I grew up in India in the 90s, saw first hand the transition from the disastrous socialism of the Nehru era to open markets, capitalism and deregulation. (The end of "license raj".) It started with PV Narasimha Rao as PM and Manmohan Singh as his finance minister in the early 90s. Thankfully Singh himself had a fruitful tenure as PM later. All it took for India to take off was the shackles of govt control to come off…
India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
241–250 of 544 posts
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#242Per my observation over the years, India immigrants are unique at hi-tech job market, when one India became a manager, over one or two years, all his team is pretty much filled up with people from India, this is unseen in other ethnic groups like Chinese, Japanese, or any other races. I can not stop thinking if they violated Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws in US.
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#243Per my observation over the years, India immigrants are unique at hi-tech job market, when one India became a manager, over one or two years, all his team is pretty much filled up with people from India, this is unseen in other ethnic groups like Chinese, Japanese, or any other races. I can not stop thinking if they violated Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws in US.
Sounds suspiciously like anecdata...
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#244Per my observation over the years, India immigrants are unique at hi-tech job market, when one India became a manager, over one or two years, all his team is pretty much filled up with people from India, this is unseen in other ethnic groups like Chinese, Japanese, or any other races. I can not stop thinking if they violated Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws in US.
Maybe we shouldn't be painting millions of people with the same brush because of some patterns our brains happened to notice
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#245Quoted post unavailable.
This opinion is offensive. India is a functioning democracy. Your claim is that the people who vote are lower caste and upper caste won’t vote hence democracy is invalid. Are you suggesting democracy is only valid if upper caste people vote?
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#246Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything is rosy anywhere in the world. One can find issues with any positive story. I would rather have expensive real estate problem due to high paying jobs than poverty.
During my dad's time, it was much easier to buy a house on a modest salary. And the houses were well built too. These days, it is near impossible to buy a house unless you are a very high earner, as all available real estate is being gobbled up by "investors", aka, who have high paying jobs (mostly software). It is good that we are elevating people from poverty. All I am saying is it creates a different set of proble…
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#248I don't understand poverty statistics. With this news, the UK now has more people living in poverty than India (16% vs 22%?). If it is valuable to judge poverty on relative income, you would think the rational course of action would be mass immigration from the UK to India but that is clearly not the case.
- Absolute Poverty: If you have less than $X/day, you are poor. This measures living standards.
- Relative Poverty: If you're in the bottom x%, you are poor. This measures status.
Without knowing anything, it sounds like this measurement is more on the Relative Poverty side.
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#249I think these statistics are all BS. If you took away all of the game playing involved in defining poverty and then measured the total number of people in the world living in poverty after our massive population growth over the last decades, you will find that the sum of human misery due to poverty is by far the highest it has ever been and is only increasing. But this way a bunch of self righteous people like Gates…
70 years ago 50% of the world lived in extreme poverty, today it’s 11%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
The population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, so 1.25 billion living in extreme poverty. Todays population is 7.6 billion, so 840 million living in extreme poverty.
Undernourishment has the sametrend, data once 1991: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_...
Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this your lived experience? I am finding it hard to believe when the Prime Minister of India comes under what is classified as a "Backward" caste there. The President of India, Droupadi Murmu comes from a historically disadvantaged tribal background. The political parties and political commentariat in India heavily emphasize Caste and other identitarian aspects as the building blocks of building a coalition rather…
India's political system has all the forms but none of the substance of a democracy. Yes Modi is from a backward caste but his policies are biased towards the upper caste and he is beholden to the upper caste support. The proof in the pudding is how well off the lower caste compared to the upper caste in the last seventy year. And the answer is the lower caste is worst off compared to their upper caste counterpart af…
That BJP only works for the upper caste is inaccurate. Like every political party in India they pander to communities for votes. Freebies and subsidies for disadvantaged groups like ration and gas is a card they have played in sufficient numbers. Recently they have increased reservations (affirmative action) for Scheduled Castes in Karnataka, I believe. This and their rhetoric are pretty much the building blocks of their campaigns.
You can say it doesn't work in the long term, but only working for upper castes is not what it is.
Our political system enables people of various backgrounds to rise in the ranks of politics regardless of their caste (I have given examples up the thread) or religion (we've had Presidents, Chief Ministers, Governors and Prime Ministers from Hindu, Christian, Sikh or Muslim backgrounds).
The medicine is working. If you are frustrated that it is not working fast enough or the way you expected it to, the reason is far simpler and what every Indian knows about.
When you have many "Backward" caste politicians and leaders with a predominantly "Backward" caste voting base who do not work to improve the status of their communities and instead just want to line their pockets, it should be obvious what the problem is. Rich people ultimately just want to make themselves richer, especially in a system that enables it with rampant corruption. That the Rich person is from a disadvantaged background does not matter. Whatever you may want to call it you cannot explain this away as Upper Caste Hegemony.
Note: I am _not_ saying that casteism, doesn't play a role in Indian society and politics, but it is not one and only explanation for our problems. Repeating this again due to the tendency of many people to explain away every problem in the Indian society with "Is this Casteism?",