the mantle of the Gandhi dynasty as the widow of her slain husband, Rajiv, or would she nominate Singh in her place? — the election was about something more fundamental.
Rather than a personality contest, it was a protest vote by an impoverished people.
Though the Congress party garnered the greatest number of votes in a fractured contest, it still claimed only 145 out of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha, or People's Assembly — hardly a resounding mandate.
Only by building on the strength of its coalition partners among regional parties, and allied Communist parties, could Congress claim the right to rule in a minority parliament.
In New Delhi, Singh emphasized that he would focus on agriculture, health care and education — areas that he claimed were neglected by the previous government. In villages like this one, the cry for change has finally attracted the attention of politicians.
Indeed, the political tumult in Andhra Pradesh was a microcosm of change across the country. In retrospect, the pesticide deaths of farmers like Kanukuntla presaged the political demise of incumbents who neglected the grassroots. Voters had run out of patience — and money.
"We couldn't recover our investment in seeds and fertilizer because we haven't had a good crop to pay the costs," said Kanukuntla's widow, Sarojana, 35, as neighbours gathered under a mourning tent last week to mark his death. "We couldn't pay our electricity bills and with no money we had to use oil lamps."
Despite such scenes of rural gloom, the campaign slogan dreamed up by India's governing Bharatiya Janata Party boasted shamelessly of "India Shining."
While former prime minister Atal Vajpayee claimed credit for recent economic growth on the national campaign trail, his regional coalition partner in Andhra Pradesh state, chief minister Chandrababu Naidu trumpeted his own achievements.
From his base in the nearby state capital, Hyderabad, Naidu cast himself as India's prophet of "e-government" services and a poster boy for India's high-tech revolution.
After all, he had wooed software companies with tax incentives and cemented his reputation with gleaming steel-and-glass towers that sprung up in his new IT park, famously dubbed Cyberabad. Dell Computers and Microsoft have set up sprawling call centres in air-conditioned offices, complete with their own power supply.
The internationally renowned Naidu, who proudly called himself the state's "CEO," promptly privatized the state electrical utility and slashed subsidies. He dazzled big-shot visitors like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, and won plaudits from the World Bank.
But his own voters didn't buy it. They saw Naidu's government as pro-rich, pro-business and pro-urban.
Beyond the confines of the capital, dirt-poor farmers worried more about the rising price of power than the government's hollow boasts that mobile phones were in abundance, or that foreign exchange reserves had reached new records. Village life — and death can provide a grim reality check on national political slogans.
"These are the killing fields," says Pallepadu Damoder, head of the Sarvodaya development group that helps local farmers, as he leafs through a stack of files detailing dozens of recent suicides.
"The mental tension is too much for them. They can't get any more bank loans, so they go to outside moneylenders who put more pressure on them."
It was the same story at Pembarthi, a neighbouring village 120 kilometres from Hyderabad, where Bushi Enugala killed himself last year.
Gathered outside their whitewashed home beside tamarind and banyan trees where he grew rice and cotton, his surviving family cursed Naidu's government for selling out farmers while seducing the World Bank.
"The cotton is the reason why my son killed himself, we didn't make any money or even recover our investment," said his mother, Aljama Enugala, 50, fingering the thin gold bangles on her slender arms.
"Everyone was asking for the money back."
Unable to repay the 50,000 rupees ($1,500) in debts that had piled up, her son excused himself from the supper table one night and drank a bottle of pesticide in the other room before staggering back in agony.
"I want to end my life," he told her.
For his surviving brother, Venkat Enugala, 27, there was no question of whom to blame.
Naidu's state government sacrificed the welfare of farmers because it thought the future was urban high-tech, not backward agricultural labour.
"People in the cities can't sleep without their air-conditioning, but here we sleep under a tree," said Enugala bitterly.
"The government was wasting its money on beautifying the city with gardens, instead of channelling the money to development and roadwork."In Hyderabad, not surprisingly, the former chief minister has his defenders within the confines of Cyberabad, a gated community with guards and barbed wire to keep out visitors.
An employee at the Dell call centre who would give only his first name, Bikram, said he voted for Naidu because India needs to move beyond its agricultural base to build up its information technology sector.
"He did everything for young people, and he brought foreign investment to Andhra Pradesh," said 21-year-old Bikram.
"Agriculture alone can't support our country.... If IT offices go down, India is back to rags."
Yet despite all the publicity given to Naidu's transformation of Hyderabad into a hub for high-tech companies, information technology still accounts for only a fraction of India's economic activity and employment.
The vast majority of Indian voters are villagers for whom the price of staples, cooking oil and electricity matter more than prophesies of improved services from e-government.
The upheaval across the country followed a similar pattern.
In rural India, where prosperity is measured in bullock carts, not mobile phones, people took out their frustrations on incumbent governments at the state and national levels.
In India, the new economy can't leave the old economy too far behind. Reddy, the Congress politician who defeated Naidu as chief minister in Andhra Pradesh, won votes by promising free electricity and debt relief to rural farmers.
But the roles were reversed in neighbouring Karnataka state, where an incumbent Congress party that had helped build up Bangalore, the state capital, into another software hub was also trounced at the polls because of a similar epidemic of suicides.
In fact, there was no detectable pro-Congress wave sweeping the country. Despite the electoral upset that brought Gandhi's party to power in New Delhi, Congress not only lost in Karnataka but also was toppled from power in three other state governments in elections held several months earlier.
Taken together, the mixed results suggest that Indians were casting a protest vote against incumbent governments, rather than offering a strong mandate to Gandhi's Congress party.
Indeed, India's economic and political challenges are so entrenched as to make it difficult for any government to stay in power at the state or national level beyond one or two terms, analysts say.
"There's a strong anti-incumbency vote," says Jayaprakash Narayan, head of the Lok Satta (People Power) movement in Hyderabad.
"The logic is inevitable, because governments in this country are incapable of delivering, even with the best of intentions, because of strong structural reasons," he adds.
With poverty so deeply entrenched, it can take years for a new government to achieve progress. But voters are impatient for results, if only because they are too desperately poor to wait.
"You're not able to deliver, and therefore you're thrown out," Narayan says. "They are angry at whoever is in office."
Narayan argues that honesty is almost impossible in Indian politics today because ordinary voters have such high expectations despite the daunting economic challenges.
They demand good governance, improved health and better education without cutbacks.
Against that backdrop, India's new prime minister has his work cut out for him.
Singh is recognized as the father of India's economic reforms, which he initiated as finance minister from 1991 to '96.
He was vilified at the time by the leftist parties for daring to deregulate the economy, but the Communist politicians who are now backing his government say he has their trust.
For Singh, widely respected as an honest and plain-speaking politician, squaring the circle will be a daunting task in the world's biggest democracy, where its 1 billion people are as impatient as they are impoverished.
Against this backdrop, India's new prime minister has his work cut out for him. Voters are not opposed to reform, but they object to unfairness.
A copy of this article is posted below:
India's rural reality
Far from a personality contest, election was about impoverished masses venting their frustrations
MARTIN REGG COHN
OGLAPUR, India — The earth is cracked after three years of drought, the roads are potholed after decades of neglect and the electricity is blacked out from one day to the next.
To survive, people eke out a living on barely $2 a day.
Ramaiah Kanukuntla couldn't manage even that. Rather than cast his ballot to defeat his government this month, the 40-year-old farmer consumed a plastic container of deadly pesticide to take his life.
He died by the village water well, leaving behind his wife and three children — and 150,000 rupees (about $4,600) in debts.
The first rumblings of the political earthquake that struck India this month emanated from thousands of sunbaked farming villages like this one. Kanukuntla's death was part of an epidemic of suicides in the state of Andhra Pradesh, 1,200 kilometres south of the national capital, New Delhi.
Overwhelmed by debt and despair, as many as 3,000 farmers are estimated to have killed themselves in the state since 1997, according to newly elected Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, who made these people's plight a major campaign issue.
The election outcome stunned much of India's urban elite, but came as no surprise to farmers at the bottom of the social ladder.
India's rural masses make up 70 per cent of the country's 1 billion population, and they voted decisively for the Congress party led by Sonia Gandhi — whose nominee for prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was sworn in yesterday with his party's coalition allies.
The plight of farmers like Kanukuntla should have served as an early warning to incumbent state and national politicians that a seismic shift was taking place on the ground.
Now, the new Congress-led government is vowing to heed those concerns by stressing economic development "with a human face."
For all the fuss of the last week, when the media and the outside world focused on the political intrigue in the capital — would Sonia claim the mantle of the Gandhi dynasty as the widow of her slain husband, Rajiv, or would she nominate Singh in her place? — the election was about something more fundamental.
Rather than a personality contest, it was a protest vote by an impoverished people.
Though the Congress party garnered the greatest number of votes in a fractured contest, it still claimed only 145 out of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha, or People's Assembly — hardly a resounding mandate.
Only by building on the strength of its coalition partners among regional parties, and allied Communist parties, could Congress claim the right to rule in a minority parliament.
In New Delhi, Singh emphasized that he would focus on agriculture, health care and education — areas that he claimed were neglected by the previous government. In villages like this one, the cry for change has finally attracted the attention of politicians.
Indeed, the political tumult in Andhra Pradesh was a microcosm of change across the country. In retrospect, the pesticide deaths of farmers like Kanukuntla presaged the political demise of incumbents who neglected the grassroots. Voters had run out of patience — and money.
"We couldn't recover our investment in seeds and fertilizer because we haven't had a good crop to pay the costs," said Kanukuntla's widow, Sarojana, 35, as neighbours gathered under a mourning tent last week to mark his death. "We couldn't pay our electricity bills and with no money we had to use oil lamps."
Despite such scenes of rural gloom, the campaign slogan dreamed up by India's governing Bharatiya Janata Party boasted shamelessly of "India Shining."
While former prime minister Atal Vajpayee claimed credit for recent economic growth on the national campaign trail, his regional coalition partner in Andhra Pradesh state, chief minister Chandrababu Naidu trumpeted his own achievements.
From his base in the nearby state capital, Hyderabad, Naidu cast himself as India's prophet of "e-government" services and a poster boy for India's high-tech revolution.
After all, he had wooed software companies with tax incentives and cemented his reputation with gleaming steel-and-glass towers that sprung up in his new IT park, famously dubbed Cyberabad. Dell Computers and Microsoft have set up sprawling call centres in air-conditioned offices, complete with their own power supply.
The internationally renowned Naidu, who proudly called himself the state's "CEO," promptly privatized the state electrical utility and slashed subsidies. He dazzled big-shot visitors like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, and won plaudits from the World Bank.
But his own voters didn't buy it. They saw Naidu's government as pro-rich, pro-business and pro-urban.
Beyond the confines of the capital, dirt-poor farmers worried more about the rising price of power than the government's hollow boasts that mobile phones were in abundance, or that foreign exchange reserves had reached new records. Village life — and death can provide a grim reality check on national political slogans.
"These are the killing fields," says Pallepadu Damoder, head of the Sarvodaya development group that helps local farmers, as he leafs through a stack of files detailing dozens of recent suicides.
"The mental tension is too much for them. They can't get any more bank loans, so they go to outside moneylenders who put more pressure on them."
It was the same story at Pembarthi, a neighbouring village 120 kilometres from Hyderabad, where Bushi Enugala killed himself last year.
Gathered outside their whitewashed home beside tamarind and banyan trees where he grew rice and cotton, his surviving family cursed Naidu's government for selling out farmers while seducing the World Bank.
"The cotton is the reason why my son killed himself, we didn't make any money or even recover our investment," said his mother, Aljama Enugala, 50, fingering the thin gold bangles on her slender arms.
"Everyone was asking for the money back."
Unable to repay the 50,000 rupees ($1,500) in debts that had piled up, her son excused himself from the supper table one night and drank a bottle of pesticide in the other room before staggering back in agony.
"I want to end my life," he told her.
For his surviving brother, Venkat Enugala, 27, there was no question of whom to blame.
Naidu's state government sacrificed the welfare of farmers because it thought the future was urban high-tech, not backward agricultural labour.
"People in the cities can't sleep without their air-conditioning, but here we sleep under a tree," said Enugala bitterly.
"The government was wasting its money on beautifying the city with gardens, instead of channelling the money to development and roadwork."In Hyderabad, not surprisingly, the former chief minister has his defenders within the confines of Cyberabad, a gated community with guards and barbed wire to keep out visitors.
An employee at the Dell call centre who would give only his first name, Bikram, said he voted for Naidu because India needs to move beyond its agricultural base to build up its information technology sector.
"He did everything for young people, and he brought foreign investment to Andhra Pradesh," said 21-year-old Bikram.
"Agriculture alone can't support our country.... If IT offices go down, India is back to rags."
Yet despite all the publicity given to Naidu's transformation of Hyderabad into a hub for high-tech companies, information technology still accounts for only a fraction of India's economic activity and employment.
The vast majority of Indian voters are villagers for whom the price of staples, cooking oil and electricity matter more than prophesies of improved services from e-government.
The upheaval across the country followed a similar pattern.
In rural India, where prosperity is measured in bullock carts, not mobile phones, people took out their frustrations on incumbent governments at the state and national levels.
In India, the new economy can't leave the old economy too far behind. Reddy, the Congress politician who defeated Naidu as chief minister in Andhra Pradesh, won votes by promising free electricity and debt relief to rural farmers.
But the roles were reversed in neighbouring Karnataka state, where an incumbent Congress party that had helped build up Bangalore, the state capital, into another software hub was also trounced at the polls because of a similar epidemic of suicides.
In fact, there was no detectable pro-Congress wave sweeping the country. Despite the electoral upset that brought Gandhi's party to power in New Delhi, Congress not only lost in Karnataka but also was toppled from power in three other state governments in elections held several months earlier.
Taken together, the mixed results suggest that Indians were casting a protest vote against incumbent governments, rather than offering a strong mandate to Gandhi's Congress party.
Indeed, India's economic and political challenges are so entrenched as to make it difficult for any government to stay in power at the state or national level beyond one or two terms, analysts say.
"There's a strong anti-incumbency vote," says Jayaprakash Narayan, head of the Lok Satta (People Power) movement in Hyderabad.
"The logic is inevitable, because governments in this country are incapable of delivering, even with the best of intentions, because of strong structural reasons," he adds.
With poverty so deeply entrenched, it can take years for a new government to achieve progress. But voters are impatient for results, if only because they are too desperately poor to wait.
"You're not able to deliver, and therefore you're thrown out," Narayan says. "They are angry at whoever is in office."
Narayan argues that honesty is almost impossible in Indian politics today because ordinary voters have such high expectations despite the daunting economic challenges.
They demand good governance, improved health and better education without cutbacks.
Against that backdrop, India's new prime minister has his work cut out for him.
Singh is recognized as the father of India's economic reforms, which he initiated as finance minister from 1991 to '96.
He was vilified at the time by the leftist parties for daring to deregulate the economy, but the Communist politicians who are now backing his government say he has their trust.
For Singh, widely respected as an honest and plain-speaking politician, squaring the circle will be a daunting task in the world's biggest democracy, where its 1 billion people are as impatient as they are impoverished.
Against this backdrop, India's new prime minister has his work cut out for him. Voters are not opposed to reform, but they object to unfairness.
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