Which India are you living in

The Rural Urban divide has attracted lot of heat and debate .Lot has been written about the impact of globalization on the poor and the marginalized sections of the society.

Madhukar Shukla has written a wonderful piece on this phenomenon of two different India co-existing together.He calls the upper and middle class as the visible India, and the rural so called below poverty line or struggling citizens as the invisible india.

Here’s a brief of the post:

* Visible India contributes substantially to India’s GDP. For instance, during 2004, its inhabitants downloaded ring-tone worth Rs. 400 crores (Rs. 4bn) on their mobile/cell phones, and they contributed an estimated Rs. 1500 crores (i.e., Rs.15bn) to GDP during Valentine Day, and so on…

* The inhabitants of the Visible India also like words such as “privatization”, “globalizations”, “competitiveness”, etc., which they see as signs of progress and development.

* Citizen of the Visible India like to live on debts – credit cards, consumer finance schemes, loans, etc. – the higher the debt, the greater one’s “credit worthiness”.


On the invisible India

* About 92-93% of India’s active workforce lives in this reality… Actually, they live in slums, shanties, and villages


* Most of the workers in India’s 3.2mn SMEs – that accounts for India’s 40% of manufacturing sector and 36% of exports – are also a part of the Invisible India (in 2003, when the India’s pharma company, Ranbaxy Ltd. registered $960 in its overseas sales, Dharavi – Asia’s largest slum in India’s financial capital, Mumbai – exported goods worth an estimated between $690 and $1.84bn).

* The Invisible India also accounts for the bottom 10% of India’s population which owns 1% of country’s assets (as compared to the top 10% in the Visible India who own 48%).

* …and account for 60% of India’s GDP!

To read the complete article click here .