India’s spectacular economic growth is the talk of the town in Davos, London, Geneva, Washington DC and other centres of influence. Talk to alternative economists, however, and they’ll say: ‘eight per cent growth, yes, but what about distribution?’ Nobel laureate Amartya Sen tells us India lags behind Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in health and malnutrition statistics, and that the poorest in India are on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.
But India’s political classes simply shrug their shoulders. We’ve always had the filthy rich alongside the desperately poor, they reason. So the wealthy and the middle class continue to flourish while the poor scrabble for the crumbs.
